As February half term is expected to be another peak time for further education professionals looking to tie down a new job, further education institutions need to implement “proactive recruitment strategies to capture the best talent now,” says Paul Howells, CEO and founder of the UK’s number 1 further education job board.
February half term is expected to be another peak time for further education professionals looking to tie down a new job, if the Christmas holidays were anything to go by, according to research from the UK’s largest further education recruitment specialist.
Website traffic and jobseeker activity on FEjobs’ market leading job board during the forthcoming holidays is likely to increase as lecturers take control of their careers. During the recent Christmas holidays, more than 1,200 lecturers searched the FEjobs site on Christmas Day itself and incredibly, the website had nearly 100 visits in the two minutes around midnight on New Year’s Eve.
In true reflection of the shift towards job hunting using the internet, even the traditional hangover of New Year’s morning was no barrier to take advantage of online application processes; individual vacancy pages on FEjobs received more than 125,000 page views.
Colleges need to know that job seekers don’t spend vast amounts of time reviewing each job opportunity; once a specific search is made, each advert only gets just over a minute and a half of average reading time. Therefore, to grab the attention of the best candidates, recruitment adverts need to be concise and clearly formatted, with engaging job descriptions, backed up with an impressive mobile optimised career site.
FEjobs CEO and founder Paul Howells comments: “The activity is unsurprising given the amount of further education professionals looking to make a change to their workload and lifestyle. We predict that as wages fail to keep up with the cost of living in 2017, education professionals will flood to the forward-looking colleges and sixth-forms that are bold enough to declare their policies on reasonable and sustainable work-life mix. Further education institutions need to implement proactive recruitment strategies to capture the best talent now.”
“The colleges who capture these keen applicants are those promoting their employer brand with career sites. Employers need to be prepared now with a clear online profile detailing the wellbeing attitudes of that workplace, paired with a recruitment marketing partnership which gives them social media presence.”
The data comes at a time when colleges themselves are in flux as many of them are merging as part of the reforms. The government has missed its targets for teacher training for the fourth year running and 10% (45,000) of education professionals are expected to leave the industry all together in 2017.