With teacher vacancy rates hitting record highs and 32% of new teachers leaving within five years, schools and colleges are competing for an increasingly small pool of active job seekers right now.
But there's a hidden talent goldmine schools often overlook: passive candidates.
Passive candidates aren't actively searching for new roles, but they represent the majority of the teaching workforce – and they’re often your best and most experienced educators. These are the teachers who are reasonably content in their current roles but would consider a move for the right opportunity.
Passive candidates are typically:
- Experienced professionals with proven track records
- Currently employed and performing well
- Less likely to job-hop frequently
- More selective about opportunities, leading to better long-term retention
- Often specialising in shortage subjects like STEM, languages, or SEN
The challenge for schools tapping into this talent goldmine is that these teachers aren’t browsing job boards, so how do you find them? To reach passive teacher candidates, you need to take an entirely different approach.
Why agencies aren’t the answer for this pool of candidates
If your school would normally rely on education recruitment agencies to find you candidates, it’s worth flagging that this isn’t a strategy that works for recruiting this type of candidate.
While agencies can be a great option for filling urgent vacancies with active candidates (at a cost!), they’re not well positioned to engage passive candidates.
Agencies can’t authentically represent your school’s culture, values and overall employer brand – which passive candidates need if they’re going to be tempted away from their current roles. External recruiters also don’t have the capacity or drive to invest in long-term relationships with candidates in a way that’s needed to reach the passive market – they just want a quick placement so they can reach their monthly targets.
Passive candidates need nurturing, authentic engagement, and convincing reasons to consider leaving their current roles. And to achieve this, you need an always-on approach to sourcing that builds relationships before you need to fill positions.
This might sound like a lot of work, but thankfully there’s technology out there designed to automate most of the work. With the right tools and process in place, you can effectively reach passive candidates with almost no manual work needed.
Here’s what that process might look like…
4-step process to sourcing passive teacher candidates
Step 1: Understand who your passive candidates are
Before you can source passive candidates, you need to have a good idea of who you’re actually looking for and where they are online. To do this, it can be helpful to build a candidate personas – particularly if you’re recruiting for a hard-to-fill position.
Personas help you think carefully about where your ideal candidates actually are so you’re not wasting your time and resources on channels that won’t bring results.
First think about successful candidates your school has hired and base your personas loosely on them. Some things to consider:
- Who are these candidates? Where are they in their career? What’s their specialism? What’s their location (and how far will they realistically commute)?
- Where are they online (and where are they not)? Which social media platforms are your target candidates actually using? Are they likely to be part of any online education communities or forums related to their niche?
Step 2: Create laser-focused talent pools
Within your candidate CRM or ATS, you can then build out segmented databases of passive candidates based on your personas. When creating these talent pools, you might also learn new things about your target candidates that will conversely influence your personas.
For example:
- Preferred communication channels
- Career interests and development goals
- Engagement history with your content
- Referral sources
Use the trends you see at this stage to influence your personas. For example, does Facebook come up often as a referral source for these candidates? Add this to your personas so it can influence your strategy moving forward.
Step 3: Build your employer brand content
Before you start engaging with the candidates in these pools, you need to go in armed with the kind of content that’s going to excite them. Passive candidates need to understand what makes your school special before they'll consider applying to any vacancies that come up.
Some examples of employer branding content for passive candidate teachers:
Teacher success stories: Blogs or video testimonials from current staff discussing their career progression, professional development, and why they chose to pursue a career at your school.
Day-in-the-life content: Show what working at your school actually looks like. Share classroom innovations, collaborative planning sessions, and the support systems you provide.
Leadership interviews: Have senior leaders discuss the school's vision, investment in staff development, and commitment to teacher wellbeing. It’s helpful to be specific about benefits, progression pathways, and unique selling points of the school too.
Student impact stories: Highlight the difference teachers make at your school. Showcase student achievements, community projects, and the meaningful work your educators do daily.
Step 4: Use a multichannel approach for proactive outreach
Once you’ve followed these steps, you’ll have a clear idea of who your target candidates are, where to find them and how to communicate with them.
The key now is to use a multichannel approach to recruiting these candidates, reaching out across various channels to engage them on the platforms they’re using.
You’ll likely have two strategies for this to reflect two types of passive candidates:
- Existing candidates already in your database who you’ll reach via the talent pools you’ve created, through personalised email campaigns
- New candidates you haven’t made contact with yet who you’ll reach primarily through targeted advertising on social media platforms and communities.
And while this might sound like a lot of work, the good news is there’s education recruitment software out there that’s designed specifically to handle the graft for you. Tools like FEjobs can take your employer branding content and school’s messaging and broadcast it across all the channels you’re using, with just a few clicks.
You can automate your campaigns to proactively engage with passive candidates in seconds, tracking who’s engaging with your content so you can save your time and resources speaking to the right candidates at the right time.
And the best thing about using software like FEJobs to track all your activities is that you’ll learn so much about your passive candidate market through your data, so you can optimize your process so your results just get better over time.
To find out how FEjobs can support your college in finding these gold dust candidates through a multichannel recruitment strategy, request a demo today.
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
