Having been in Education Recruitment for 8 years, I have seen just how much the market has changed. With budget cuts getting worse and worse, some schools have been increasingly reluctant or unable to use agencies, yet they haven’t fine-tuned their recruitment processes themselves, leaving them with unfilled vacancies.
Some of the key position changes I have noticed are:
Teacher Training
More schools are thinking long-term and looking into teacher training internally so that they can train and develop their own teachers who will typically stay with them longer.
Thinking outside the box
More schools seem to be thinking outside the box with their recruitment. Some things I’ve seen include:
- Advertising signing-on bonuses for hard-to-fill subjects
- Moving teachers up a payscale or two
- Creating TLRs and working around teachers’ strengths
- Looking at Unqualified Teachers
Advertising
Many schools are investing more in their own advertising and marketing. I have seen some amazing videos from schools on why theirs is a great place to work, filled with teacher testimonials and more.
Similarly, I have seen Headteachers networking on LinkedIn and directly headhunting teachers without using agencies. I love this ingenuity, although I don’t think they will ever have the same amount of time to reach the number of teachers needed.
School leaders do incredibly well in recruiting in this harsh climate, but if budgets were bigger, I think the use of agencies would be more widespread and less of a “last resort” for some schools that are forced to exhaust every option first before being able to use agencies.
If school leaders are able to consider not only money but the time spent resourcing candidates, I think more would be coming direct to us rather than wasting time and money on their own traditional methods of recruitment that are becoming less and less effective.
