Most companies have shifted their recruitment strategies in the past few years to attract top talent—and educational institutions must do the same. The Institute of Education Sciences reports that 69% of schools struggle to hire teachers because of limited candidate pools, while about 64% state that there is a lack of qualified candidates applying for work. It’s even more challenging for schools to recruit teachers or even find substitutes for specialized subjects, such as computer science or special education services.
These recruitment challenges will continue unless schools find better ways to attract talented candidates. Here are the top three strategies that can help you recruit qualified teachers for your school:
Develop a marketing plan for your recruitment strategies
For many schools, it’s not enough to simply post job vacancies online. Robin Fletcher, the superintendent of Lawrence County Schools, even notes that many school administrators have zero certified applicants for vacant positions despite their recruitment efforts. This prompted Fletcher and other educational experts from Kentucky to establish several recommendations to help schools attract top talents, including developing a marketing plan.
Creating marketing plans for recruitment isn’t easy, making it critical for schools to work with experienced marketing professionals like chief marketing officers. LHH’s list of a chief marketing officer's responsibilities outlines how these professionals can coordinate marketing efforts with an institution’s financial and branding goals. They can leverage budgets to improve your school’s branding as an employer and develop recruitment strategies that align with the preferences of top talents. Through their expertise, educational institutions can boost their reputation and stand out from other employers.
Offer employee benefits that teachers want
You can also increase the effectiveness of your recruitment efforts by providing work benefits that meet the needs of teachers. To illustrate, teacher and policy fellow Athena Lindsey expresses that many educators get second jobs or even leave the profession because health insurance premiums keep increasing. Unfortunately, these educators think they are getting low benefit quality for the high premiums they are paying, making it critical for schools to find better health insurance plans for them.
Health insurance plans are just one of the many benefits that educators want. So if you’re offering these benefits, you can include them in your recruitment marketing strategies to attract promising teachers. You can highlight these benefits in job postings or even list them in a section on your website’s careers page. By offering and highlighting these benefits, you can show top talents that your school cares about their well-being.
Leverage technologies that can optimize their workloads
Aside from marketing the benefits that you offer, you can also attract talented teachers to your school by promoting the technologies in your school. Our article on the ‘5 Ways to Win Teachers Back’ highlights that leveraging Google Classroom student groups in Schoolytics makes it easier for teachers to assign group work and enjoy more flexible work schedules. Plenty of teachers would also enjoy using technologies for hybrid teaching because they can speed up administrative tasks and help them focus more on teaching. On top of that, some educators simply enjoy using technologies related to their specialized fields, such as robotics and computer science.
These technologies are assets for schools, which is why you must highlight these technologies in your job postings and your website. You can opt to include promotional photos of these innovations or simply discuss them in-depth in several channels to attract talented teachers that are interested in them.
You can attract top talents by tailoring your recruitment strategies to their preferences. By applying these top 3 strategies, you can increase your chances of recruiting qualified teachers.
About the author
Jinkie Barrow became an edtech blogger due to her love for reading books and learning new information. When she's not writing about the latest tech trends, you'll often catch her reading children's books or building puzzles with her kids.
