Our Senior Client Partnership Manager – Education, Adele D’Silva, discusses the changes she’s seen in education recruitment recently and how new challenges can be approached.

Having held a number of different positions, both in local councils and private organisations, I’ve been working closely with schools on their recruitment for over a decade. As a result, I like to think that I’ve gained a pretty good idea of the challenges faced when recruiting teachers and the ways that this has changed over the years.

I’ve seen the national shortage of teachers grow and the impact that it is having on schools and academies’ recruitment efforts. With the growing number of academies and, subsequently, MATs, the realm of teacher recruitment has transformed and competition for the best candidates has never been higher.

MATs face a unique challenge amidst all of this; it’s challenging enough to recruit for one school, how do you approach effectively recruiting for a collective?

One of the key aspects of succeeding in a competitive market is standing out from the crowd. The challenges faced by MATs is not only promoting each individual school but also the trust itself. Your ability to create and maintain an online presence in order to boost your brand profile can make all the difference. Whether this is done through social media, ensuring that you’re regularly appearing in relevant Google searches or a combination of approaches; those that make themselves visible are likely to reap the rewards.

There is then the matter of what it is that you’re making visible. Does your website have the information that prospective candidates are looking for? Does your landing page engage visitors to stop them moving on elsewhere? From speaking to our clients, many MATs would admit to not being confident in selling themselves to teachers as so much of their efforts go towards promoting the academies to prospective students. In this highly competitive market, it is crucial that your recruitment efforts include online content that is geared towards teachers. Imagine it as if you were buying a car; you have two models of a similar price, when researching them online you’re able to quickly find lots of information on model A however with model B you are only able to find a little bit of information on after a lot of searching. Which one are you going to go for?

An aspect of recruitment that is so often overlooked is your application process, and it can make and break your recruitment efforts. Candidates become increasingly frustrated with long, convoluted processes; once again, when they’re spoilt for choice why would they waste their time on dysfunctional application forms, long waiting periods and irregular communication?

As with so many of our problems in life, many of our recruitment woes would be solved with a bottomless bag of money that we could throw at our problems. The freedom to advertise on every single platform and outlet, the very best web developers to build a flashing, animated website and maybe J.K.Rowling to write our job adverts. I’m fairly confident in saying that none of us have that luxury; we all have to be very careful with our budgets and every penny counts. This means that the ability to make better, smarter decisions in terms of budget allocation is an incredibly valuable commodity in the current market. If you don’t already have a way of collecting data on the effectiveness of your recruitment advertising then this is something that could be a real game-changer.

At Jobsgopublic, we have been developing a solution that we genuinely believe will transform the way in which MATs recruit. Our approach enhances every aspect of your recruitment process, ensuring that you have a visible online presence, an information hub that provides candidates with the information they need, the ability to provide a slick application process and positive candidate experience. On top of all this, our systems provide real-time reporting on your advertising which gives you a clear picture of which outlets have provided your applications and, ultimately, those that you appoint. This provides you with the data that you need to make informed decisions with confidence, knowing that your budget is only being spent on outlets that provide you with quality applications.

As we know that MATs operate in different ways, whether it be with centralised recruitment teams or separate teams in each academy, our systems are completely flexible and effective in every scenario.

I would love the opportunity to talk to you more about the ways in which Jobsgopublic can help you transform the way that you attract and recruit quality candidates. Get in touch if you’re ready for a new approach that offers value for money, measurable results and streamlines your processes.

In the meantime, for more information on our offer for MATs click here or hit play on the video below.