Beyond the checklist: a person-centred approach
Building a strong team is the best way to drive the success of your school.
Recruiting great people is a simple way to bring new skills and a fresh perspective into your team.
But what’s the thing that underpins all school recruitment?
You’ve had training (multiple times).
Read the yearly guidance. All 178 pages of it (must stay awake, this is important!)
It informs your policies, paperwork and Ofsted are all over it.
Safer Recruitment of Course!
I’m completely bought into the benefits of Safer Recruitment. In fact, just last week I was flagged to a candidate who was likely a risk to pupils. By following the Safer Recruitment rules, I and the school were aware of this before the interview, it could have had a very different outcome if we hadn’t followed the guidelines.
It does just what it says. It helps me to feel safer about the candidates I’m helping to appoint. I sleep better knowing I’ve followed the policy, and it works.
Safety over Success?
It works to keep (most of) the bad people out of our schools.
The problem is it keeps some of the great people out too.
The dyslexic applicant.
The parent who would love a job in your school but barely manages a toilet break on their own so definitely doesn’t have a few hours to complete the form.
Or the person without a computer, only applying for jobs they can access on their phone.
The one who just doesn’t get how to negotiate the process.
Or sees the agenda for the day and is overcome by nerves. They drop out because they have no-one to answer their questions.
The one who withdraws before interview because “if it’s this hard to apply, they’ll probably be a nightmare to work for”.
And all the people who get other jobs whilst waiting for news on yoru process.
Remember your Goal
Contrast this with the best recruitment in other sectors and it becomes clear why education is in a recruitment crisis.
We’ve forgotten that the goal is to bring an amazing person into the team. We’ve lost the person bit in what is essentially an exercise to find your perfect person. Instead, we cling to forms, emails, tests, and person specs. Believing that if we just follow the process exactly, we’ll get our person.
Conclusion
Education is an amazing sector to work in because its people centred, whether that be staff, pupils, or families. Ironically, the process doesn’t factor in what the ideal candidate wants and needs.
Education staff are some of the warmest, most approachable I’ve met. Where is all that warmth and personality in the recruitment process? It’s absent until the very last stage when the candidate walks into the school for their final assessment.
What can you do to change this? Ask yourself:
Who is our ideal candidate and what do they want?
How and when in the process can we up our engagement?
How can we make the process easier for our ideal candidate?
The answers are your starting point to building a hiring strategy that really works.
Want the blog as soon as it’s live?
Pop your details here…