Frontline Blog

I was a newer principal, and I had recently dismissed a pre-tenured teacher. She wasn’t terrible, just not good enough for my students. I had written her a reference letter, the kind you write for just this type of situation — strengths, as everyone has them, with lots of holes that I hoped other interviewing administrators would find. Then I took a call from a principal in a nearby district. We knew each other by association, but that’s all. He was eager to hire her, and this call was his final stop. I answered his questions and thought to myself, “I hope he listened carefully, and realized that I wasn’t really recommending her.”

Early in both the back-to-school rush and the hiring season, you have options. You can choose between the Lisa Frank notebook with a tiger on it, or one with a unicorn. You can hire candidate A, or candidate B, or candidate C. So you take the time to make the right decisions and get ready for the first day of school.  

Everyone has a story about the one that got away. And when you have hundreds of applications to pore over, there’s bound to be an all-star applicant you accidentally overlook. It happens to all of us at least once. But missing out on amazing candidates can mean that students lose out on the teacher of a lifetime.  

A lot of work goes into getting students ready for their first day of class — making sure they have a great teacher to support them, planning what they’ll learn over the course of the year and giving them goals to focus on. But students aren’t the only ones adjusting to a new school or classroom.

Every person in every district’s HR department wants the same thing: to find the best candidate for each job. And there’s a way to increase the chances of this happening: having an objective, research-based hiring process can do a world of good in finding those high performers. A high-quality selection tool can support this, and help you bring in the best talent possible. 

You want to hire and retain the best teachers for your students. The problem is, so does everyone else. So how do you stay competitive and attract the best candidates? You want to create a compelling brand that makes great teachers want to work for you and help achieve your district’s goals. This isn’t something that can be done in a day: it requires buy-in throughout your district and sustained effort, but the payoff is worth it. To develop your brand as an employer, you’ll need to tackle three questions.

For K-12 Human Resources offices, the task of staffing the district for another school year needs to be a two-sided coin, one side focused on getting (recruiting and selection), and the other side focused on keeping (onboarding and retention). Finding the top employees for your district is a complex and time-consuming project, but it is only part of the job. It's just as important to focus on keeping your district's top employees engaged and satisfied with their position at the district.

Many school districts I speak with across the country are examining how they recruit and hire great educators and other staff. I think this is positive as having a great recruiting and teacher selection process can ensure your organization is looking for new candidates in the right places and using the right measures to select the best person for the job!

We all want the best candidates filling vacancies in our school systems. Regardless of the position we are looking to fill, be it a classroom teacher, a superintendent or a bus driver, we want the person who will outperform our expectations and make our school community a better place.