For a few years I was both a governor and the safeguarding representative for a school in Kent. During that time, the school advanced from single form intake to three form intake. It also transitioned from State School to Academy Trust. Schools are busy places!

During my tenure with the school I learned that both time and money are generally in short supply. There is so much to do that the Head’s secretary, the bursar or other teachers and leaders can find themselves straddled with additional responsibilities. The unfortunate reality is that some of those responsibilities are accepted with no training and no budget. That is because time and money just don’t stretch far enough in schools. Everyone tries their best, but most schools will admit that some jobs would be done better if they had more resources. Recruiting can be one of those jobs.

My school had no school ATS. It had little to no understanding of jobsite options and no back-data to help improve outcomes. Recruitment was a hit and miss affair.

School Recruitment

In every school I have spoken with, employment checks and safeguarding are treated with due care. However, most employment checks, other than for some referencing, are completed for only new recruits. Employment checking is manageable, but recruiting is a much bigger job than employment checks alone. Ask yourself who in your school performs the following tasks?

• Update and finalise the job specification.
• Write and optimise the advert.
• Decide where to post your advert and at what cost.
• Highlight the strongest applicants for wider review to save time.
• Acknowledge receipt and set expectations with your best candidates to keep them engaged.
• Score your applicants without reference to protected characteristics.
• Organise interviews and confirm attendance.
• Periodically review your recruiting process compliance with equal opportunities, accessibility, best practice, safer recruiting guidelines, GDPR and more.
• Check that your application process works without error on all devices.
• Review the source of your applicants to eliminate unnecessary advertising costs.
• Ensure that all employment checks are recorded, verified and immediately available for inspection.
• Ensure that outdated paperwork is stored safely and shredded at the right time.

Could you say with certainty where your last 5 hired people saw your advert? When saving money is a common ambition, that one piece of information can be invaluable.

In some schools, recruiting is managed by HR. Every aspect of recruitment is under perpetual review. HR professionals generally know where and how to advertise school vacancies. They check their recruitment process to make sure that it is fair, accessible and compliant. They also know where applicants found your advert. By contrast, some schools treat recruiting as an admin function. I know of one school in which the Head’s PA write the job adverts. Each advert reads as briefly as the following:

“We are looking for a xxxxx. Please read the attached job specification then download the application form, complete it and return it to blah@blah.org.uk. We are committed to Equal Opportunities”

It should be of no surprise that each vacancy receives very few applications, if any. There is very little to persuade the best applicants to apply. In fact the best applicants will most likely be dissuaded.

In the dark when recruiting

Without a school ATS it can be difficult to monitor one’s own recruiting approach. I remember when a headmaster lifted a set of papers and asked “Can you find a way of dealing with all of that?” He held a bundle of application forms that he hadn’t had time to review. Just separating the protected characteristics from each application took too much time. He told me that he had no idea why they lost good candidates. Was his school taking too long to respond or was the pay better elsewhere? He did share with me that it hurt his school whenever they missed or failed to hire the best applicants. This was a headmaster in the dark.

Consider your own school for a moment. Are people applying because they saw your advert on Tes Jobs or because they heard about it from a friend? How many good people fail to apply for your vacancy after suffering technical issues with your application form? Not everyone tells you. Many simply give up and concentrate on other applications. If you don’t know, it’s harder to succeed.

Most schools would prefer recruiting to be easier and less costly

Most schools I speak with want to:

• Remove all barriers to applying for their jobs.
• Recruit successfully at least cost.
• Use current staff and expertise to do the job of recruiting.
• Avoid learning something new and complicated.

Without a school recruitment system, there are still some things you can do. Here are some advisories that should work for any school.

1. Make one person responsible for recruiting. It’s easier to learn from experience and refine your approach.
2. Ensure your job adverts are up to date on your website. Outdated adverts or any advert not written identically to the version on a jobsite can deter high quality applicants. Some applicants want to apply on your website to to avoid unloading their details to a jobsite.
3. Advertise your vacancies on Indeed, using their free advertising option. Consider sponsoring some vacancies on Indeed because more and more teachers are looking there.
4. Advertise teacher and leadership vacancies on one of eTeach or Tes Jobs because that’s where many teaching staff look for vacancies. They will alert jobseekers with your vacancy.
5. Extend advertising to GOV Find a Job, any relevant Local Council jobsite and others. Some allow free job postings and you’ll never find your most cost effective source until you try some.
6. Eliminate technical barriers. Swap out any Word forms for electronic applications on your website. If you have control of your website you can create and implement Google forms to achieve this.
7. Formally review applications as they arrive. Leaving this until advert expiry is common practice in a school. However, that delays candidate engagement which is damaging. There is no need to delay if your review criteria remains identical for every applicant.
8. Consider minimising the initial application process for non-teaching staff. Invite only appropriately qualified applicants to complete the remaining process. This will appeal to applicants who have not worked in education.

These advisories may raise an eyebrow. Swapping out Word Application forms for electronic forms may seem complicated. If these small changes are hard to manage then perhaps a school ATS or school recruitment system could be a quicker, cheaper solution.

What a school ATS could do for you

A school ATS can hep you address all of the common issues and more. As a purpose built school recruiting system, it should be able to solve your recruiting problems right out of the box.:

• Update vacancies on your website fully automatically.
• Post jobs to jobsites for you.
• Swap Word Application forms for electronic applications as a built in feature.
• Tell you which jobsites are most rewarding (eTeach, Tes Job, etc.) in seconds.
• Alter information collection options to suit the post.
• Professionally communicate with and update your applicants in just one or two clicks.
• Solve your GDPR and other compliance issues.

In fact, recruiting can be efficient, robust, easy to manage and low cost with a school recruitment system, or School ATS.

CVMinder ATS, a low cost School recruitment system

You can improve recruitment with virtually no effort at all. In just 2 weeks, you could be better off with a dedicated school recruitment system that is surprisingly inexpensive.

CVMinder ATS was designed with input from school leadership. They wanted greater recruiting control and an easier recruiting experience for both staff and applicants. Key objectives were to save time, do things right and keep everything simple.

CVMinder ATS was the result. It is a school recruitment system that helps you to:

• Display current vacancies on your website automatically.
• Publish vacancies to jobsites like Tes Jobs, eTeach and Indeed automatically.
• Specify the information you want to collect with ease.
• Give applicants electronic application forms out of the box.
• Hide and disguise protected characteristics from shortlisting staff automatically.
• Automate applicant scoring or support panel based and individual shortlisting.
• Help you communicate with applicants at every stage with ease.
• Discover where your best applicants are coming from at the touch of a button.
• Embed immediate GPPR compliance and stronger management of employment checks.

These are just a few of the features and advantages of using CVMinder ATS. The main benefit is that any school or MAT can remove barriers to recruiting successfully and improve its outcomes with less time and lower cost.

CVMinder ATS is a school ATS. It’s an Applicant Tracking System (a Recruitment System) designed for any individual School or Multi Academy Trust.

As a school ATS, it is low cost, easy to use and deliberately simple to use.

Use the contact form or talk to us now about the best ATS for education and let us surprise you with its simplicity. Don’t forget, you could be using own school ATS in just 2 weeks from now.