Does your school have a recruitment strategy related to saving money, while still recruiting teachers in the most cost-effective manner?

Perhaps you just employ a firm to do it all for you?

Staff turnover is inevitable, promotions, retirements and a teacher’s partner’s career move all lead to resignations, not to mention time out for maternity leave and other caring roles taken by teachers. So, the first question is – how many resignations were for other reasons, and could they have been prevented?  Of course, you might have made a wrong appointment and be pleased to see the teacher depart, but how hard will they be to replace?

The next question is then: will the recruitment cost of the new teachers exceed the retention cost of keeping the current teacher? The answer might be different as between a teacher or physics and a teacher of history. One is likely to be easy to replace, even for a January appointment, while the other post will aways be both expensive and risky in terms of finding a replacement.

Having identified likely turnover, do you just take out a blanket subscription or look to a plan how to spend the cost of recruitment. There are three main groups of vacancies:

Those vacancies that an advert on the school website and a bit of social media will fill easily.

Those where you might as well employ a specialist recruitment agency on a ‘no appointment no fee’ basis if there is no interest in the job on the school’s website after a couple of days. Schools can be certain that the vacancy will have been noticed and passed onto others. If there isn’t someone in the wings just waiting to teach food technology at your school, then you need help finding a teacher of the subject.

The third group of vacancies are those that fall between these two extremes, where knowing your local and regional market is important in deciding how much to spend on recruitment advertising.

A secondary school with ten vacancies in a year; one straightforward; one really challenging and eight of average challenge might consider that whatever it does it will still have to pay for the search for a teacher for the challenging post, but need not pay for the straightforward to fill post.

The question to ask is ‘how much should our school pay to advertise these average vacancies in the present climate?’ Can there be added benefits such as the management of the process of recruitment as a part of the package? Do you know how many possible candidates any recruiter has for your level of job in your area?

Finally, do you know what the labour market looks like for the period when you will be recruiting? If your recruiter tells you, what is the evidence base that they are using?

If you have read this far, you may know that I am Chair at TeachVac, a job board that from October will charge schools for vacancies based upon how successful the site is in making matches with interested possible applicants. At present there is a £250 offer for unlimited annual matches for secondary schools, and £50 for primary schools regardless of size. There is an alternative pay by match scheme. Check out more at https://www.teachvac.co.uk/misc_public/TeachVac%20Brochure.pdf