K-12 Recruiting: 5 Strategies to Find Top Candidates

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “86% of U.S. K-12 public schools reported challenges hiring teachers for the 2023-24 school year, with 83% reporting trouble hiring for non-teacher positions, such as classroom aides, transportation staff and mental health professionals.” As K-12 hiring challenges persist, NAS is here to offer you 5 smart strategies for K-12 recruiting.

Get in the K-12 Recruiting Mindset

Before you begin implementing a recruiting strategy, it’s important to look at your competition, as well as who you are targeting. When looking at competitors, try to think more broadly about who you actually compete with – not just direct competitors but adjacent industries or other types of organizations who hire a similar candidate profile. Now let’s take a look at the 5 strategies you can use to up your K-12 recruiting game.

Know your Market and your Competition

Once you know your competitors, you need to know who you’re targeting. In the marketing world, these are referred to as personas, and in the recruitment marketing world, they can be referred to as job families or career areas. It’s important to think broadly about who it is you’re targeting across all the different roles you have to offer, and knowing your personas helps you craft your message and target those individuals and emphasize the elements that are going to be most appealing to them. This is a great way to attract, bring them over to your site and ultimately convert them into applicants.  

Ensure Your Brand Delivers on its Promise

An employer brand is a fantastic way to make a powerful first impression, communicate quickly what your company is all about and create an emotional connection with candidates. It also serves as an organizing principle for all recruitment marketing, telling a consistent story across all media and job seeker touchpoints. The employer brand needs to be compelling, appealing, inspiring and more than anything else…it needs to be authentic.  When developing your employer brand, it’s important that you deliver on the employee experience your brand promises. Candidates today crave a truthful peek into your organization so they can imagine themselves as part of it. The more you can feature real employees, compelling videos and employee-generated content, the greater your candidate engagement and the more likely you are to attract candidates that fit your organization’s culture.  Want to learn more about creating an authentic career site? Download our ebook.

Give Candidates Choices to Contact You

Providing candidates with multiple contact options can help you increase your number of applications. Some great options include:

Chatbots

A chatbot on your career site can increase interaction and help your TA team quickly answer candidate questions.

Quick Connect Forms

Quick Connect Forms allow candidates to easily get in touch with your recruiters.  

Talent Network Prompts

Providing candidates with talent network prompts help engage candidates who do not find the right position the first time they visit.

Meet Our Team Page

Having a page dedicated to showcasing your recruiters allows candidates to learn more about your team and easily reach out to them.

Text Messages and Emails

Communicating with candidates using texts and emails helps keep them informed and allows you to send jobs to candidates in your talent network.

Consider Augmenting Your Staff

Staff augmentation might be a helpful approach in some cases. For example, one of our clients, Wake County Public School System, a leading K-12 district, utilized retired teachers to assist their hiring team in reviewing contact requests, verifying candidate information and contacting candidates about next steps. This not only helped cut back on hiring costs, it also added a personal and authentic touch to the candidate experience.

Track your Media and ROI with Analytics

Analytics provides insights into where you may be succeeding and where you may be experiencing gaps. Often, it can reveal profiles of the candidates who match up well to your organization, a pattern of hiring a certain demographic or even the need to update your career pages.  Analytics involves gathering, collating and analyzing statistical data as it relates to the recruitment process. Analytics offers relevant data for any TA team, but it is more than numbers. It can prompt meaningful discussions about the impact of recruitment efforts and potential revisions of the marketing strategies to generate a high volume of the right job candidates to your organization. While metrics vary by organization, based upon your goals, you may want to start with gaining insight and trends on the following:

• # of visits to your site

• # of job views by job candidates

• # of completed applications (and of those who started the % of those finished)

• # of offers and hires by critical roles

• # of job starts and retention post-90 or 180 days

• # of completed applications

Keep in mind that you’ll need to allow time to gauge which strategies have an immediate impact and which ones take longer to produce the results you want.

Want to See These K-12 Recruiting Strategies in Action?

If you want to learn more about K-12 recruiting, watch our webinar here. Download our case study on how we helped Wake County Public School System implement all of the strategies above – and see what the results were. Ready to learn how NAS can help you get the highest marks in K-12 recruiting? Contact NAS to learn more.  https://www.nasrecruitment.com/contact-nas/