Recruit a Teacher: How to Hire Good Teachers

With 86% of US K-12 public schools reporting challenges in recruiting teachers, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and a ratio of hired to job openings of 0.55 among educators, based on data from the National Education Association (NEA), it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hire good teachers and retain them over the long term. Meanwhile, building a qualified, motivated, and collaborative faculty body is crucial for the academic, emotional, and psychological success of students and for running an efficient educational institution. Still, finding the right teachers to fill vacancies is possible as long as you design and implement a deliberate, intent-driven, and result-oriented process.

This guide takes you through the 9 steps of how to hire good teachers with proven tips along the way. Finally, we conclude with the best strategies to retain your best hires for the long haul to ensure the success of your team, your school, and your students.

Meanwhile, check out how Fullmind can help you address your school or district needs in core instruction, supplemental instruction, and virtual staffing.

Following is the step-by-step process of recruiting a teacher who will make a real difference for your students:

1. Define the Needs of the Teaching Position

Before you start looking for professionals to fill your teacher vacancies, it’s important to first define the exact needs of these vacancies. An effective teacher recruitment strategy is driven by a deep understanding of the necessary position, the required qualifications, the most important additional qualities, and the expected results.

In defining the parameters of the available educator position for which you need to recruit, you and your team should answer the following questions:

• What position are you hiring for: full-time, part-time, assistant teacher, paraprofessional, or another?
• What grade(s) will the teacher instruct?
• What subject(s) will the teacher teach?
• What curriculum will the teacher follow? Does your school work with the district curriculum or do you implement your own syllabus?
• Does the teacher need to be bilingual?
• What specialized knowledge does the teacher need to have, such as STEM, foreign languages, arts, special education, homebound schooling, etc.?
• Will the teacher lead any electives and/or extracurricular activities? What?
• What is the minimum level of education required for the position?
• Do candidates have to be state-certified?
• What is the minimum expected experience for the job? What is the bare minimum and what is preferred?
• What additional teaching and other certificates does the candidate have to have?
• Are there any extra requirements, such as experience teaching online, working with specific groups of students, etc.?
• What classroom management skills are necessary for the position?
• What is your school culture, what values do you emphasize the most, and how is the candidate expected to fit in this?
• What soft skills do you expect the ideal candidate to have?
• What professional development expectations do you have for the candidate? Does your school offer such opportunities or do you expect the candidate to be entirely self-driven?
• What contract do you offer for the position?
• What is the salary range based on your school’s budget?
• What additional benefits can you offer to the top candidates?
• When do you need the newly recruited teacher to start?

Once you have the answers to all these questions, you will be ready to write a compelling job description and start recruiting new teachers to build your faculty.

2. Write an Attractive Job Description

The second step in hiring good teachers is creating an attractive, yet accurate and detailed job description. The process of writing a strong job description is two-fold. On the one hand, the best teacher job description needs to outline the exact responsibilities of the position, the must-have and good-to-have qualifications of the candidate, the necessary experience, and the specific expectations of the school. Equally importantly, it has to detail the salary range and the benefits package, the school culture, and what makes your institution the best place to work for an educator. In other words, the job description should highlight why someone would like to work with you and what is required for your school to want to work with them.

The key elements of a good teacher job ad include:

• Clear job title that includes the position, grade(s), and subject(s). Some of the most effective educator job post titles look like “Full-Time Elementary Math Teacher in Los Angeles” or “High-School Science Teacher Assistant in Dallas”.
• Main responsibilities of the job
• Obligatory and preferred qualifications and skills
• Compulsalary and preferable additional certifications and licenses
• Minimum experience required
• Necessary soft skills
• School/district teaching philosophy and methodology
• Summary of the school culture with emphasis on school values
• Additional information about the district and the school and what makes your institution the best working place for teachers (This part is extraordinarily important to make your school stand out from others in the area in the current environment of abundant teacher vacancies and insufficient candidates.)
• Work schedule
• Employment terms
• Starting date
• Salary range
• Benefits package including professional development, health insurance, retirement plan, etc.
• Application process with clear steps and deadlines
• Contact information of the hiring manager

The most effective job descriptions are the product of team efforts that include different stakeholders, such as the HR coordinator, the district superintendent, the school principal, the department head, and the best fellow teachers who have all the qualities that the ideal candidate for the job should possess. While you can get started with a readily available teacher job description template, it’s recommended to tailor it as much as possible to your specific position and institution. This will help set up the right expectations on both sides, facilitate the process, bring the right candidates, and produce the best results.

3. Distribute the Job Description

Once you have the right job description with all necessary details, it’s time to start actively recruiting for the position. Keep in mind that it takes 4-12 weeks on average to find and hire a new teacher, so make sure that you start on time.

You have to distribute the job description along the most effective channels where it will get in front of the eyes of qualified candidates.

Tip: Actively look for the top candidates for the position instead of just waiting for them to come to you.

To stand a strong chance of hiring good teachers under the current teacher shortages, you have to be creative and proactive. In addition to publishing the job ad on your district and school websites as well as popular generic job websites and platforms, also try the following effective strategies:

Post the Job Ad on Education Job Boards

Distributing your job description on regional niche job boards and platforms can help you reach out to education specialists looking for available opportunities. Your job ad won’t get lost among thousands of other non-education related postings like on general recruitment websites.

Some of the best free and paid educator job websites include:

• SchoolSpring
• TopSchoolJobs
• Teachers-Teachers
• AcademicCareers
• K12JobSpot

Use the Power of LinkedIn

Another great, yet frequently overlooked place to post available teacher openings is LinkedIn. As the most professional social media network, the platform brings together a community of qualified educators who are frequently looking for new opportunities.

In addition to publishing the position on LinkedIn Jobs, you can use the detailed search options provided by the website to look for the best fit for the job among the hundreds of thousands of teachers using the platform. You can see if any qualified candidates are open to work via the LinkedIn badge and get in touch with them. But also don’t shy away from contacting top teachers in the field who haven’t declared that they are looking for a job. Usually the top-qualified professionals are already engaged, but you might be able to recruit them for your school if you offer better terms than their current institution.

Ask for Referrals

Another proactive strategy to make sure that your teacher job opening reaches the best candidates is to ask for referrals, also known as word-of-mouth. As a first step, let your colleagues at the school and the district know that you are actively hiring teachers and ask if they might be familiar with someone qualified. After all, educators and administrators who work within your environment are already aware of the school and district culture and will know better than anyone else if someone might be a good fit.

To expand the potential network, get in touch with former coworkers, colleagues from other districts, and anyone else you know in the education field. Share with them the job description and also discuss the specific details of the position so that they can refer the right people to you.

Do Cold Reachout

Cold reachout is another popular and effective recruitment approach that works well in the education system. You can deploy different strategies to research the top candidates for the available teacher position, such as LinkedIn, teacher networks and associations, and education conferences and events.

Once you find someone you believe could be a good match for your institution, send them a friendly, yet professional email that explains why you are contacting them and includes the job description. In your email, highlight why you think they could be the perfect candidate for the job and how they can get in touch. You could also send LinkedIn messages or give phone calls in your cold reachout teacher hiring strategy.

Attend Job Fairs

Instead of simply waiting for candidates to apply for your teacher job opening, you can take part in local job fairs to actively search for good candidates there. Depending on your market, you can have a booth in general job fairs or in education-specialized events. Form a small team from your school that will be best fitted to spot potential candidates, present the benefits of working at your institution, and judge who could be a good fit.

In-person job fairs are a particularly good place to recruit teachers as they give you an opportunity to interact with candidates, ask questions, and answer their enquiries in real time.

Look for Recent Graduates in Education

Recent graduates form a great applicant pool for your teacher needs. Fresh out of college, they are familiar with the most recent practices in the education field and they are full of enthusiasm which you can channel to your benefit. Moreover, fresh graduates are perfect to train into the instructional methods and styles preferred by your school and district.

To access this candidate pool, you can partner with college career centers, education department professors at local universities, alumni networks, and teacher training programs. As many states require students to complete credit hours of in-class instruction to become teachers, you can offer internships to college students as a way to introduce them to your school and recruit them right after graduation.

4. Pre-Screen Candidates

If you have completed the steps so far correctly, you should start receiving a flow of applications from candidates. It’s now the time to start sifting through CVs and cover letters to separate the potentially qualified candidates from the rest.

Depending on the number of applications you receive, going through all candidates manually might not be feasible, no matter how big your teacher recruitment team is. You should consider using an applicant tracking system (ATS) that can help you organize and manage the hiring process. This software is designed in a way that allows even non-HR professionals to streamline the recruitment process regardless of which industry they are hiring for.

In pre-screening the candidates, you need to set aside those that meet all formal requirements and qualifications and whose cover letters make you think that they might be a good fit for the position and for your institution.

5. Interview the Top Candidates

As soon as you’ve built a solid list of qualified candidates, it’s time to start interviewing. Ideally, you want to set up in-person interviews with the top candidates as it’s important to be able to observe their behavior and manners. After all, you are hiring people who will work directly with students, so they should have exceptional interpersonal skills.

Tip: Build the most relevant job interview panel to select the best matches for your school and position. The best members include the school principal, the department chair, one or two experienced teachers from the department, and an HR representative.

Make sure that you and your colleagues have a carefully prepared list of questions that will help you evaluate how well candidates fit the position. Allow about an hour for each interview. Try to schedule interviews over the course of 2-3 days so that your impressions of the first interviewees are still fresh when you’re done with all candidates.

Some of the most important questions to ask when trying to hire good teachers are:

• What makes you the best candidate for the position?
• Why did you choose a career in education?
• What inspires you on the job?
• What values do you appreciate the most in the classroom?
• What specific steps do you take to ensure that students with different learning needs and abilities do well in your classes?
• How do you manage classroom discipline and provide a positive learning environment?
• Can you give an example of a challenging situation in the classroom and how you handled it?
• What do you hope to contribute to the school?
• What comprises student success in your opinion and what do you do to ensure that your students succeed?
• How do you prepare for and structure lessons?
• What technologies do you use in delivering instruction and in assignments?
• What types of assessments do you use to measure progress and track student performance?
• How do you work with colleagues, supervisors, and assistants?
• How do you communicate with parents?
• What professional development opportunities have you attended most recently?
• What do you hope to get out of this job?

Plan the interviews in a way that leaves some time for the candidate to ask questions as well. For teachers it is as important to make sure that they land the right job as it is for schools to ensure that they land the right teacher. The interview should feel as a two-way communication process rather than an one-sided examination.

Moreover, remember to have a few minutes between interviews to discuss your impressions with the panel and assign a score to each candidate before moving to the next one.

6. Give the Best Candidates a Teaching Test Task

After the round of interviews, you should be left with 5-6 top applicants for the teacher position who tick all the boxes. Then, you need to see them in action. It’s one thing what people say on their resume, in their cover letter, and during an interview, and it’s a totally different thing how they act when they are put on the spot. Assigning in-class test tasks is a must when recruiting a teacher as you need to check their classroom manners, practices, and behavior.

One of the most effective test tasks for potential teacher recruits is to ask them to prepare a class plan for one of your upcoming lessons and deliver the lesson to actual students in the classroom.

When preparing the test task, make sure to:

• Provide candidates with all details including the grade, subject, and specific lesson.
• Give them enough time to prepare.
• Remain available for follow-up questions in the preparation process.
• Specify the exact time and place of the test class.
• Explain who will attend the class including the number of students and the make-up of the recruitment panel.
• Let candidates know what technology they will have at their disposal during the class.
• Inform students in advance that the class will be led by someone different from their teacher and ask them to behave as usual.

7. Conduct Background Checks and Talk to References

Once you’ve further shortlisted candidates with the teaching test task, your next step is to run thorough background checks on the remaining applicants to make sure that there is nothing worrisome. While you should avoid discrimination at all costs, you have to ensure that your teacher hires are safe, trustworthy, and reliable enough to work with your students.

Additionally, it’s time to contact the references they provided along with their applications.

Some questions to ask references include:

• In what capacity do they know the candidate?
• For how long have they known them?
• What qualities make the candidate stand out from other educators they have worked with?
• How effective has communication been?
• What is a specific situation in which the candidate has really stepped up and proven themselves?
• Is there anything else that should be taken into consideration by a potential employer?

8. Make an Offer to the Best Candidates

As soon as you’ve completed the interviews, the test tasks, and the background checks, you should decide which candidate would be the best teacher hire and move forward with an offer.

Tip: Don’t wait for more than a few days after the test task to send an offer to the top candidate. You don’t want to have your best applicant snatched by another school.

In the job offer, include the following details:

• Exact job title
• Clear list of responsibilities
• Work schedule
• Start date
• Compensation and benefits
• Available bonuses
• Contract terms and duration
• Probation period
• Contract renewal options
• School code of conduct
• Reporting structure including supervisors and supervisees
• Any remaining contingencies

In addition to sending the job offer by email, you can follow up with a phone call to make sure that the candidate has received your email and to give the offer a more personal touch. It’s important to start building a positive work environment as early as possible so that you not only hire but also retain the best teachers and help them grow professionally within your institution.

9. Design an Effective Onboarding Process

Hiring good teachers does not end with candidates accepting your job offer. It continues with a strong onboarding process that allows them to get started on the right footing and thrive in your institution. The onboarding process should be a mix of materials that they go over on their own and in-person activities supported by the school body.

The most important components of effective onboarding for new teachers include:

• Pre-arrival preparation that covers a welcome package, introduction to the school rules and code of conduct, office setup, and technology setup (email, software accounts, and access to school systems as well as educational tools and apps)
• School orientation (day 1) that includes a tour of the school, meeting the department and the rest of the faculty body, getting introduced to the school administration, being formally introduced to classes, and attending training sessions
• Settling in (week 1) that comprises classroom setup assistance, curriculum and planning meetings, observations, and daily check-ins
• Integration (month 1) that includes ongoing feedback, regular check-ins, and frequent mentor sessions
• Long-term commitment (months 1-3): A typica probation period lasts 3 months. During this time, you need to make sure that you provide your new educators with everything they need to become an integral part of the faculty body and to succeed on the job. After the end of the probation period, it’s time to decide if this is really the right fit for your teacher position needs and whether you want to continue working with them.

The school administration and relevant faculty should remain available to help and support good teachers even after the end of the 3-month trial period. It’s important to provide opportunities for professional development, offer regular feedback, and welcome feedback from your teachers as well. Frequent and open communication is the only way to create a positive work environment for your teachers that will benefit your school and your students while preventing issues from building up.

Tips on How to Hire the Best Teachers

While implementing the above-described step-by-step process of recruiting teachers, you can take advantage of the following proven tips to enhance the success of your hiring efforts:

1. Anticipate Your Future Needs

Develop a strategic plan for your educational institution for the next 2-3 years that outlines your anticipated teacher needs in the near future. It’s best to know what positions you expect to need in the upcoming years based on envisioned subject diversification, class expansion, school growth, and pending retirements. In this way, you can continuously work on building a network of potential candidates to have the right people to reach out to as soon as a new position opens. Moreover, if you know when exactly you will need new teachers, you can start recruiting well in advance as the process takes an average of 4-12 weeks.

2. Be Proactive

When hiring teachers, you need to act proactively by looking for potential recruits where the best applicants are. This involves strategies such as using LinkedIn, attending education conferences, participating in teacher job fairs, building relations with colleges that offer education degrees, and doing cold reachout. To find the best teachers for your vacancies, it’s not enough to post the job description on a few websites and online forums and expect top candidates to start pouring in.

3. Involve Relevant Stakeholders

Hiring good teachers is not a one-man show, and it requires the dedicated efforts of a team of professionals. For optimal outcomes, you should build a solid team that includes district and school representatives. Some must-have figures include the district superintendent, the school principal, the department chair, experienced teachers from the department, the HR office, and potentially school counsels.

Moreover, to ensure that the approved candidate meets student needs and expectations, it’s a good idea to get students on board as well. While defining the needs for the position and working on the job description, you can have a student focus group where you learn from students what the most important qualifications, skills, and characteristics of the ideal teacher are. Similarly, after the test assignments, you can conduct a quick survey among students to ask about their thoughts on the candidates and what they liked and didn’t like about each potential teacher. After all, good teachers are those that are able to reach out to students and impact them in a meaningful way.

4. Create a Compelling Job Offer

Once you’ve decided on the best candidate to fill in the available position, make sure to send them an offer they cannot resist. Of course, everything included in the job offer should be in line with the school/district budget, standards, and practices. But in the current competitive job market for teachers, it’s crucial to provide the best offer you can afford so that you don’t lose good candidates to other institutions.

5. Consider Virtual Teachers

Finally, it’s worth investigating the possibility of hiring virtual teachers for core and supplemental instructions. Synchronous online teaching is an increasingly popular trend among public and private schools which offers a quick and efficient solution to the growing problem of teacher vacancies. Indeed, working with virtual instructors can offer many benefits over hiring teachers the traditional way. The most important benefits include immediate access to qualified educators, a selection of state-certified instructors, flexible schedules, and adaptation to any curriculum.

If your school or district is planning to recruit teachers, you can check out Fullmind core instruction services. All our instructors are state-certified for their subjects and are trained in online teaching. Many of them hold additional certifications to address the needs of a diverse student community, and they follow the curriculum assigned by your district. Moreover, our teachers get fully integrated in the school community via participation in staff meetings, taking part in parent teacher conferences, and communicating with students in real time.

How to Retain Great Teachers

Being able to recruit the best teachers is the first part of the process of building a qualified, capable, and successful faculty body for your school. The second part is being able to retain good teachers.

Following are a few tips on how to build the best teacher retention strategy:

• Maintain open channels of communication: First and foremost, to keep teachers happy, they need to know that they can communicate with the school administration and faculty in an effective way, and that any feedback that they provide will be taken into consideration. You need to work on establishing clear, yet flexible communication channels across your institution.
• Offer regular professional development options: Employees feel appreciated and motivated when they have opportunities to improve their skills and grow in the hierarchy. This is achieved through well-planned professional development courses, seminars, and other events.
• Provide ongoing feedback: Even after the initial orientation and onboarding, you need to continue offering feedback to teachers, both when they do everything right and when you see an area for improvement. Build mechanisms such as annual evaluations, quarterly reviews, and monthly check-ins with mentors and supervisors.
• Work on building a team: Creating a sense of collaboration and cooperation is crucial for the success of your faculty team and for the happiness of individual teachers. Organize team building events and encourage teamwork.
• Increase compensation regularly: At the end of the day, all people work in order to make money to take care of their personal needs and their families. To retain the best teachers, you need to offer them salary increases that at the very minimum compensate for the inflation rate.
• Build an incentive scheme: In addition to growing regular income, employees also feel motivated to excel and to remain at their current job when they have access to performance-based bonuses and incentives. Offer additional compensation, albeit small, when teachers go above and beyond, by organizing extracurricular activities or when their students exceed the average performance, for example.
• Support initiatives and innovation: You should not simply allow but actually encourage teachers to be creative and proactive and to suggest new ways to improve the education process. Whether it’s the introduction of a tech-based tool or engaging their students in a career-readiness event, teachers should have freedom to innovate inside and outside the classroom.
• Acknowledge contributions and achievements: Last but not least, to install a feeling of pride in your faculty body, you should recognize their contribution to the school and their achievements within the institution. This can be done through simple activities like having A Teacher of the Month award.

With these incentives, you are guaranteed to retain good teachers for longer so that your recruitment efforts are worth it and so that your students enjoy the benefits of experience and continuity.

Bottom Line

Recruiting teachers, especially good ones, is not an easy task. However, following the 9-step process outlined above, you’ll be significantly closer to building the highly qualified, motivated, and caring faculty body that your students deserve. Once you’ve been able to hire the good teachers that you need, put the necessary effort into retaining them in the long term.

Meanwhile, check out how Fullmind can help you address your school or district needs in core instruction, supplemental instruction, and virtual staffing.