There are schools that draw teachers into the profession, develop them and retain them, and those that drive teachers away. Jonny Uttley

Hiring great staff is not easy. But how do we unearth real talent and hold onto it? Some say there are fewer people in the recruitment pool with the right blend of knowledge and experience than a decade ago. Perhaps. The question is what can we do about it.

This post is about how I’ve changed in my thinking about recruitment.

We’ve just recovered from the transfer window deadline – May 31^st in the teaching profession. There’s a lot of inevitable reacting triggered at this time:

We react to the last-minute decisions of others.
We react to the motives of people leaving.
We react to the lack of candidates applying for roles we advertised.
All this reacting makes me feel like I’m on the back foot, and out of control and I don’t like it.

I used to spend lots of time thinking about appointments: writing bombproof JDs, getting adverts in all the right places, designing tip-top websites, fine-tuning interviews. But I’ve realise now I wasted a lot of time, because this is the wrong way round. I was focusing on the people out there. I began thinking that this was an interview problem, then a problem of recruitment, and then I realised I needed to adjust my lens, and look more closely at the people here with me. Yes, maybe there was shallower pool, and yes, there are aspects of the system beyond my control, but I wanted to take responsibility for the elements I could do something about.

I wanted to develop our own pool, to grow our own talent. I now realise that this is more about building talent, and less about just securing talent.

Some leaders believe that talent is a limited commodity. They think there’s is a fixed amount of candidates out there and that we need to catch them before a rival organisation does. This describes a philosophy where we mistakenly believe that talent is a limited good, that a fixed stock of good people creates a zero-sum equation.

But of course, talent is a renewable resource, and when we get the culture right, we create a virtuous cycle. The more you give, the more you enhance your own supply. By identifying talent early, by beginning conversations quickly, providing creative opportunities for people to step up, you create the conditions for people to stay with you. You’re also more likely to know what professional development will help them to be successful, you’ll think more creatively about the whole support package you need in place, and the more likely you and they are to achieve success for them, and for your school.

So for me, term six (the period beyond May 31^st) feels like the right time to seize control. To plan further ahead, I had to rethink my approach, I wanted to be:
More proactive about earlier conversations with people.
More proactive about opportunities we can offer.
More proactive about our CPD offer
More proactive about setting the right culture around recruitment.

Organisations which are reactive, have a recruitment strategy which basically reads, ‘advertise, see who comes in, interview.’ Organisations which are proactive, begin talking with people about the future much earlier, create authentic roles and experiences which prepare leaders better, seem always to be thinking about the next role for their people – genuinely succession planning.

This isn’t crystal ball gazing, but it is seeing the future more clearly. It’s the difference between looking forwards with optimism at future talent, rather than looking backwards with blame at disappearing colleagues.

To use a fishing analogy, I could focus on helping our organisation to catch the biggest, shiniest fish in the pond (we beat the recruiting opposition to the catch). Or instead, I could do something about improving the stock in our pond. One is zero-sum, one is growth mindset.

What does your recruitment strategy look like?

Is it bait the hook? (and focus on the fish) here you think most about the how you market the job to the potential candidates and the mechanics of the interview process.

Or is it widen your pond? (focus on your pool) here you think most about what is happening in your own organisation, and how you are developing your own potential candidates.

The moment I changed my thinking was when, two years ago, Mark Jones, our brilliant HR Manager told me that the most recent six school leader appointments in our Trust had come from outside the organisation. “What’s this telling us?” he asked, “and what shall we do about it?”

Of course bringing in new people brings fresh ideas and know-how, and sometimes you have a specific gap for which you need outside expertise, but there is a trade-off between this and losing an opportunity to develop one of your own, plus the time it takes for a newcomer to embrace your culture (the way we do things here). But Mark’s challenge to me led to a discussion about much more than recruitment. We asked ourselves how we could prepare people to be effective school leaders, how to keep our best people, and how we wanted to support people in their career journey. In short, about the culture we wanted to build. Questions which apply equally whether you’re a headteacher building your team in a small school, or thinking about school leader capacity in a large trust.

We asked lots of questions about our pool:
How do we widen our pond (build our leaders)? What diet works best (CPD)? How strong is our pond-liner (how do you protect our staff)? A bigger pool equals more fish but it also means a greater range of species. Is your CPD model like a salmon farm in a Scottish loch (all the same diet, assuming all the same experience), or is it a more balanced ecosystem, where you provide opportunities for everyone? The first might solve one issue this year. The second could help you reap the recruitment reward for years to come.

More Give and Less Take
In his book, Give and Take, Professor Adam Grant dedicates an entire chapter to the university-teaching of C.J. Skender. His results were incredible, but most of his graduate successes were not high starters. Grant describes this highly effective teacher as a giver, someone who believes in giving everyone in front of him a chance, whatever their starting point. He wasn’t looking for out-of-the-blocks talent, he was looking for capacity. Most teachers and leaders internalise this behaviour. They operate as givers, not expecting immediate brilliance from colleagues, but showing trust and belief in their staff that they’ll work hard and develop the required skillset.

There’s a message here in how we recruit, in our role as mentors and in how we run our CPD: We need to resist the temptation to give up recruiting when we can’t find those who we believe are high-potential people, who tick the complete person spec. We need to mentor people on the basis of their capacity to learn and grow, not their starting point.

In his excellent chapter in ResearchED guide to Leadership (‘Professional Development through instructional coaching’), Jon Hutchinson says, “we are far less interested in how good a teacher is and far more concerned with their capacity to improve.” This might mean a more inclusive approach to CPD, not excluding those who aren’t yet at a certain point in the hierarchy. If we assume that we are appointing people who will stay with us for the next five years, it helps us focus on where we want them to be at the end of year two rather than what they achieve by the end of their first term. This investment-mindset will filter through the staff room, and soon the school will feel more about people than performance.

Grow a bigger pool
There are two ways of making better recruitment decisions: we can improve the way that we use interviews to choose between candidates, which is difficult. Or we can improve the quality and the size of the applicant pool before we begin our process of evaluation, so that most of those we shortlist are already good candidates. It’s easy to fall into an interview, fixed-mindset, instead of an applicant-pool, growth-mindset.

To be able to make reliably strong hiring decisions we have to make our pool bigger. Research from industry suggests that candidates recommended by work colleagues perform more strongly, stay longer in an organisation and integrate into teams better. Many leaders actively look to recommend advertised roles to those they or they colleagues know or have worked with before, who have proven themselves to be effective colleagues. This creates an energy around newly advertised roles, and means that the reservoir of talent regularly applying keeps getting deeper as the network grows.

The best scenario is where employees recruit others because they want to work with great teammates and believe that the company would benefit from bringing that employee on board. Ron Friedman

Match your values to your HR processes
If your values say a lot about empowerment, for example, then focusing more on developing your people (a process you can easily control), rather than panicking about recruitment (an end point you can’t) really helps. So, I’ve changed my mindset about recruitment. I used to either blame the supply (there’s just not the same quality of candidates out there anymore), or criticise the process (ten years ago we’d have received 25 applications), whereas now I look forward with intention at the potential of those we have with us. For me it’s a case of, love the ones you’re with.

When I focus on the former, it limits my thinking. When I apply the lens of the latter, then I begin to think about the people in my team, not the recruitment problem, and my thinking becomes more creative, more generous and more optimistic.

Have earlier conversations
This helps identify your future leaders. We identified our current group with the interest and capacity for learning to become senior leaders and headteachers, and are beginning a combination of conversations and one-to-one coaching, to find help them explore these professional development questions:

Where future roles are you interested in/excited about?
What skills would you need for those roles, and where do you see the skills gap?
How could we help you close that skills gap?
What are the barriers to your next steps? How can we help with these?
Where is imposter syndrome an issue for you and what can we do to help?
What might help you to unlock greater confidence?

If you don’t manage your talent… they’ll leave you for someone who will
In her book Talent Architects, Mandy Coulter describes the process of explicitly ‘planning your workforce’, in the same way that we’d write a school development or a site plan. “Many schools don’t have a medium- to long-term workforce plan. Given that the vast majority of a school budget (70% plus) is spent on staffing and that no other resource will have such an impact on pupil outcomes, we need to tackle this”.

Write a workforce plan
A three-year workforce plan, which aligns to your SDP, takes account of budget, pupil forecast and your educational goals is a good start. This incorporates both hard planning (short term predictions of how many people in each year or subject with those skills you will need), and soft planning (longer term plans to address recruitment and retention of staff – spotting talent, developing leadership skills, using flexible working to support retention of your best people). A good place to start could be that recognising that talent and leadership will look different in different schools/contexts. Your future talent might be:

Those with leadership potential – eg. current middle leaders who could become senior leaders.
Y6 and Y11 and Y13 teachers with a track-record of strong outcomes
Phonics experts and Early Years specialists
Support staff who are brilliant at engaging hard-to-reach families (eg. improving attendance)
ECTs who develop rapidly as teachers, or who thrive on taking on responsibility
Proactive teaching assistants keen to develop as teachers
Front office staff who want to develop as Business Managers
Experienced and expert teachers (excellent pedagogy or subject knowledge) who it would be difficult to replace

Leaders are starting earlier (so need more support)
It’s definitely true that colleagues are applying earlier. But the paradox is that while they may not have the layers of experience with which leaders applied for roles a decade ago, today’s novice leaders have supported children and families through a worldwide pandemic. This means they’ve built up a set of skills, compassion and all round health-know-how that previous incumbents just didn’t have. This should count for a great deal in the recruitment equation.

So, you may have to offer more mentoring than you think they need: in order for them to apply, they need to know that the likelihood of success is high. They will need to know that there will be follow-up support and checking in on offer. Providing them with a mentoring relationship (or executive leadership support) can build in a structure of success and reduce the possibility of failure. And, you may need to more explicitly deal with imposter syndrome (which I write about for leaders here) in order for tentative colleagues to have confidence to apply for role.

To help make leadership more realistic, more accessible, and more do-able, you might run a workshop led by a school leader in their first year (with their mentor), which describes the bridge to headship, describing the steps to headship and what the practical support of the ‘mentor’ looked like.

When appointing future leaders, we need to choose to think long term, not short term: high potential people with great capacity moving up should, with lots of support, be strong in the long-term, but may take time to develop in the short term. So think about your appraisal process with this in mind.

You might develop a skills matrix, for those closest to becoming school leaders, where you really personalise their CPD can make the next step seem much more achievable. And of course, secondment opportunities, while tricky to make work, can bring the layers of experience currently missing.

Experts/Novices
The novice/expert gap we noticed in our own organisation was interesting – we could see that there were talented potential school leaders, it was just that many hadn’t yet had the opportunity or time to be developed. That crucible of school improvement work, which takes time, and which is part of the formation of a school leader. The talent was absolutely there, but what was missing was the layers of experience, and we wanted to do something about this. Sam Sims (2019), says that instructional coaching is the single best bet to accelerate the progress of novice leaders. ‘Instructional coaching is currently the best-evidenced form of professional development we have.’  

In my next blog I’ll consider how we can improve the training diet for leaders. Badly-organised leader training is the single best way to frustrate your best talent, waste their time and get them looking elsewhere to be developed and inspired. Treating everyone the same, offering the same CPD diet for experts (your most accomplished, experienced school leaders) as for novices (your school leaders in their first year in role) is asking for trouble. If we create in our schools and colleges a culture that prioritises learning and chooses to allocate significant amounts of time to people development and talent allocation, I think we will be in a much stronger position to face what is definitely an uncertain recruiting future.

Mark interviewed an ECT earlier this the week, and he reminded me this morning that she and others joining the profession this year could be the future school leaders running our schools long after we’ve retired. If we can find a way of motivating the good ones to stay with us, because we keep them enthused about what they do and help them reach their potential, then we‘re on the right track.