


Attracting and Retaining the Right Staff

The staff lifecycle covers seven key areas, to which we have added an eighth. These are
- Attraction
Your employer brand – the image of your school as a ‘great place to work’, in the minds of current and potential staff, stakeholders and community. - Recruitment
The active phase of finding and securing great people. Recruiting is more competitive than ever, so how do you ensure every candidate has a great experience? - On-boarding
The degree to which new starters feel welcome and are helped to quickly become part of the team, including knowing their way around and what is expected. - Performance
Review individuals regularly and provide feedback. Recognition, praise and effectively holding staff members to account is key. - Development
Encourage consistent professional development and a learning culture. Create the time and capacity for it and ask staff members to take responsibility for their own development. - Retention
Focus energies and efforts on retaining key staff, ensuring they are both happy and challenged. This is supported by getting all the stages right and by having clear measurement and plans for individuals, including managing talent and succession planning. - Farewell
For many team members there will come a time when they leave. Whatever the reason, whether it’s on promotion, retirement, capability (or anything else), you want them to positively promote your school. - Leadership Behaviours
Finally, we have added everyday leadership behaviours. These create great everyday experiences (or not) for staff. Leaders should be aware of and role model those behaviours proven to engage staff and prevent / reduce staff stress. You can see more on this in another tip here.
In this section we will briefly look at attraction, onboarding and retention.
Attraction
This is all about generating interest in your MAT and schools and sharing why they are great places to work. Your reputation is what is most important, particularly for teachers. Shout out about the culture and share the positive experiences of staff. Of course this means you do have to create a good place to work as an employer of choice - you cannot just shout out about it. The everyday experiences of staff and what they say about you as an employer will quickly spread in your locality, and perhaps further afield..
Identify routes and ways to get your message out and reach ideal candidates and give them reasons to engage with you, even when you have no vacancies. This might include, for example, providing CPD opportunities and value beyond your own staff and showcasing how you provide flexible working or part-time roles. It should also mean keeping in touch with staff who have previously worked in the Trust and those who have come into contact with it, for example unsuccessfully applying for previously advertised roles (you may want to apply some discretion).
This needs very specific focus and involves so much more than the usual good news stories in the local press! The best ambassadors and recruiters you have are those already working with you. Attraction and recruitment is the responsibility of all staff so give them reasons to ask others to join you.
What you do must be genuine and authentic and not simply for show (otherwise staff and potential staff will quickly see through it).
Measures you can use for attraction include; number of applicants, qualified applicants rate (% of total applicants), average outstanding vacancies (as % of headcount) and database of previous candidates (% applying).
Recruitment
You are recruiting in a highly competitive market, with a shortage of qualified candidates, and where targets for those joining the profession are now being missed.
Preparing a job description and people specification, creating an application form and job advert are hygiene factors – everyone is doing it. Job interviews and selection days are just part of a process. Look at most job adverts in the press, application forms, interviews and more and in most cases you could transfer them between schools.
Your job has to be to ask the question, “How do we stand out from the crowd?”
A starting point is to focus on attitude and culture fit, and not just skills and experience. Be clear on your Trust values, ensure they are lived, and bring these out throughout the process. While having a gap, particularly a teaching one, is very difficult to manage, it is better than bringing people onboard who are not going to add to your longer term performance.
The work already done on attraction, reaching out to people beyond your MAT and keeping in touch with previous staff, potential staff and staff who have previously applied will help build a pipeline. You should also offer feedback to every candidate. I know you are busy and for some roles you may get many applicants, yet taking time to put together and deliver feedback to each one will make a real difference.
When we share this suggestion, we are often shot down as it being too difficult, with feedback at best being limited to those who received an interview. Yet you want every person applying, whatever the outcome, to go away with a very positive view and to share these stories with colleagues. Future advertised roles will likely receive more candidates if you do this.
One way to do this and stand out is to use video. Covid has helped people get better with this medium and there is likely to be at least one member of the senior team confident to make a feedback video. You are reviewing each application anyway, to decide whether or not to progress them to the next stage. Ask whoever is doing this to write down one thing they liked about the application and one thing that the applicant should develop. This should add very little workload.
Then use an application like Loom, where you can create short videos for free - it only needs to be around one minute.
"Hello, applicant name, thank you so much for applying for the position of........
My name is......... and I am the (role) at (Trust or school).
On this occasion we will not be taking your application forward and I wanted to share a little feedback about our decision. One thing that I really liked / loved about your application was (insert your positive).
The main reason we decided not to take you forward to interview was (insert reason). When applying for future roles you might consider how to better...(for example, show how your experience could be used to deliver...., demonstrate how you have performed in......, etc.
Thank you so much for your interest in (MAT / school) and for taking the time to make an application. We would welcome you applying for future roles."
Only add the last sentence if true.
You can review each step of your process and identify a small number of steps that will make a big difference, like the one suggested above.
Staff that apply to your MAT and schools, are not just future candidates, they share their experience with others. Imagine the good will if every experience was positive, even where they don’t get the job!
Measures you can use for recruitment include; time to fill vacancies, % of offers accepted and % of vacancies filled internally.
On-boarding
You might not like the title and see it as business speak!
I use it quite deliberately to move away from the idea of induction. We are not inducting people into our way, or delivering a quick start, but helping them to be their best self within the culture we have created. It is not just about their first hour, day or even week.
It should start on the day of appointment and the information and contact you have before they start. It is then about the ongoing support and challenge that is provided. On day one we may be desperate to get teaching staff in the classroom (there are students to be taught and teaching spaces to fill) and support staff on their job.
Yet day and week one should involve much more; meeting the CEO, Principal, Head and other senior leaders; having lunch with a group of teachers and support staff; and spending quality time with their department or immediate line manager. And over the coming months; regular 1 to 1 time; coaching; feedback; training; regular two way reviews; a first career conversation and more.
To do this effectively means having a clear plan, with timelines, each new staff member having a personal plan and every line manager knowing what is expected of them, having had the training and support to be able to deliver against this.
This will lead into the next stages of performance and development which you can read by clicking the links.
Measures you can use for onboarding include; feedback from staff and line managers and % of staff satisfactorily meeting probation.
Retention
Everything we have covered above, together with everyday behaviours, performance, development and how we manage farewell, strongly influences retention. Give people reasons to want to work at your Trust and schools, recruit and on-board them effectively, manage their performance and development, provide opportunities and treat them well every day and they will stay with you.
This includes identifying and managing talent early, building a succession plan, knowing what roles are at risk and having a candidate ready to step into them. It also means creating alternative career paths. Not everyone is cut out to be a leader and strong classroom performers need to be rewarded, without necessarily having to progress along a leadership path (if it is something they don’t want or will not be good at).
Many MATs address this with cluster, regional and overall roles, and you may need to be creative, if you are not already doing this. However, this is not about giving an unpaid associate or temporary role for six or twelve months - while they can be useful as part of development, they do not create the alternatives needed for long-term growth. Having Trust, rather than school, contracts, giving staff greater autonomy in how and where they work and having clear plans to retain those going on maternity leave are also key areas that will provide greater support.
In addition to delivering across the staff lifecycle, there are other ways to seek feedback and address those things that are likely to keep more staff in your Trust.
Reviewing Trust and school data that covers the number of people leaving, absences, grievances, usage of employee assistance schemes (providers should be able to give anonymous numbers) will give strong clues. You can add to this with a staff survey. Addressing findings and demonstrating that staff are being heard will be of significant benefit.
Two additional actions you can take are to hold Exit and Stay Interviews.
Exit interviews are more commonly held and not always done well. They do provide useful feedback on why people leave, as long as they can get open and honest feedback.
Of course one of the challenges of an Exit Interview can be it has come too late - they have already decided to leave. Carrying out Stay Interviews to understand what keeps people in your MAT and schools, will help you to identify and address issues and perhaps prevent staff from leaving. Unlike exit interviews, when you are finding out why people left, a stay interview enables you to find out what will help people stay.
Specific measures you can use for retention include; staff turnover %, annual wellbeing survey results, exit interview feedback, % of maternity and paternity leave returners, % promoted annually and % of talent who are organisationally mobile.
Farewell
If you deliver on all we have covered then you will recruit more staff from those available and more will stay with you. Yet, it remains inevitable that some will move on. They may not be doing the job needed, and have not improved, despite support, to meet expectation. Or perhaps teaching really isn’t for them. In this case you will have helped them in a professional and effective way to leave the school. We cover more on farewell here.
If you find this useful then ask how we help you measure and track staff wellbeing and the impact of the actions you take.
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