Recruitment Methods
What is your most common way of recruiting applicants for instructor positions at your school and how can the method be improved?
We use many to recruit instrictors. The Internet ,proffessional socities and recomednations form staff. the staff recommendations has brought some of the best instructors to our campus.
Our campus mainly recruits from employee or graduate referrals. We also use our campus and Career Services website and social media to advertise current campus openings.
We speak to current instructors and our Career Services department to get qualified leads. Instructors are also still working in the field so they have many contacts. Career Services is aware of graduates of our programs who are job seeking or are looking to advance into an instructor position. We also utilize internet based job boards, if necessary, to recruit candidates that may not have been associated with our school in the past. It is always best to pull from a larger pool when you can.
We also use referrals and the internet. Both have been successful, depending upon when and how we were looking.
We commonly use previous graduates that have been in the field over 3 years. We also have a training program that has been very successful. A new candidate that will be teaching a hands on class must Teacher Assist for 2 to 3 terms in the class that they will be teaching. I know that we are very lucky to be able to do this but it works.
Lise,
Referrals from other faculty members can be really effective.
Jeffrey Schillinger
The most common way that we recruit for positions that are available is from staff suggestions. Perhaps they work with someone who is looking to change careers or take a different path than what they are doing now. Or the other ways are the normal ones, job advertisement in the paper, the internet, even the company job listing site. Sometimes someone from another school is interested in relocating. Several times in the past, applicants have contacted either other faculty members or send in their resume for review. When we receive several applications for a position, we generally will sit down together and review it and then have them come in for a meeting a skill demonstration.
Troy,
Thanks for this post. In your opinion, what makes a good teacher?
Jeffrey Schillinger
I speak with my colleagues to find good instructor and I also talk with other instructors.
Shannon,
I have found referrals from my current faculty to be the most effective way to identify faculty members for professional courses. I have had better success finding general education instructors through working with local teacher's organizations and/or the public schools.
Jeffrey Schillinger
The most common or popular method we recruit instructors at our institution is through internet websites. Ultimately, we may want to consider professional bodies or instructor referrals to better accommodate our demand.
Heidi,
Good faculty members will know of others who can be developed into good faculty members.
Jeffrey Schillinger
Carolyn,
Thanks for the reminder about getting job experience before retuning to teach. Hiring someone to teach who just finished the program is often setting up the teacher for tough sledding.
Jeffrey Schillinger
I most commonly use employee recommendations, especially from those instructors who prove to be strong, effective teachers. They are very familiar with the student culture and the overall requirements to meet job expectations. Therefore, they are most likely going to recommend an individual who they believe is knowledgeable, skilled, and willing to do the job, and I am sure they will!
At our school the most commonly used methods of recruitment are referal and internet postings on our job portal to alumni. This continues to work well and this method has a built in filtering mechanism that generally funnels candidates to us who already have some known and acceptable qualifications. Nevertheless, this method does not guarantee that we will always get or hire someone who can do the job even if they appear to meet our criteria.
The people that we hire always have the proper credentials and generally demonstrate good teaching and classroom management skills. The area were we have observed difficiencies is in the non-classroom aspects of certain teacher's abilities. By this I mean social skills, management skills, administrative skills, etc. Problems in these areas can affect student outcomes, administrative requirements, etc. This is the area that we need to pay more attention to in order to get an improvement.
One way in which we are working towards this goal is to build up a bench of Teaching Assistants that we can observe, develop and train to meet the standards required of an instructor in all of the areas that are vital to a teacher's success. It gives us a chance to see people in action and thus allows us to be better able to analyze their skills and abilites and to be better able to judge if they qualify for a teaching position.
Alex,
Our college pays a referral bonus to employees who recommend folks to us who stay and perfrom well for at least six months. It seems to help folks keep referrals in mind.
Jeffrey Schillinger
Well our school has recruited instructors/prospective employees through several of the methods mentioned in the training. The only on that does not get utilized is the newspapers ads. It seems it is outdated and almost obsolete at this point. We have used the internet, social media, association job boards, word of mouth and other instructor recommendations. In addition I feel alumni are a good source to begin a teaching training program to begin as Teacher Assistants. But as the webinar mentioned, it is important for graduates to receive a sufficient amount of practical experience in the field before they are moving through the teacher academic process.
We use the referal method and internet postings aimed at our alumni to draw candidates to our school. These two methods have worked very well. Referal by our employees works well because they have a good sense of what it takes to do the job and they also have a good feel for our work culture and how a referred person could fit in. Reaching out to alumni also works well for some of the same reasons but also because our subject matter and methods are so specialized that our graduates are already somewhat pre-trained for the job. This makes it a good pool to draw from.
Most common is from our employees referrals and grads students, however we use internet and other ads, but we can improve this, this course have a lot of new ideas.
