Juliet Caunt has an HR career of over 30 years, working across a wide range of both specialist and generalist HR roles for Royal Mail and the Legal Services Commission before spending more than 10 years as Chief People Officer at Co-op Academies Trust as it grew from six to almost forty academies. Now an independent HR consultant, she works with a number of academy trusts to develop and implement their HR priorities. Throughout her long and varied career, attraction and recruitment has been a key theme.
In this article, Juliet shares her learning and insights around effective recruitment (particularly what she has seen work well in relation to attraction techniques) from within education and beyond it. Within this, she offers some reflective questions for trust leaders to consider when looking to attract and recruit new staff members to a trust.
At Forum Strategy, the broader concept of being an ‘employer of choice’ has been well explored with various useful resources and thinkpieces shared on this subject (and linked to at the end of this article). The work around being an employer of choice includes all elements related to our staff – starting with attraction and recruitment, then staff retention and finally, also considering staff experiences of leaving the organisation. This article will focus specifically on the initial ‘attraction’ part of the recruitment process to dive in-depth into this particular aspect of the employer of choice work.
Undoubtedly, we are all aware that making teaching (and the support roles that are central to a school and trust’s success) an attractive career option, is an integral part of building and sustaining a thriving education workforce and that currently, in many areas and across particular roles, trusts and schools are finding this challenging. For us to be able to bring in more people with the right skills, knowledge and experience, our profession needs to appeal to these people in the first place, which is easier said than done given we are operating in an increasingly competitive jobs market.
Getting the ‘attraction’ aspect right is all about making sure that people know about your vacancies and they are intrigued enough to ‘click to read more’ (actively considering whether it’s the role for them) and following that, there then needs to be a conversion of their interest into applying. This is all about getting the right information in front of the right people, making it both honest and attractive, and encouraging the potential candidate to picture themselves in the role and working for your organisation. I’ll explore this in some detail over the course of this article.
