Reflecting on hiring practices and how they help your organization grow or maintain status quo

How do you balance developing talent from within and seeking outside insights?

Spring is the time when schools are strategically hiring for many positions. This year’s hiring faces substantial strain on school districts and education organizations serving schools budgets have been cascading downwards the last two years. Hiring is always a critical piece of building the team of people - but how carefully do you hire for people who will amplify the positive impact of your organization and help you all leverage the team you do have by adding new perspectives?

What does your organization or school want to accomplish in the next 1-3 years? 

When you are hiring for a specific role like Literacy Teacher on Special Assignment, Algebra teacher or a new Director of Multilingual Programs, you might be tempted to skip over this step. Time is short and common practice is to approach hiring as a transaction:  dive into the specific duties and responsibilities of that role and charge forward with specific questions that establish candidates' knowledge of that subject, your district and duties tied to the position.

But when you first think about what you want to accomplish in a one-to-three-year time frame, you can start thinking about those roles strategically.  

• Maybe you want to understand if candidates have had experience with different models that have been successful for literacy support and then think about how flexible their thinking is as a future teacher leader on your site? 
• Maybe you’ve always dreamed of taking your school in the direction of Building Thinking Classrooms (Dr. Peter Liljedahl)  and want to change your classroom-based scenario in the interview to give you insight on how comfortable a future candidate is with classrooms aligned to that approach?
• Maybe you want this hiring process to reveal how ready the candidates are to apply what they know, seek research to guide decisions and wholeheartedly jump into new directions and growth. 

When I look at the team holistically, what skills are we missing and how might this role help us address those gaps?  

Before you draft a single interview question, consider what your organization’s strengths are and where you have gaps.

As a leader, you would look at this in much the same way a teacher looks at their classroom. You are looking at multiple domains, for example, general knowledge, application of knowledge, ability to collaborate, expressions of ingenuity, fidelity to process, accuracy, fluency in content.

As the leader, you also want to consider how well your team is positioned to grow as a team - without your involvement in daily decisions. Oftentimes schools or organizations can find that they’ve only trained and hired people in one or two approaches and models. Then, when it’s time to improve, change direction or infuse new thinking, they can find themselves trapped in the status quo. People who have had different career experiences can bring new questions to your school or organization. They aren’t attached to “the way we’ve done it” for the last ten years and they can often be a catalyst for rapid growth and movement because they’ll ask questions others no longer even see. 

“What if we recruited students by creating a transition plan into our school and met 1:1 with them before they ever enrolled? We could build a stronger master schedule and start the relationship now.”  

“What if we offered P.E. as a PE/Math block for our rising 8th graders?” (remember that piece I shared on PE in Napierville, Illinois - I couldn’t resist the call back 😊)

How can I change our interview process to give someone more of a chance to shine?

Like the story of Goldilocks, you will have candidates who have what you consider “too much” experience who might come into your applicant pool as well as those who might be stretching up for the position you have posted. Whether it’s a candidate from within your team or organization or one from the outside, you are seeking the person who is “just right”. They will be able to join the team and learn and also stretch the team through their own unique voice, perspective and experiences. How might you revisit the interview process to ensure you are giving candidates within and outside your district opportunities to standout to the hiring panel?

These questions to Uncover Hidden Talents of Candidates might get your creative juices flowing to revise your own standard questions for the next round. 5 Clever Interview Questions to Uncover Candidates' Hidden Strengths

Ultimately, what you want is for your next hire to be a great one . And to do that, ensure your own mindset and the process you follow sets you up for a new hire who will propel you forward as a team.

And sometimes that means disrupting the status quo before the job posting is written.