Hiring Yield and Cost per (Teacher) Hire: The Only Recruitment Metrics that Matter

Finding the right candidates for your school's open roles can be a challenge. It can also be expensive and time-consuming. When it comes to the most effective practices, find out what leads to the highest possible hiring yield, and lowest cost per teacher hire.

Hiring Yield and Cost per (Teacher) Hire: The Only Recruitment Metrics that Matter

We all want to uncover the process that leads to the highest possible hiring yield - but with so many sites arguing they can do just that, it can be easy to lose focus - and hard to decrease your overall cost per hire. And while we firmly believe you should expand your teacher pipelines, we also know the importance of staying grounded in these metrics.

But before navigating the best route to increase your hiring yield and decrease your cost per teacher hire, you need to ensure you and your team are aligned on key aspects of finding the right-fit candidates:

  • Your school culture
  • Your ideal candidate profile
  • And your current interview / hiring process

When deciding on ways to strengthen your candidate pipelines, you’ll want to focus your time and energy on organizations that will help you better define your school culture and ideal candidate profile - while also increasing your school’s discoverability with those right-fit candidates. Ultimately, this should lead to less time spent scouring resumes in search of the right-fit, and more time available to screen for the best fit.

To start, let’s make sure we have a shared understanding of our metrics:

Hiring Yield = # of teachers hired / # of candidates contacted

Cost per (Teacher) Hire = (recruitment team salaries + third party tools) / # of teachers hired

Then, let’s break down our three key aspects as they relate to our metrics - and what you can do to positively impact your overall results.

School Culture

To find the candidates that are right for your school, you need to effectively - and realistically - share the story of your school. This includes your mission statement, the visions you have for student learning and staff development, your student demographics, what you do differently - and dare we say better - than other schools. While you may not always be able to compete with the salaries, benefits, or working hours of other schools - you do have a unique value proposition. What is it? When you can clearly articulate this with candidates, you’ll unlock the key demographic you were hoping to reach - and you’ll stop wasting time on candidates who were never the right fit to begin with. Bottom line: You’ll be able to focus your time and resources where you can win and have the highest ROI.

Inside Tip: Finding the right qualifications in candidates can be a challenge - and so is determining the right-fit for school culture. But Selected helps by having candidates answer their own culture preference questions (i.e. pedagogy, discipline, etc.) and tagging them clearly as “Culture Matches” if they match your school’s preferences.

Ideal Candidate Profile

Knowing what you’re looking for in an ideal candidate will help you uncover who that person is - and it will lead to a much faster identification process when first vetting candidates. It’s also key to ensuring alignment across your team. While we all have our own biases in deciding what makes the best teachers, we can help guide our teams toward consensus when we clearly articulate the skills and characteristics of the right candidate for the given position.

Inside Tip: Consider organizations that allow you to filter for the skills and characteristics you have identified. This will save your team countless hours of resume skimming. In fact, Selected can save you even more time because the candidates you see in your pool are not only pre-screened for qualifications, they are also actively looking in the region(s) your school(s) serve.

Current Interview / Hiring Process

When you can accurately estimate the time it currently takes in your process, you can identify key areas to reduce time and increase efficiency. If you find that the majority of your hiring process is simply identifying candidates who meet your baseline criteria, you’ll want to take a second look at your Ideal Candidate Profile - and look into partnerships that cut down on the time it takes to get to the candidates you are looking for. If it’s the logistics of interview days that are taking up the majority of your team’s time, see if there are opportunities to divide and conquer  -  and take a closer look at your rating rubrics to ensure a proper norming of standards and expectations.

Inside Tip: With Selected, you can preview resumes before even connecting with candidates. But what makes the preview so strong, is that it has pulled the information most compelling to recruiters - right to the surface. With the click of a button you can now easily see each candidate’s education, certifications, and most relevant professional experience.

Remember, at the end of the day, your return on investment matters - and time is money. Whether you partner with a School of Education or a third party talent sourcing site like Linkedin, Indeed, or Selected, make sure they value delivering quality candidates to schools. And make sure their features align to that value. When it comes to sourcing, there is a lot of noise out there - and noise can get expensive. If their goal is not to reduce your cost per teacher hired, then it’s time to find a different pipeline.

See what Selected has to offer, and how we can help you reach a cost per hire as low as $266 per candidate.

About Selected

Selected helps schools hire the best teachers. We offer a matching platform that connects 1,200+ public and independent schools with a deep and diverse pool of 30,000+ Pre-K to 12 teachers in urban metro areas in the Northeast and West Coast, including New York City, NJ, CT, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Boston, SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Create a FREE school profile and start speaking with candidates immediately.