Teacher Recruitment

Every independent school should ask the question: “What is the quality of our faculty and staff and what are our hiring criteria?” As you can tell from the above, we believe this is the second most important factor in a school’s success (second only to the recruitment and selection of a headmaster). We recommend being as far-reaching and assiduous in searching for an eighth grade social studies teacher as you are in finding your headmaster and management team, because any school is only as good as its weakest link.

Thus, as with any executive search, we believe a school (or its designated partner) should call as many individuals in the school business and begin sourcing for talent for any and all positions. When we do so on behalf of schools – again, whether it is a headmaster search or a Spanish position – we ask our sources two questions: first, whom do you know who might fit well this particular job description; and second, whom do you know who might know of someone who might fit well this job description. The school’s goal should be to develop an initial list of prospective candidates. This list could number as many as 40 to 50 individuals, but may only need to include a dozen or so. The school may have made as many as 150-200 sourcing calls, though most effective searches average about 100 calls.

To give you an idea, in our current head football coaching search, for which we are now down to two finalists, we’ve made well over 200 calls, started with a pool of 140 candidates, and interviewed in person approximately 15. The final selection will be yet another case of our families (and the families of neighboring schools) wondering “how in the world did they get him to come to Forsyth Country Day School?”