I Had to Learn How to Recruit School Staff with Confidence. You can too!
Kelley Ridings
?Empowering Educators Globally with Innovative Solutions in School Job Searches & Hiring ? K-12 International Education & Leadership Expert ? Author: The GIFT Hiring Method & Teach or Lead Abroad
As a school leader, I always said that hiring was the most important work I did.
Sometimes, we found excellent hires; occasionally, not so much. When I started leading schools, I thought I had done everything I was supposed to do. I had designed what I thought were good interview questions. I thought I had conveyed what was important about our school culture. I thought I had designed a thorough vetting process to check references. I thought I had a good idea about the red flags to look for in the interview process.
In retrospect, that was the problem. I thought. I thought. I thought. But at the time, I didn’t really know.
Prior to this, I don’t think my reactions were all that different from many hiring administrators I have met over the years who have done the same thing. We don’t know what we don’t know.
In good times or bad, I felt I took the hiring process seriously. Yet despite my early efforts, too many ineffective candidates made it through. Some were catastrophic hires who took up an enormous amount of our leadership team’s time and energy to work with in trying to fix problems that many of these employees simply didn’t want to fix. They were who they were and didn't see a reason to change.
Yet after making some monumentally bad recruitment choices, I realized that it couldn’t just be my bad luck. There had to be a reason. One lesson of leadership is that when something happens only a few times, we might be able to attribute it to luck or chance. But when it happens many times, then that is a sign of a system’s failure. Wow! After one too many, I finally realized there was a system failure, for sure! I was the common denominator.? ?
I needed help. I needed a twelve-step program for my recruiting dysfunction. “Hi, I’m Kelley. I’m a bad hirer.”
Looking back, I see several reasons why it took me so long to recognize the seriousness of the problem.?
Upon realizing my problem, a fledgling phoenix emerged from the flames of my past bad hires. That was the proper start of my rethinking of the hiring process. I stripped back all my beliefs and learned the whole process anew, rebuilding along the way.
This system has taken years to hone; it’s not the result of any one book, theory, or framework. Instead, deep research led to a collection of revelations, bit by bit, that have evolved into the process that turned our school into one of the top-performing international schools in China and the world. I am convinced it can work for your school, too. I describe this process in my new book, The GIFT Hiring Method: You Can Confidently Recruit Quality School Staff.
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It comes out in a few weeks, so stay tuned.?
Copyright 2025 by Kelley Ridings
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Tedx Speaker| Special Education Thought Leader | Founder of iCan Dream Center | Workplace Culture Strategist | Equity Designer | Author of Benches in the Bathroom
1 个月Your book sounds very interesting and timely! Check this out Tateanna Foster.
I help teachers go where they're appreciated / Turn curriculum and practice for schools into skills as Consultant and Vice Principal / AP History and Psychology Teacher and Tutor
1 个月I had a school leader claim to me that the process was entirely random. I asked him if he would apply that same standard to practices in the classroom.