By Will Bourke,
Outreach and Engagement Manager, Teaching Vacancies
Will Bourke is the Outreach and Engagement Manager for Teaching
Vacancies. Will has thirteen years’ experience of being a
teacher, five of which are as a Deputy Headteacher in an
'Outstanding' secondary school. Here he provides an update on the
work the team has been doing to reduce the admin and cost burden
for trusts when advertising vacancies.
Making it easier and quicker for trusts to fill
vacancies
Teaching Vacancies is the free national service for state schools
in England to list teaching, leadership, and education support
roles. The service is quick and easy to use and 86% of hiring
staff would recommend the service to a colleague.
The service has been built around user needs and feedback. The
team received this ’ask’ from a number of the larger trusts:
‘could we make it even quicker to bulk upload vacancies’?
Over the last six months we have been exploring how we can meet
this user need and automate the upload of jobs to Teaching
Vacancies through integrating two interfaces.
What is ATS integration?
Put simply it is a programme that allows vacancies to be pulled
automatically from a Trust’s Application Tracking System (ATS)
through to Teaching Vacancies and getting two systems to talk to
each other. The aim is to reduce the time it takes for hiring
staff to post vacancies, streamline recruitment, and do it with
no cost to the trust – all helping put money back into the
classroom.
Case Study
Lisa Cole, Deputy Director of HR United Learning and Vicky
Button, HR Services Manager
We took part in the MAT integration pilot because we are
continually looking for ways to attract high quality teachers as
part of our recruitment and retention strategy. The recruitment
process can be quite clunky and involves a lot of different
steps; we were getting some negative feedback from our schools
and HR teams about having to list roles on our own website, and
then again on recruitment sites. We hoped we could work with
Teaching Vacancies to streamline the process and integrate our
application tracking systems.
It was very straightforward to work with Teaching Vacancies. They
set up a project team and we had regular catch ups about the
progress, so we always knew what was going on. It was very useful
to have a digital team on board who could work out what was
technically possible around integration. As expected with a pilot
programme, there were a few minor technical issues, but the
Teaching Vacancies team resolved them quickly and made sure to
put solutions in place so they wouldn’t happen again.
We’re very satisfied with the service and would definitely
recommend integration to other MATs. Since all of our roles have
been listed on Teaching Vacancies, we haven’t encountered any
problems, showing that the integration has worked really
well. Our recruitment teams now only have to list a vacancy
once and everything else happens automatically; we’ve given them
one less thing to worry about! Early indications from our data
show we’re definitely getting an increase in jobseeker traffic
too.
We’re always looking for ways to reduce our advertising and
recruitment costs and still get great quality candidates who are
going to stay with United Learning, so we love that Teaching
Vacancies is a free service. If you were looking for a job in the
health sector, you’d go to the NHS website, so why not go to the
Department for Education website if you’re looking for a job in a
school or a multi academy trust?
How to get access
If you are interested in how ATS integration could benefit your
multi-academy trust, or would like to find out more about how
Teaching Vacancies is able to save schools money on teacher
recruitment, please contact william.bourke@education.gov.uk
