13 | February 2021
Pivoting to Virtual Teacher Recruitment How Austin ISD Recruited and Hired Hundreds of Teachers Using Free Tools
Norma A. Castillo, Director of Talent Aquistion, Austin ISD
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ecruiters usually only need a few swag items with their school district branding, a passion for their school district and a big personality to recruit teachers. Most recruiters can usually accomplish this right from the trunk of their car. Every year, our school district employs 600-800 teachers during the span of four to five months in preparation for the first day of school. This requires recruiting
thousands of potential candidates who will eventually make Austin ISD their home. However, in the Spring of 2020 teacher recruitment, like many other things in our world, were immediately changed forever. In the midst of prime teacher recruitment season, we were no longer able to recruit teachers face to face. Universities, our main recruitment source, suddenly cancelled job fairs and we were faced with having to reinvent how we recruited teachers. Previously, our district had explored the possibility of virtual recruitment as an option pre-pandemic and had initial conversations with
representatives from different virtual recruitment platforms. We those representatives to follow up but quickly realized they were also being contacted by a large number of other school districts and their response time lagged. We also realized purchasing a virtual recruitment platform in the time of budget uncertainty may not be the wisest choice. Therefore, we quickly developed a system to virtually recruit teachers with free tools we already had available. Using Zoom and Google forms, our team created a toolkit that included everything we needed to recruit, interview, and onboard hundreds of educators.
