Senior Leadership recruitment in Schools

JME HR was asked to design a process for recruiting a Head of a Preparatory School.

The role of the Head, in the current economic climate is morphing from a pure educationalist to that of a business manager, coach & mentor and external ambassador. A tough role to resource and even more of a challenge to succeed at in the current climate. We had internal candidates to consider and planned to invite external candidates to apply as well.

We could have engaged a head-hunter and outsourced the assignment. Instead, we had the internal expertise to recruit and a very good network amongst senior staff and trustees. We decided to post an advert online in TES.

• We scoped the role of the Head and created an agreed job description – challenged the accountabilities for a modern-day school, detailed the experience, soft skills and knowledge that the successful candidate would need to bring to the role.
• We designed a fair and transparent process. We invited key stakeholders to partake in the recruitment process, trustee members, parents, and internal senior leaders.  We designed a fair assessment process, with presentations around growth and strategies to achieve increased pupil numbers. We included an in-tray exercises to see how the candidates prioritised the day-to-day challenges that they would face every day in their new role. We included competency-based interview questions designed to get to the depth of experience that the candidates could offer.
• We included the opportunity to see the children, staff, and the facilities to engage the candidates and allow them to see and feel the ‘ethos’ of the school.

What was the outcome:

We had an interviewing team working together to make the correct assessment on candidates, free of bias, as we followed a robust and transparent process. The team valued the structure, coaching along the way and the professional assessment and critique of what each applicant had demonstrated throughout the process and could bring to the school.

They had learned a lot from the process. They felt confident that they had made a good ‘choice’ based on facts following a thorough assessment of each candidate’s performance. The team were aligned on the decision having considered the performance of each candidate on each element of the assessment process.