Why It’s so Difficult to Fill Support Roles
Support roles within education can be a nightmare to fill. Your HR department will upload their needed support staff vacancies on their vacancy pages and will have already resigned themselves to low numbers of applicants, and not very suitable applicants at that. This is because people applying for school support roles will not usually visit individual schools’ teaching vacancy pages. It’s just not an optimal way of applying for roles when there are job boards available to those people. Hundreds of jobs vying for the attention of candidates. They can pick and choose who to apply to and won’t have to input a different URL every time.
The problem with uploading your teaching vacancies to job boards is that most schools will not fill their support roles with top-tier candidates. There is just far too much competition on there against other schools, with many applicants throwing around flippant applications that are just there to test the waters with roles they feel are a “meh, if I get it, I get it and if not, who cares?” attitude. That just isn’t the kind of person you want to hire, they’ll be out the door in a month, or even less so.
Another reason support staff vacancies are much harder to fill is that it is a kind of purgatorial position, in regards to teaching assistant jobs. These teaching assistant vacancies are inundated with recent graduates trying to gain some experience, teachers that have yet to be offered permanent positions, or just people that think a teaching assistant requires no special qualifications. These applicants have their benefits, but the most glaring negative is that they will all, most likely, be applying for 30 different roles that week, leaving you to choose someone you think will choose you rather than someone you think is perfect for the role. It’s a difficult situation to be in when trying to recruit great people to your great school.
A similar job that is more specialised and can be even more difficult to fill are SEND teaching assistants. These roles require a certain kind of person, with a very specific set of skills that allow them to be great at their roles. Patience, intuition, empathy, and emotional stability are just a few traits required to make a great SEND teaching assistant. But because of the nature of this job, many SEND staff don’t actively look for different jobs at all, building and fostering relationships with their pupils due to small class sizes means that they can feel settled in their roles. There is comfort in understanding what certain children require when in the classroom, so looking for a job is not something that is on their radar.
That’s where soccialy comes in, this problem is why we exist as a business. You may know us from our advertising teaching vacancy roles, and you may be thinking, “well, it’s much easier to fill a teaching role than a support staff role.” Don’t worry, we understand that better than anybody else, that’s why we tackle a support staff role the exact same way we would approach a teaching job role. We target people on social media who have casually shown interest in their jobs online through the words they search, their social media bubble of interactions with like-minded people, and many other factors. Our educational marketing AI places your ad in front of potential candidates in a subtle and sleek fashion that feels natural to the person’s timeline or feed. This approach is extremely underrated, people don’t want ads shoved down their throats, whether is for their dream job or not. A subtle approach works wonders and keeps potential candidates interested and curious. Don’t wait around on job boards receiving flippant job applications, have your ad placed in front of someone who is guaranteed to click on it, and look into your role further. soccialy is here to guide you through your support role troubles.
