the educator mag Jan 26 - Flipbook - Page 66
How Shaw Education Trust
cut time-to-hire by 65%
Transforming recruitment outcomes
with a candidate-first strategy.
In today’s education landscape, with high-quality educators in
demand and increasingly selective about where they apply,
Shaw Education Trust was facing a familiar challenge: a
recruitment process that couldn't keep pace with modern
hiring expectations.
With their time-to-fill averaging at nine weeks, the multiacademy trust was risking losing top education talent to
competitors who could move faster. It's a pressure point felt
across education recruitment, and Shaw Education Trust
decided to make a decisive change to address it.
The challenge: speeding up recruitment,
without sacrificing quality
For Shaw Education Trust, the problem was unnecessary
friction built into their recruitment journey. Applications were
lengthy for candidates and took too long to process,
communication with candidates felt disjointed, and hiring
managers lacked real-time visibility into their overall hiring
data. Chief People Officer Steven Watson knew that in a
candidate-driven market, a clunky application experience
doesn't just slow things down but actively drives quality
applicants away.
“Some of the real challenges were, how can we stand out and
move from quite archaic practices which didn't do quite the
right job? We were making candidates work really hard to apply,
with downloadable printed forms which for me wasn't the right
thing to do.
One of the key things for us was finding a partner that matched
our values but also got the situation that we were in.”
The trust needed a bespoke hiring tool that could deliver speed,
insights, and compliance - specifically for the needs of
education recruitment – whilst delivering a high-quality,
engaging candidate experience.
From nine weeks to three: reducing time-to-hire
The shift to SchoolRecruiter's Applicant Tracking System
fundamentally changed how Shaw Education Trust
approached their hiring. By centralising applications,
automating administrative tasks, and creating a smoother
mobile-first application journey for candidates, the trust
slashed time-to-hire from nine weeks to just 22 days.
But speed was only part of the successes. SchoolRecruiter ATS
gave hiring teams equally valuable visibility into their key hiring
metrics. With full candidate source-tracking and centralised
Enhanced Reporting dashboards, the team could finally see
which channels were delivering the best candidates, where
bottlenecks were, and how to put recruitment resources back
into their best-performing channels.
Real results, connected processes
The impact extended beyond just numbers on a dashboard.
For candidates, the mobile-first application method with Fast
Apply meant fewer abandoned applications and faster
feedback, crucial factors when competing in a candidate-led
market. For Shaw Education Trust's hiring teams, it meant less
time chasing paperwork and more time on engaging with
candidates and making informed hiring decisions.
Steven said, "It's really improved our time-to-fill, which is great,
but also from a candidate point of view we're able to act really
quickly when we see candidates that we know would be great
working with us.”
The trust attracted a higher calibre of candidate, proving that
efficiency and quality in hiring aren't mutually exclusive.
Optimising the recruitment process also gave the team
breathing room to think ahead to their next hiring cycle, with
the tools and confidence to approach it proactively, rather than
a reactive hiring mindset.
Systems that scale with hiring needs
What Shaw Education Trust discovered is that the right
recruitment technology such as SchoolRecruiter ATS doesn't
only solve immediate problems, it creates strategic room for
the next recruitment cycle and beyond. By removing manual
work and building data-driven insights into their hiring process,
Shaw Education Trust has positioned itself to scale recruitment
without proportionally scaling the admin burden. In education,
where budgets are tight and great educators are everything,
fundamentally rethinking what modern recruitment looks like
has given them a deeper understanding of how today’s
educators engage with the school hiring process.
What your school could learn
By moving from fragmented, manual recruitment processes to
a centralised, education-focused ATS, schools and trusts can
shorten their time-to-hire drastically, improve applicant
quality, and free up senior leaders to focus on wider strategy.
Shaw Education Trust's 65% reduction in time-to-hire is a
proven competitive advantage in a candidate-led market.
"If you're looking to streamline all of your recruitment processes,
particularly in education, you're going to have access to
incredible reporting and deliver accountability at Trust level.
SchoolRecruiter is absolutely the software that people should be
investing in.
It's been a real game-changer in terms of what it's done for the
workflow, time-to-hire, from advert through to onboarding. The
recruitment team love the system and what it does."
The question for other schools or trusts in a similar position is
whether they can afford to wait while competitors like Shaw
Education Trust are thinking ahead.
Want to see how your MAT or school could see the same results?
Get in touch with us to explore transformational recruitment today.
www.eteach.com/employers | T: 0845 226 1906
