Firstly, Happy New Year to you all! Whether you have a general interest in Leigh Academies Trust, or you work in the recruitment sector like myself, I’d like to welcome you to read my first blog post!
To give some context, I am a Recruitment Administrator for Leigh Academies Trust and I help to recruit all staff across our 31 academies. As you can imagine, a huge part of this role is to post job vacancies across a multitude of online platforms in order to generate interest in these opportunities, and ultimately help our academies appoint the best possible candidate for the job.
It has recently come to our attention that the DfE’s official Teaching Vacancies Service now allows us to post all types of vacancies on their website, this ranges from support roles, such as a member of the site team, all the way through to trust-level roles. It is probably best to also mention at this point that these job adverts are completely *FREE* to post on TVS!
I would like to thank Thomas Martell for reaching out and presenting us with the facts and figures on why multi-academy trusts, like ourselves, should use this service to its full potential. You can read more about this in his recent blog post.
When we first started using TVS to post our vacancies, we were only able to do so for teaching staff, so our other support vacancies weren’t getting the same exposure. After receiving knowledge that this is no longer the case we are excited to begin utilising the DfE’s official job posting service and hopefully start to reap the benefits of attracting a larger audience.
Thomas touched on some very interesting points around the yearly cost that goes into advertising and it was very eye-opening to read that the DfE estimates a £75 million spend each year in the education setting alone. Now I am sure my fellow recruiters can appreciate that the past year has been one of the toughest so far for generating a talent pool of candidates, however the money spent on other platforms such as Tes, provides us with exceptional and personalised services such as SmartMatch which allows us to recruit the best possible fit for our academies. So we understand that with a great service comes a substantial cost and I don’t think we would have made it through the year without resources such as Tes.
With this being said, it is in the best interest of all businesses, whether they be in the public sector or otherwise, to save money on the cost of advertising. Which is why I encourage any other recruiters in the education sector to begin using this service to post any and all of their job adverts. Hopefully, if further MATs start to follow in these footsteps, together we can give TVS the publicity it needs to help generate a larger pool of applicants for us to take advantage of.
Whilst we will still continue to use our well-known and effective paid-for services, I want to express the importance of using free platforms like TVS. I can fully understand and appreciate that a lot of recruiters will only post their vacancies on the most popular websites, but we have found that by using as many resources as possible we can attract a lot more attention! So for us, it’s a no brainer! Why would you not want to use a free service that has the potential to find the perfect candidates?
The recruitment environment is becoming more and more candidate-led so it will be interesting to track and review the data on which services are the ‘go to’ when searching for vacancies. I am hopeful that TVS will become more popular throughout the course of the year by generating further traffic to their website and making it a priority to post all of our adverts here.
Thanks again to Thomas Martell for giving me the inspiration for this post! I am eager to see how 2022 will pan out in the recruitment industry as opposed to last year.
