Educators in schools, colleges, universities, education dept., and private and public entities play a significant and multi-faceted role that involves teaching, problem-solving, mentoring, and much more. The efficacy with which they perform their role is directly synonymous with how well skilled and trained they are. Undoubtedly, if they are motivated, contended, and engaged, the positive learning environment created speaks for the institute's reputation. HRs here have an imperative role in sorting and selecting employees who would work to create a learning environment.

Bringing productive and engaged employees on board who strive to provide outstanding results for the students isn’t as easy as it may seem. There are numerous challenges that they face when it comes to recruitment for the education industry. Here are a few primary challenges we’ve picked that make the job difficult for even some of the most experienced recruiters.   

Challenges the Education Industry HRs Face

• Retention of the Employees:  As with other sectors, hiring and sustaining qualified professionals is the primary concern of the recruiters for the education industry. The root cause can be pointed to: 

  1. Difficulty the institutes face to balance the employees pay structure

  2. Quality education they expect from the underpaid or available resources.

Teachers worldwide are inclined towards their subject instead of the institute they are working at. This results in them hopping from one institute to another, whichever pays them a better salary, has a better brand value and gets better funding.  

• Less Number of Qualified Professionals Entering the Industry: If we speak about the recruitment setting in the US, two daunting scenarios are affecting the education sector- recruitment of the qualified followed by their retention. According to the study by edsurge.com, the number of educators entering the profession is far less than those leaving. Low wages, minimal support, and burnout are the primary reasons contributing to the sad state of affairs.  

The shortage in the education sector is real and ever-growing. This is because of the drop in the number of people graduating from the programs compared to those enrolling in the new sessions.

• Biased Recruitment: Another primary concern that has marred the recruitment process in the education sector is biased recruiting. Be it the age, gender, or most regretting, the color, there’s a considerable bias in the mindset of recruiters that often makes the institutes lose out on the deserving candidates.

• Shortage of Qualified Substitutes: There’s a shortage of substitute teachers not just across the US but all around the world. Finding them is a challenge that the HRs have faced for quite some time, particularly after the pandemic. If they are lucky enough to find some, the qualification and skills are not at par with what the education system requires. Having data of the right people is what the HRs need and lack.

How COVID Affected the Employment Prospects in the Education Industry?

The offset of COVID-19 jeopardized the learning modules of the students all around the world, but the worst affected were the teachers. Slithering its way into the otherwise smooth education and respective employment system, it posed a challenge for the schools to reopen the schools and universities.

Early retirements, resignations, and the impending job postings for the new joinees have resulted in acute shortages in the education industry, which is becoming severe with pandemic-related complications. Take California, for instance; numerous districts are either struggling to hire teachers who have very substandard qualifications or have to hire substitute teachers who are already very few in numbers.

Businesses for colleges and universities toppled during the pandemic. The campuses moving to remote and online mode have made the institutes grapple with financial aids. This compounded the cash flow uncertainty because the students either failed to pay the fee because of the economic crunch or didn’t continue with the distance learning program. In events like these, it’s the teachers who fall prey to the unforeseen scenarios and are ultimately laid-off.  

The RAND American Teacher Panel further confirms the uncertainty teachers feel regarding their profession in its survey comparing the mindset of teachers from March 2020 to March 2021.

The Future of Recruitment in the Education Sector

The Statista Research Department published data that showcased the projected number of employees in the US education sector from 2019-2026. Going by the data, 2026 will have around 14.47 million employees compared to the more significant number of 14.52 million in 2022.

Of course, HR professionals can’t fix the crumbling state of affairs. Still, they play a significant role in enhancing the teacher’s recruitment experience, especially when it comes to the first two or three primary funnels of the hiring process.

Education Industry Key Players & Their Recruitment Problems

While studying the significant pain areas of the education industry, we came across the names of many key players:

• Peoplework

• Recooty

• Higheredjobs

• Lumaway

• Snapwiz

• HirePro

• HireXpert

• Microtrain Technologies

• Greenhouse Software 

• Oracle

• Peoplesoft 

• Edjoin.org

• SAP

• Blackboard

• BlackBaud

• Workday

• The School District Of Palm Beach County

Whilst researching, we realized that the constant change in the education landscape has indeed added to the HR teams` pressures. Courtesy of this, the accuracy in the job descriptions has dropped to a significant low. This subsequently affects the compliance requirements depending on different positions.

Topping it is the struggle to attract the attention of candidates who at least visit the website and apply on the career page. Add to this is the sorting and sifting of resumes to find that perfect match and fill in the positions.   

RChilli resume parser, realizing the pain areas of the HRs in the education industry allowed them to select the preferred skills set and mine valuable and relevant information. This eligibility checklist helped them compare the qualifications, skills set, experience, accolades, if any, and much more to make an informed yet quick decision.   

The employment metrics or the skills set that the HRs set to evaluate the desired set of candidates further helped them automate the candidate data structuring.  

Considering the problems faced by the recruiters, RChilli resume parser backed up with a deep learning/AI network further simplified the hiring and recruitment process to save both time and money of the education institutes. Few prominent names among the many that use RChilli’s resume parser in their system include:

• The University of Memphis

• Eastern Wyoming College

• Reading Area Community College

• University of Technology Sydney

• Chagrin Falls Exempted Village Schools

• Council Bluffs Community School District

• Washington Network Group

• Derech HaTorah

• Maayan Torah Day School

• Suny Canton

• Mesivta Netzach HaTorah

• Emory University

• Tufts University

• University of California

• William Penn University

• Rivier University

• The College of New Rochelle

• Davis & Elkins College

• University of Colorado

• Harvard University

• Frederick Community College

• NorthEastern Illinois University

What Other Ways Does RChilli Resume Parser Help in Education Industry Recruitment?

• Breaking the Recruitment Silos

The conventional recruiting model that usually most of the companies follow was designed with silos as a point solution. This procedure kept just the fundamental requirements of the recruiters in mind. It meant restricting them from being tech-savvy. RChilli resume parser empowered the recruiters and hiring managers by helping them get access to structured data of the candidates that match the requirements set by different departments.  

• Redact Resumes (Promoting Blind Hiring)

As discussed above, one of the prime aspects that hinder effective recruitment is intentional or unintentional bias. In the USA for instance, most of the teachers are white despite the ones from a different race or color being much better educationists. Other than this, the personal preferences including gender, experience, age, religion, and more pave the way for unconscious bias. RChilli resume parser helped the recruiters stay clever of the inclinations that could affect skilled candidate hiring. Select a few preferred fields and the parser offers a database of candidate resumes that matches the requirements to the best. 

• Hiring & Sustaining Multiple Cohorts

An institution’s workforce includes multiple cohorts that range from full-time academic staff to ad-hoc based team members. Each one has its specific candidate requirement, which can be pretty challenging to support if the process is done manually. The resume parser easily integrates with the native server, streamlines the recruitment process, fetches the required data, and matches quickly and easily.

• Extracting Resume Information in the Data Fields

While managing the nitty gritties, it’s not feasible for the recruiters to scan through each resume and then keep aside the ones with preferred skills. RChilli resume parser, understanding this dilemma, converts the unstructured data in nearly 140+ fields in real-time, including age, education, gender, skills, qualification, and more.

• No More Paper-Based or Manual Data Entry

What’s strange is that despite the evolving industry landscape and the need to enhance the employer-candidate experience, many universities haven’t made the shift from the paper-bound recruitment process. Filling in the data manually from each resume to the excel sheet naturally encourages the recruiters to evade the procedure and select candidates randomly. Working in tandem with the education HR professionals for years has proved that swapping the paper-based processes with streamlined automation (RChilli resume parser in this case) reduces the risk of human errors and enhances accuracy. The resume parser makes this tedious job simple by automatically fetching the data from the CVs and filling those in the ATS.

• Giving You An Extra Edge Over Your Competitor with Positive Candidate Experience

One of the major challenges that the universities or schools face is finding and hiring knowledgeable educators before the competitor. More than the salary, the employer’s brand is a compelling aspect for the candidates these days. Building a brand value hence is very important in the current scenario. Improving the candidate experience is one way of doing so. With RChilli’s resume parser, candidates needn’t worry about repeatedly filling the information mentioned in their resumes. Just one click and the parser populates the information of skills automatically.

• Ingenious Solutions to Enhance Candidate Recruitment

Hiring candidates, especially when they have to be educators, is no cakewalk. Parsing is just one facet of the solutions that we offer. To make recruitment more seamless and resourceful, there’s a list of AI solutions including:

Search & Match: Search and match candidates and jobs with great relevancy by filtering resume data according to similar search keywords. Get the perfect candidate through normalized and enriched data e.g., skills/ competency, domain, location, education, city, company, and job title.

Data Enrichment: Unified Platform empowering global CRM/ATS/Enterprises to easily launch their own marketplace.

Taxonomy: Enhance your resume/job searching capability and build better search engines. RChilli Taxonomy 3.0 offers a comprehensive collection of skills and job profiles, along with their related information. At present, it offers 9,00,000+ Skills and 5,50,000+ Job Profiles in multiple languages.

Data Migration: Seamlessly migrate data structures to your ATS. RChilli Data Migration Service streamlines the process of onboarding new clients into an ATS by migrating their data from the old ATS/CRM to the new ATS.

To sum it up, here’s how RChilli helps the education industry recruiters:

• Simplify the hiring process.

• Saves both time & money

• Seamlessly integrates with any platform

• An improved candidate experience with one-click apply.

• Reduces the hiring cost with multiple and flexible API plans.

• Enhance the ability to find the matches quickly and easily.

Concluding

Despite the education system facing constant challenges or changes, the recruitment industry needn’t face the wrath. Leveraging technology and optimizing the recruitment process with RChilli can improve employee hiring and retention.

If you further want to know how we helped the HRs from the education industry keep up with the recruitment struggles during and post-pandemic, give us a shout.