Recruiting Challenges for Rural School Boards and Districts: Tech Solutions That Work

While the teacher shortage affects districts in many geographic locations, rural schools face a particular challenge in finding, hiring, and retaining top educators. Why?

The reasons are many, but administrators most frequently report difficulties related to smaller talent pools in less-populated areas; academic and economic equity gaps, especially compared to suburban communities; and retention considerations like administrative and mental health support resources for students as well as teachers.

While supportive public policy is essential to tackling many of these issues, using the right technology—particularly teacher hiring solutions like video interviewing software and automated scheduling—can give a district an essential foot in the door toward attracting and keeping top teaching talent.

Key Recruiting Challenges for Rural School Boards and Districts

Digging deeper into the reasons behind your recruiting challenges can help you hone in on the best technology to help you streamline teacher hiring for your district. Let’s take a look at some of the most common challenges rural K-12 administrators face when it comes to filling teacher and staff vacancies.

#1: Limited Talent Pool

The first issue that comes to mind is simply a matter of math: smaller communities have smaller talent pools. Posting job openings in rural areas tends to draw fewer eyes, both because the local candidates are few and because farther-flung candidates may not know how to find your district’s job postings in the first place.

#2: Geographic Barriers

Another geographic hurdle is rooted in logistics. During the recruiting phase, it can be difficult to find candidates who are willing and able to travel long distances for interviews (and it can be expensive to facilitate those meetings when they are willing). Additionally, the issue of relocation can’t be overlooked: not all teachers want to move to a new area or to live in small towns, and sometimes limitations with housing available in these areas is a real barrier to even filling your open roles.

#3: Competition with Urban & Suburban Schools

Rural boards and districts also face the perception that they have fewer resources or less optimal facilities compared to schools in more densely populated areas. These administrators also often hear from prospective talent who perceive a lack of career growth opportunities or funding for professional development.

#4: Slow Hiring Process

On the recruiting operations side of things, more rural school boards and districts may face limited staffing or other challenges that can lead to administrative delays or a slow hiring process. Candidates who are anxious to find new roles in the appropriate timing between school year contracts may receive offers from other districts before rural administrators have a chance to connect more intentionally, which can be frustrating for everyone involved.

#5: Retention Challenges

Finally, retention challenges are a stressor for school districts of many sizes—but in rural areas, they can feel particularly intense. Teachers and staff may opt to leave for better-paying schools in urban or suburban areas, and administrators often have a particularly difficult time filling mid-year vacancies, finding reliable substitute teachers, and encouraging innovation within their teams.

How Tech Solutions Can Help

School administrators in rural communities are often called upon to explain these challenges to their neighbors, including taxpayers and school boards. Participating in this community engagement with an open mind and collaborative spirit can help build supportive public policies for their districts.

However, for many of these common challenges in rural K-12 hiring, simply onboarding the right teacher hiring solutions can make a huge difference.

#1: Video Interviewing

Connecting with candidates is easier than ever. Rural school board and district administrators need not miss out on interviewing and getting to know top candidates simply because they live far away. And you don’t need to spend limited funds bringing those candidates to you, either.

Put simply, video interviews for teacher recruitment enable boards and districts to connect with candidates without travel-related barriers.

Leveraging video interviews can speed up the initial screening process, particularly if you employ one-way interviews (also known as on demand interviews) as an alternative to traditional screening calls with a recruiter.

Whether candidate-led or for live conversations, interviews conducted via video can be an excellent way to expand your reach beyond your immediate area to attract out-of-state talent and engage them in a faster, more pleasant recruiting experience.

All of these benefits can lead to a higher likelihood of accepted offers and faster time-to-hire for your boards’ or districts’ staff vacancies.

#2: Automated Interview Scheduling

One of the most irritating thorns in the side of recruiters of all backgrounds is scheduling.

For hiring teams in large districts, a flood of applicants and vacancies can mean a great many back-and-forth email exchanges about scheduling the next round of interviews. Meanwhile, in rural communities, HR teams are often smaller and tasked with more responsibilities; as a result, having to balance the babysitting of schedules with more urgent tasks may make for slower response times and long delays between recruiting steps.

All of this leads to a poor hiring experience for everyone involved, and when top teaching talent is in high demand and short supply, districts simply can’t afford to lose applicants to a slow recruiting process.

Automated interview scheduling is a simple but game-changing solution to this persistent problem. By enabling candidates to select the interview times that work best for them from real-time windows of availability for interviewers, you can significantly reduce the back-and-forth communications and delays that are so typical of this step in the hiring process.

The result? A streamlined, self-service experience that makes both candidates and hiring teams feel respected and empowered to move at their desired pace.

#3: AI-Powered Interview Summaries

Another tool that can make a significant difference for over-burdened HR teams and recruiters in rural school boards and districts? Artificial intelligence.

AI is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for recruiters all over the map. Despite common fears on the subject, it’s very possible to employ AI in the recruitment process responsibly while facilitating huge efficiency gains.

AI for recruiters isn’t about judging candidates in lieu of human decision-making; it’s about freeing up time for the humans to make more insightful, more impactful decisions faster.

In particular, AI-generated interview summaries can help accelerate the hiring process by delivering immediately readable and actionable content for recruiters to review and share after chatting with a candidate. By leaving behind the distraction of manual note-taking and the need to summarize takeaways for hiring managers after a screening interview, rural K-12 recruiters can use AI to pay closer attention to their conversations with candidates, quickly collaborate with the rest of the hiring team, and provide reliable documentation of interviews.

In short, AI is here to help you spend more time on the conversations that matter and less time on the administrative tasks that distract you from them.

Bonus Tip: Prioritize ATS Integration

As you’re searching for the right hiring tech to meet these needs, you should remember one thing: when it comes to building an HR tech stack, less bouncing between platforms is more. You can optimize your software investments, keep your hiring process organized and efficient, and allow more seamless communication between all the members of your hiring team by choosing platforms that integrate smoothly.

For example, integrating interviewing software with your applicant tracking system can ensure a simple workflow when you need to check the real-time status of an applicant or job posting, centralized reporting so you can improve your hiring process where necessary, and keep sensitive candidate and interview information centralized in a single, secure place.

Take Control of Your Hiring Strategy

When you work in a rural school district, it can be frustrating to push back against these kinds of challenges in your pursuit of excellent educators and staff for your students. Policy conversations are complicated, funding is limited, and your population may be small.

Despite that pressure to compete with more densely populated or highly resourced areas, you should rest a little easier knowing your community is something special and has a lot of wonderful benefits to offer top talent.

You can take back your ability to tell that story by leveraging the right hiring software, particularly through innovations like video interviewing, automated scheduling, and AI. To get started, please drop us a line at interviewstream. We’d be happy to help evaluate your current approach to hiring and share some tips on how the right recruiting software can help you reach the next level.

About The Author

Monique Mahler is the CEO of interviewstream. She is an avid researcher of facts, a self proclaimed marketing geek, and an equestrian in her spare time.