Prizmah and the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge partnered to convene a Jewish Day School Educator Pipeline Working Group in the past year to study the current landscape, explore new ideas and make recommendations to help address all facets of the Jewish educator pipeline challenge. and we came up with a “playbook” of initiatives that resulted from it.
A partnership in Boston between Prizmah, the local Federation Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Beker Foundation and other local funders launched in late 2022 positioned us well to experiment with ways to address this challenge. Project Stronger Together was created on the premise that collaboration among the 14 Boston-area Jewish day schools would strengthen the entire ecosystem. Since its launch, we have implemented more than a dozen initiatives, including job-alike groups, shared resources and professional development opportunities.
It soon became clear that, like the rest of the Jewish education and the broader education sector, our Boston-area Jewish day schools faced a talent challenge. Recruiting, retaining and supporting classroom teachers were a common issue. Focusing on the immediate need to hire more teachers for the coming year, we identified an education recruiter to help broaden our collective pool of applicants and expand our reach.
First, we needed to figure out how to address the culture of competition. Questions included: How would we design a reasonable scope of work for a short-term pilot? How many schools did we think would opt in? What if some schools required more time than others? Would we fully fund this or charge schools to participate? Would we cover the cost of posting positions or pass it along to the schools?
Before we could answer any of these questions, we needed to find a talented professional with recruitment experience who understood the way schools operate and ideally had some familiarity with Jewish education. After spending some time searching on LinkedIn and sending messages to people who looked like they might be able to help, we found someone who checked all the boxes. Leslie had worked in schools, had recruitment experience and was actively involved in the Jewish community. She was exactly what we needed.
Having found the right consultant, we began working together to design the project. Our first task was to get buy-in from school leaders. After sending a survey about their recruitment needs, we decided that Leslie would give an online presentation to interested heads of school to share her background and explain how we were thinking about the project, as well as what it would include. We incorporated the feedback from that session and refined our plan.
In order for this to work, we would need to provide real value to the schools. Of course, our first priority was to fill all the open positions with qualified candidates, but it was also important to take some of the most time-intensive elements of the recruitment and hiring process off the plates of very busy school leaders. Once it became clear that this would save them time (and likely money since we also decided to cover the cost of job postings), we had the buy-in we needed. Six schools opted in, including three community schools and three Orthodox schools.
Launching the initiative
We started by posting positions in places where public and independent school teachers typically search for jobs, as well as sites commonly used in the Jewish community. We later expanded to more global hiring sites that yielded more candidates, although not always the most qualified candidates. We refreshed job postings regularly, adjusting titles and tweaking job descriptions to get more views, clicks and applications, and tracked those metrics throughout the process.
We built relationships with university schools of education, starting conversations to create teacher pipelines, particularly with two schools in the area where students were most likely to be interested in teaching at a Jewish day school. We also posted positions on university job boards and reached out to public and independent schools in the area for possible job-sharing opportunities. Through these efforts, we increased visibility for our schools and laid the foundations for ongoing collaboration in the future.
We began the initiative with biweekly updates to all hiring managers, although it quickly became apparent that a more individualized approach to communication was needed. Leslie emailed, Zoomed and talked with hiring managers throughout the process to make sure all jobs were posted accurately, to get updates on interview processes and to help ensure that we were finding the most qualified candidates.
Finally, she did an initial vetting of candidates, adding notes about each one to a tracking spreadsheet with a tab for each school. This helped hiring managers focus their time on the most qualified candidates. She also would make the initial contact if a candidate’s application was unclear for some reason.
Was the project successful?
In the end, we filled more than 80% of the open positions we were asked to help fill. We had more than 150 qualified applicants, including retired public school teachers, recent school of education graduates and current educators, as well as some looking to make a career change. The feedback we received from school leaders was that they received more candidates, and most importantly, more qualified candidates, than in previous years.
Because we were recruiting for positions across multiple schools, we built a large pool of qualified candidates. As a result, as positions were filled, we were able to reach out to candidates who did not get the job they applied for and ask them if they were interested in positions at other schools. This led to larger interview pools at several schools, and ultimately, to several high-quality hires. When one school realized at the end of the year that they needed to hire a fourth-grade teacher, we were able to immediately send them several qualified candidates, one of whom was quickly hired. This would never have been possible without a shared recruiter who could see all the candidates and know about open positions across multiple schools.
What we learned:
- The time that was spent early in the process working with school leaders to help them craft better school descriptions enabled those schools to more clearly articulate who they are and be in a better position to attract candidates who are a better fit for their unique school cultures.
- Most applicants came by way of job posting sites that were not specifically Jewish, i.e. SchoolSpring and Indeed, as well as social-media posts LinkedIn and Facebook.
- We were a bit overly optimistic that this project would be completed by the end of June. We now understand that the work needs to continue into the summer as some schools will not have filled all their positions by the end of the school year. Next year, we anticipate that we will begin and end later, likely starting in March and going through July or August.
- While it didn’t make sense for this pilot, if we decide to continue this program long-term, it would be helpful to invest in an applicant tracking system, which would save a lot of time.
- We did not anticipate schools asking for our help late in the hiring season, but we had three schools that requested our assistance in June as we were preparing to wrap up the project. Because we had a pool of candidates, we were able to help them, even at that late date.
In the end, we believe this was the most impactful initiative that Stronger Together has implemented to date. It addressed a real challenge faced by most of our schools; it was something they could not have easily done on their own; it served schools of all sizes, including our smallest and largest schools; and included both Orthodox and community schools. For the coming year, we plan to make a few adjustments and look forward to helping hire even more teachers for our diverse group of Boston-area Jewish day schools.
