The government’s free teacher jobs board will be able to automatically copy job adverts from academy trusts’ websites under a new scheme piloted with England’s largest chain.
The Department for Education has revealed its teaching vacancies service has been trialling “ATS integration”, which pulls through vacancies automatically from a trust’s application tracking system (ATS) to the national website.
The scheme was piloted with United Learning after trusts asked if the DfE could make it “quicker to bulk upload vacancies”, according to a blog post from outreach and engagement manager Will Bourke.
He said the aim was “to reduce the time it takes for hiring staff to post vacancies, streamline recruitment, and do it with no cost to the trust – all helping put money back into the classroom”.
Trusts can choose to list vacancies automatically when listing them on their own websites, the DfE said. “Multiple trusts” are now taking part, according to the department, though it would not say exactly how many.
Pilot trust says scheme saved workload
Lisa Cole, the deputy director of HR, and Vicky Button, the HR services manager at United Learning, wrote that the recruitment process “can be quite clunky and involve a lot of different steps”.
“We were getting some negative feedback from our schools and HR teams about having to list roles on our own website, and then again on recruitment sites.
“We hoped we could work with teaching vacancies to streamline the process and integrate our application tracking systems.”
They said there were a “few minor technical issues, but the teaching vacancies team resolved them quickly”.
She would “definitely recommend” integration to other MATs, as it meant the recruitment team listed a vacancy just once. “We’ve given them one less thing to worry about.”
But the DfE told Schools Week it was “too early to say if this integration will work with every ATS”.
“This project is in its infancy and will continue to monitor its progress. Schools and trusts can pay for an ATS system as part of their recruitment strategy, but there are no additional costs to integrate with teaching vacancies as a free service for state-funded schools and trusts.
“This feature reduces the workload as this integration removes the need to relist vacancies on teaching vacancies, as this is done automatically through the ATS.”
It comes after Bourke revealed at the Schools and Academies Show last month that the teaching vacancies service was due to expand to allow more school roles to be advertised, such as business leaders and catering staff.
Government figures show that schools spend about £75 million on recruitment adverts.
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