Is there an immediate solution to the staffing crisis in British education? According to the House of Commons, the student-to-teacher ratio has increased from 17.1 to 18.0 over the past 10 years. Currently, the plan to recruit teachers is underperforming by 38%, leaving gaps in the personnel roster and putting the quality of education at risk of a significant decline.
A long-term solution would be systemic reforms in education, but the effects of these would not be fully realised for several years, or even decades. Meanwhile, schools face immediate challenges that require faster solutions. One such solution is AI-powered candidate engagement. Let’s explore how artificial intelligence can help your educational institution hire the best talent more quickly and cost-effectively.
A common recruitment method used by British schools is contextual advertising. However, targeting the right audience can be challenging. These events often generate many views from uninterested users, leading to additional costs, especially with already limited budgets.
But what if you could show ads to only a few dozen highly relevant people, resulting in a better return on your investment? This is not science fiction—such campaigns are becoming a reality thanks to data-driven candidate matching.
Artificial intelligence fine-tunes targeting by considering factors like a teacher’s specialisation, location, age, interests, and even behavioural traits. It’s impressively efficient—you can find the ideal candidate with just a request, bypassing the lengthy and costly traditional search process.
Soccialy (now branded as Gaia) offers expert AI-driven recruitment solutions tailored for schools. Collaborating with over 2,000 educational institutions across the UK, it streamlines their hiring, saving time and money. This acceleration in the recruitment process fills positions faster and elevates the standard of education nationwide.
In the education sector, crafting adverts that truly engage the intended audience is a key challenge. Traditional methods often result in ads that are too generic, failing to spark interest among teaching candidates and potential students, which leads to underwhelming results and wasted resources.
But what if adverts could grab attention and resonate specifically with a targeted group, dramatically boosting engagement and responses? This is a practical outcome for transforming school hiring with AI.
Artificial intelligence now skilfully tailors advertising content, aligning it with potential candidates' interests, preferences, and online behaviours. This approach results in highly relevant adverts that directly address the unique needs and aspirations of individuals. Such precision isn’t just efficient—it revolutionises a standard advert into a compelling, bespoke communication, greatly enhancing the effectiveness of the recruitment process in schools.
According to Forbes, most recruiters spend an average of six to nine seconds reviewing job applications and thousands of CVs. Only candidates for significant and responsible positions receive up to 60 seconds of attention—typically top managers, surgeons, aerospace engineers, and highly specialised programmers. The problem with this approach is that recruitment teams simply don’t have time to fully assess each candidate. They usually rely on key points, such as total experience, previous positions, or education.
If a recruiter is unable to pay enough attention to all the qualities of a candidate, AI-powered technology can step in. An automated teacher screening process provides a comprehensive assessment that considers dozens of factors, from quantitative characteristics like job change frequency to spelling mistakes and contradictions in the text. This helps avoid superficial judgements, reduces response time, and ensures that the best-fit candidates are identified—rather than those who simply know how to tailor their CVs to appeal to recruiters.
Despite globalisation and multiculturalism, discrimination remains a major problem, including in education. At the same time, traditional rules for unconscious bias mitigation in school hiring are not always effective. This prevents building a healthy, inclusive environment that could be a positive example for students. Improving teacher diversity with AI is the most effective approach to solving this problem.
A programme that uses a blind selection algorithm is free from bias. It ignores factors such as gender, race, and appearance, focusing entirely on the professional characteristics of candidates.
According to LeadFuze, the average recruiter receives up to 80 phone calls a day, spending up to three to five hours of work time. Of course, most of them are unproductive, which negatively affects all interested parties. Schools are forced to wait a long time to fill job postings, recruiters get tired quickly doing tedious tasks and cannot work effectively, and candidates complain about the lack of attention to their logical and reasonable requests.
That's why AI-powered chatbots can facilitate how AI can help schools find the best teachers. These simple yet powerful applications can:
A chatbot can increase the efficiency of the entire hiring process, provide a positive candidate experience, and personalise the teacher's experience. Simulating live communication with candidates is much better than sending a cold, formulaic response. This simple solution can significantly increase the retention rate of qualified candidates and improve recruitment efficiency.
Surveys show that 82% of employers prefer remote interviews via video calls, and this figure may soon rise to 86-93%. Some professionals complain that this method of communication limits their ability to assess the emotions and non-verbal cues of potential candidates. However, it also streamlines the interview process and provides access to fundamentally new tools.
AI-powered tools can conduct an in-depth video conference analysis and provide real-time information. They study facial expressions, tone of voice, gaze direction, body language, and other factors. This helps to determine when a candidate is nervous, speaks confidently, is in doubt, or doesn't like the conditions offered. Moreover, it positively affects the retention rate and productivity of human recruiters.
According to Jobvite statistics, approximately 30% of new employees in the US leave their positions within 90 days. Similar trends are observed in the UK. Unfortunately, many educators decide to change their careers due to difficulties faced in the first few months.
One way to solve this problem is AI-powered candidate engagement, which works effectively even at the later stages of the process—after a particular CV has been selected and approved. Predictive AI will become the best advisor to the HR director and hiring manager. It can suggest exactly what a new employee might expect—whether a moderate workload or a higher income, a creative approach, or quick integration into the daily routine. By reducing staff turnover, AI helps with cost savings in school recruitment.
The scenarios described above illustrate a reactive approach to the recruiting process—where AI helps recruit suitable candidates as quickly as possible. However, you can be proactive by using predictive analytics for teacher quality assessment, which can be based on specialisation, location, experience, or other characteristics. This approach is considered the future of school recruitment—it allows you to have relevant candidates ready for most positions.
An intelligent system of talent acquisition in education looks like this:
An AI-powered school recruitment system can improve the educational system during an acute staffing crisis. It delivers positive results now, without the long wait for systemic reforms to take effect. Implementing AI reduces the time required to fill job openings, eases the burden on school administration, and optimises budgets. This last point is crucial, as a positive return on investment (ROI) from AI in education recruiting can free up additional funds for raising salaries and improving the educational process.
It may sound unusual, but AI-powered candidate engagement can make the recruitment process more humane and comfortable. Automated CV sorting relieves specialists of their workload, giving them enough valuable time to communicate with candidates and launch creative advertising campaigns. And chatbot communication is more engaging and informative than cold, formulaic emails. Therefore, using AI in education recruitment is a positive trend that benefits all participants.