Apptegy's VP of Marketing Tyler Vawser and Tyler ISD's Chief Communications Officer Jennifer Hines explore what districts miss in attracting talent as well as tips from the private sector on how to stand out.

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Transcript

Tyler Vawser: Thank you everybody for joining us. I know it's a Friday, the last day of January. Hopefully, you've stuck to your New Year's resolutions a couple weeks past the normal deadline of one fifteen. So today, we're gonna be talking about how do you recruit teachers.

We're gonna look at research, and we're also gonna look at one of the best career pages, in my opinion, in the country. So we've asked Jennifer Hines to talk about how Tyler ISD in Tyler, Texas, has built their career page the way they have, why they've done that, how it's worked for them. And so I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here, and we'll jump in, do a little bit of interest for each of us. And we are recording this, by the way, so if you have to leave halfway through, don't worry.

We're gonna email this out to everyone that registered.

Alright.

So I'm Tyler. If you've been on a webinar before, chances are you've met me. I've got four amazing kids. We're actually going to Disney in a couple of weeks, so this was their big Christmas present this year.

We've never been before. The youngest is four. The oldest is about to turn ten, So they're very excited. We've been talking about it a lot.

And so we've got like a countdown clock running at home, about eight days to go.

At Apptegy, I head up our marketing team. But before I did that, I led our onboarding and HR efforts. And so a lot of what we talk about today comes from both our research, but also my experience, and then, of course, Jennifer's experience, being in communications and helping their HR team recruit teachers. And originally from Colorado, lived in New York City for a long time, but I now live in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Apptegy is headquartered, as well as the SchoolCEO team.

Alright, Jennifer, I'll turn it over to you.

Jennifer Hines: Okay. Hi, everyone. I'm Jennifer Hines. I am the Chief Communications Officer here at Tyler ISD.

I've been in this role for about five years and this is my team that you can see on the screen. We've got a great team that we get to do a lot of fun communications, things with but also HR being one of those. I love to travel, so this is a picture of me and my family where we got to go to the Bahamas this past, summer. If we do big ten year old trips when our girls turn ten, they get a big trip, and so this was our youngest big trip.

And we got to swim with pigs and stingrays and turtles. Was very fun and very adventurous. And then I also love to travel. This is me with my best friend from college and we are in New York City.

We had to catch Harry Potter because I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I was in New York because I was receiving the top women in communications for twenty twenty four for Reagan Communications so that was really really neat. Like I said, I've been here five years now at Tyler ISD. Before that I spent about twenty years as a news reporter.

I call it my tour of Texas.

I started off in Abilene, worked in Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and then Tyler for about a decade before I came over to school PR. Tyler and I were talking a little bit about this before we got started today and yes my alarm did go off at three thirty in the morning for seven years and I even had a schedule once where I worked from four to eight am and two thirty to five thirty pm so I worked and slept in shifts and every day was like having two days.

So definitely a great work life balance being over here on this side in school PR.

Tyler Vawser: Very cool. Thank you, Jennifer. Well, Well, we're going to be talking about school CO's research and if you're not already on it, we have a newsletter from school CO that goes out every two weeks, and that's a good way to keep up to date on kind of seasonal moments, you know, thinking about recruiting in this season or thinking about enrollment coming up. And so if you aren't on newsletter, it's a great way to keep up with the updates and the issues in between our print issues that we put out every quarter. And you can also sign up for the print magazine on the website as well. So you can go to schoolco dot com or you can scan the QR code right there.

Today, we're going to be talking about this issue, what teachers want. This came out back in twenty twenty three, around this time, so February twenty twenty three, and this data is still pretty fresh, right? So less than two years old. And what we're going to talk about today is first, we're going to talk about kind of a data review and response.

And as part of that, we're going to look at Tyler ISD's career page and do a real deep dive on that careers page. So if you're joining from a comms team, you can think about what your role is on the website. If you're joining from an HR team or that side of it, think about how you can partner with the comms team to make the work that you do more visible to your community. So we're going go really deep into their careers page to talk about how to do that well.

And then later on, if there's time, we'll get into more recruitment and retention strategies, and how you can take some of the ideas beyond the career page into the practice of recruiting teachers and classified staff as well. Alright. Also, if you've joined our webinars in the past, this is the first time we're doing like a proper Zoom webinar. So instead of there being a chat, there's actually a Q and A button.

And so you can click on that and you can write in a question, and we're able to see that, and we're going to answer some of those as we go. Some of them we'll save for the end of a section. But if you have a question or a comment, feel free to leave that there. We won't be able to answer every single one, but we'll do our best to get through them.

Alright, so with that, let's go ahead and jump into the data and the research here. So when we start a research project like this, we obviously have key questions that we want to answer. And so these were some of them. These aren't all of them, but the big ones. So what do teachers of all ages look for in a job? How do they learn about open positions? And then third, what can leaders do to attract and retain the best teachers?

And this was in some ways a follow-up study way back in twenty nineteen, we did something very similar, but it focused only on millennial teachers. And so with this research, we wanted to expand it beyond just one demographic group, but think about all teachers, all generations, and that's really where we'll start. So when we look at the data here, what we find is that, by and large, it's mostly women teachers. Right?

This tracks with national data on who is in the teaching profession. You'll also see its majority of Gen X followed closely by millennials. Right? So if you're Gen X, you beat out the millennials and it study for once.

It feels like there's always studies about millennials, not always enough about Gen X. And then on the left side here, you actually see kind of how this breaks down as far as what type of district. Is it urban? Is it rural or suburban?

Really nice representation across this. And what we actually found is that, this tracks just generally with national data. And so it's representative, we had over a thousand responses, and those thousand responses came from over three hundred different districts.

And we just had a question about, will we have access to these slides? Yes. So we'll send a follow-up email later, and it will include the recording, the slides, as well as links to the research itself, and some of the other data and articles that came out of this issue.

So the first question we wanna look at is this idea of teacher satisfaction. So are you happy in your current position? So the majority, sixty four percent, agreed that they are happy in some way in their position. About fifteen percent said neutral, and about twenty percent disagreed.

Now, you can reverse, like kind of rewind back to twenty twenty three. We are coming mostly out of the pandemic, but the previous couple years had been very difficult, right? So in the future, we'd love to do something like this, and our hope is that we can, you know, do this every three to four years to see how the trends are changing. Just got a question about which states are represented. So I believe all fifty states were represented through those three hundred different districts. I'll double check on that, but it was the majority of states. It might have been forty nine instead of fifty, but I believe it was very close to fifty.

The other questions we asked were, have you browsed other job opportunities within the past year? Now, this one's really interesting because it's going to tie to the next slide that I show you. So the majority, sixty five percent, said that they had looked for other opportunities in the past year, right? This is pretty alarming because you're thinking like, wow, if teachers are generally happy, they're also looking, like what does that tell us? And what we actually found is that they're happy, they're looking, and this next slide, they're usually not taking action. So to put it simply, they're window shopping, right? They're kind of curious to see what else is out there, but nothing's really intriguing them enough to go take that next step of applying to a position.

And so they're kind of casually job hunting. And this is where career pages, as we'll see later, are so important, right? If we are literally window shopping, what you want to do is have something that's so enticing that someone has to open the door and come into your store and buy. The same idea is true of a careers page. How do we make it so attractive that they really want to learn more and take the next step to either apply or send in an inquiry or follow-up with a colleague that already works within your district.

All right, any questions on this?

Put it in the Q and A, and then we'll keep going here.

Alright, so this is a really important slide. So this question is, was your decision to work in your current district based primarily on salary and benefits? And what you see here is like a pretty even spread.

And a lot of times when it comes to discussions about recruitment or retention, it only is a discussion about pay and benefits. And that's not to minimize it, right? That's a very important part of how people make decisions, but it's not everything. And so while we want to, of course, pay teachers well to make sure they have the right benefits, we also have to think about what other motives, what other drivers are helping them decide where they want to teach or why they might want to leave where they're currently teaching. And so what we found is that actually the majority disagree, meaning that there's something other than salary and benefits that's driving their interest in where they currently work.

Alright. So if it's not salary and benefits as the main driver, what are the other factors from most important to least important?

And one thing that we always say when we show this slide is that it's not that mentorship programs and opportunities are unimportant, but given a choice on how to rank these eight factors, teachers ranked that the lowest. And what they ranked the highest was location, culture, leadership, and flexibility in curriculum and teaching.

Now location's a tricky one, right, because you can't pick up your district and move, right? Jennifer can't take Tyler ISD and move to the beach as much as she might want to. And so you can't change that, but what we found when we dug into the data further is that location matters because people generally don't want to move. Teachers don't want to move across the country for a position that's by and large the same.

And so what we found is that location matters to them because they want to stay close to where they have roots, where they have family, where they grew up. And so location is important because you're not going to necessarily attract everyone to your district, but you want the people that already live within a certain radius of your district to know that you have opportunities and that you're the best district to work for if they're in the teaching profession. So the way that that broke out was about sixty percent said that geographical location was important to them because they do not want to move from where they are.

And then about thirty percent plus said that that was a factor, and that trended towards the younger demographics, right? So thinking about Gen Z or those younger millennials, they don't have as many roots put down, and so they're more open to thinking about a different location.

But numbers two, three, and four, you could argue are actually all about culture. Right? Who what is the culture? What's the environment?

Who leads it? How much do they trust me? Right? When we think about flexibility and curriculum and teaching, what we're really saying is I want someone that trusts me, and I can do things my way.

Like, I'm a teacher for a reason. I love to experiment, try new ideas. I want to be able to adapt and adjust to the kids in my classroom versus following something so rigidly and strict that I don't feel like I have that flexibility.

These other five, six, seven, and eight, right, these are things that generally that you don't control if you're in communications or HR, right? These are a bit outside of your realm of influence. And so what we want to do is think about how do we make all of these factors more visible, but in particular, make the location, the culture, and the leadership more visible so that someone knows what they're getting into before it's too late. Right?

Usually, by the time you find out a job culture is not a good fit, you're two weeks or three months into the job, and it's not you can't just reverse that and go back to where you were. So we wanna make it really easy for people to remove the doubt about is this the right choice for me or not? Is it worth the time to apply? Is it worth the time to take the interviews?

And then ultimately, is it worth making a decision to leave my current job to work at a different district that has the things that I'm looking for, the culture and the leadership?

Alright, career pages. So this is so important. So everything we're talking about today isn't very helpful if you don't put it into actions. And so what we're going to look at here is how career pages are really the main way to take this research and have it work for you and for your school districts.

So on the left is my example of what a career page is not. So if you're thinking, we already have a careers page because we have a lot of open jobs, If it looks something like what you see on the left, I would tell you that is not a careers page. That's just a list of like a you know, it's like the classifieds. There's no selling happening there.

It's just a list. People have to click in, and it's not particularly exciting. On the right, Tyler ISD's career page. Right?

This is talking about those factors we just looked at, the location, the leadership, the culture, who else works there. Can I trust that my colleagues are going to be delightful and enjoyable, that I'm going to enjoy working with them? Okay? So left is not a careers page.

On the right, when we say careers page, this is what we mean, and this is what we're going to do a deep dive on with Jennifer.

The other factor here is you want your career page to be mobile friendly. Like most people today, when they go to look for a new job, they're not gonna sit down on their desktop with a spreadsheet and start ranking jobs. Right? Instead, they're kind of casually watching Netflix while they're on their phone. And in the case of teachers, they're probably doing some lesson planning as well. And all this is happening at nine pm at night. So we want our primary careers page on the web to look great, but we also want it to look really good on a phone when someone's just kind of casually looking so that they can take the next step and follow-up later to go deeper on the main web page.

All right.

Before we do the deep dive, a couple other stats to look at here. So before applying to the district you currently work in, did you look at the school or district websites? So this is a huge stat, right? Seventy one percent said yes.

This is massive. So when it comes to a teacher making a decision about where they're going to work, the website is a really important factor here. Now, part of this is because the application's on the website. But the other part of this is that people really want to know what they're going to do before they make these big decisions about what their career is going to be and where they're going to go next.

This relates to what a careers page is and is not. When we looked at this data, this is from another study that looked at school district websites, seventy six percent of school districts list open positions, which is good, but only twenty percent of those talk about incentives, so salary and benefits information. And so right away, what you can do is make those salary and the benefits, even though those aren't the primary drivers for the majority of teachers, they're still important, make those incentives more visible before they have to apply and before they have to go through the interview process.

Right? I think Indeed's even running ads right now about how it can be you know, is it very competitive? Oh, it's very competitive. Right?

And this idea that sometimes you don't really know what you're getting until you get to the last stage of a job interview, and we wanna make that part easier and make that clear up front.

Out of all the districts that we looked at, only eight percent had true career pages like what Tyler ISD has today.

All right.

Couple more stats here. So how did you find out about your first job in your current district?

Starting on the left school or district website followed by word-of-mouth, right? So we're going to talk a lot about websites and career pages today. But that word-of-mouth part, that career, sorry, the culture of the district really matters. How teachers talk about their experience with other teachers is one of the biggest drivers about how people find out about open positions within your district. What you might find interesting here too is that recruitment agencies and social media are such a small part of this.

So social media is important, but it's generally not the way that people first find out for the simple reason that by the time you're following a district's page on social media, chances are you've been to the website first or you've had a conversation with somebody and that's the reason you want to follow them on social media. So this is thinking about what's that first step? How do they first get introduced to your school district? The website, the word-of-mouth are the main drivers.

And here's the real problem, and then I'm going to turn it over to Jennifer. So the real problem is that teachers are looking at your district website, but when they get there, they're generally being repelled. Right? This is that window shopping problem.

They're interested. They're casually looking, but they don't really love what they see. Now, could be that your district's actually amazing, but when they look at the careers page, it's just a list of open jobs, and you're actually missing this opportunity to tell them what it's really like to work at your district. So that's what we want to solve for, is how do we have a really exceptional careers page that helps people understand what's already true and helps them understand, exactly, you know, who you are as a district.

Alright. Let me share this, switch over here. And I'm going turn it over to Jennifer. And what we're going to do here, I think this is going to be helpful.

If you've seen some of this data before, we're going to really make this practical, and we're going to walk with Jennifer through their page on the what and the why of each one of these sections throughout. And what you'll find is they've done a great job and it's actually quite long. And it's because it's making the case for why Tyler ISD is the best place to work locally.

All right, Jennifer, I'll turn it over to you.

Jennifer Hines: So what I love about this page is thinking about where we started, and that is that human resources had their own separate Wix website page.

They did not want to have a page on the district's website. They wanted to do their own thing. It took us two years to convince them that we actually in communications could help them sell themselves better. So once we were able to get that green light, and we did, we had to lay out all the reasons to convince them we were able to create this page.

So starting off, people want to know who they're going to work with, right? They want to see people that they can connect with. That's what we did here right off the bat. We're showing you people that work for our district.

We're showing you not just teachers, but we're showing you bus drivers. There's a principal on there. There's somebody from our police force that we have.

We've got auxiliary, we've got career tech on there, we just show a variety of the teachers and the positions that we offer in our district. We do start at the very top with our hometown school district or your hometown school district. That's our current slogan, so I want that at the very top. And then we did just get America's Best in State Employers for twenty twenty four, so definitely want to put that front and center because that's a great accolade on behalf of everybody that works here and the fact that they love to work here.

I want to put that right there on the top and then we break it down. Some people they're looking for very specific information they want to go straight to the hiring events that are coming up or maybe they want to go straight to applying. They already heard about the job or they want to see what's open. So that's where we get to the next section where you have all of those there where you can just go straight to that section and not move on to the other parts.

So then we go on down where we break it up into the four different areas. Instead of listing everything all together and grouping it together, we have put educators in one category, professional in another, support staff and auxiliary, and then you can easily click those openings or again go to apply now. One of my favorite parts about this website is the visiting international teacher program. We do travel to other countries to recruit, and so again when we go there we can lead them back to this web page.

They can see other teachers that have picked up and moved countries to come work for Tyler ISD and then we go a step further and we have videos of them talking in their native language what they like about living in Tyler, what they like about teaching in Tyler ISD, and what that whole experience is like. They talk about everything about where they like to go out to eat, to what it's like working with their team, maybe the campus that they work for to really give those people an idea of what it would be like if they made that trip because we're not just talking about moving across country, we're talking about moving from a different country here to Tyler.

Then if we keep going a little bit further, you want to scroll on down, we have the requirements, resources, contact information, who is interested in this opportunity, what requirements you have to have, and all of that. And then we all know that we have areas where you, you know, have those jobs that are a little bit harder to fill, so we want to feature some of our jobs that are a little bit more specific.

For example, we really only have one or two systems engineers and we've got an opening for that, so we're featuring that one.

We also special education, I know everybody is always looking for somebody for special education, that's a hard one to fill, and those instructional assistants.

So again you've got right there underneath all of the job descriptions easy to click onto and just again making it very easy as Tyler was saying earlier you know we've got the pay scale right there. We've got the number of days that you'll be working, the number of hours. So some of that information is just right there right off the bat that people are going to ask, you know, and want to know. And I think when you're building these pages, that's the other thing that you have to think about is what is the information that they're gonna wanna know first? Go ahead and put that right there where they can find it the fastest. And as you go

Tyler Vawser: One thing I'll add, Jennifer, is, like, you've got kids in the pictures.

Right? There's a like, if we go up to the top quickly here, we've got some pictures of students. But the majority of pictures are of the adults smiling, engaging with people, but it's not all about the kids. Right? I think that's a really interesting decision. I'm just kind of curious if you can talk a bit more about that.

Jennifer Hines: Yeah, absolutely. So, most people that are in education, they're looking at these different jobs. They already know what the job is. They're going to be working with kids, or if they're a school bus driver, they're going to be driving kids.

So they know that. So we put some of those pictures in there. A lot of people, they want to know who they're going to be working with. You know, what does that person that I'm going to report to look like?

Or what does my co worker look like? Do they look like they're having fun? Do I look like I could fit into this team or connect with these people? So you'll notice a lot of these pictures are close-up.

You can see their faces, you can see the joy, you can see the fun, or you can see them hard at work. For example, our systems engineer like this kind of shows them like what they would be working on. So it kind of gives a little glimpse into what that life would be like if they came to Tyler ISD.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, it's really good. I think one of the things you're trying to accomplish is can I see myself there? And then also, as we go through this, like, this idea of, like, removing doubt, like, giving them more and more confidence about what the job is, who they would work with. And I think that's what you all are doing so well is that there's a lot of information here, and people can pick and choose, but they're not going to be left wondering, what about this or what about that? I didn't hear anything about this thing or that thing.

Jennifer Hines: Exactly. And of course, we're hiring, going to have that on there. Bus drivers that that's always an ongoing need and I know we're going to talk a little bit later about a bus driver campaign that we came up with that was highly successful and we've got the save the date, we've got that job fair that we're already talking about internally, getting all of that ramped up but want that information out there so that people that are looking to come here know where they can come and meet some of these people in person and ask their questions directly. So definitely love that.

The other thing too, I don't know if you've noticed but I think we're maybe on the third maybe fourth button of ready to apply. So again, that call to action throughout as people are scrolling through and looking for this information. Again, at the very top, if you remember, you could just skip to a certain section. Well, if they do that, they might miss that where to ready to apply button.

So we we want to make sure to have that throughout that call to action. Like, they like what they see. Where do they go next? You got to put that throughout so that they have easy access to that.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, we just had a question in the chat. Is this something that they can build with what they currently have with Apptegy? Short answer is yes. So this is not an add on or anything. This is all built within Apptegy's CMS.

Jennifer Hines: It sure is.

Tyler Vawser: One thing I noticed here is, like, you know, you've got the event, which is great. It's, you know, plenty of time before it happens, but also that they get to meet the principal. Right? I think sometimes, we forget that, you know, teachers, of course, they need to know who the superintendent is, and they're gonna interview with HR, but their real boss is who they want to know, right? They want to know who is the principal that I could potentially be working for. So I think it's such a smart idea, not just to mention that the career fair is happening, but that you get a chance to meet potentially the person that you would report to and work closest with.

Jennifer Hines: Yes, and one thing that we also did that's really cool for our job fair that some people have found super easy, and again, you're talking about removing barriers, making it very easy to apply is we created QR codes where they can upload their resume. So they literally can just hand over their resume right there when they're meeting the principal and then the principal has the authorization to go ahead and give them a letter of intent and hire them right there on the spot. That's definitely something that we always promote with that but they've streamlined that process to where it's super, super easy. That actually came out of COVID. We were like, can't just bring in the paper resumes, what are we going to do? So we created this QR code and then we have all of that information and all of those leads, whether they're hired on the spot or not for other principals.

Say you have a teaching teacher candidate that comes in and they might speak to these three elementary school campuses, but I've got ten more over here. Those principals can look and see who all applied and if these campuses maybe didn't hire that person or they didn't have a need for that fourth grade teacher, this campus might have that need and they have access to that information.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, that's really smart. Appreciate you saying that. Let's talk about benefits.

Jennifer Hines: Yes, and this is I love this section because it's starting to show some of the ways that we're using wording like we offer betterment not just benefits. So think about how you can connect with people, make it fun, and not just put benefits as your title. So we offer betterment not just benefits.

Again, just honing in on what our culture is like using those words to relay that. And so these are the things that you're going to get asked the most. They want to know about salary and compensation. They want to know about benefits like health care and any kind of social emotional support, wellness programs. Those are all really big. Those are all of those things that surround that salary that can make or break somebody's decision.

Tyler Vawser: Very good. I actually like the wording here, right? Like, you're going get the standard benefits, but we're also going to go above and beyond. So you kind of have that standard here and then on the right, you're adding more to it and then you add even more.

Right? So Yeah. Additional jobs. Right? And just But wait, there's Yeah.

Jennifer Hines: And then again going back to the pictures showing them who they're going to work with as they work their way down it's not just text it's not black and white the whole way through so this also allows us from a visual standpoint to add that pop of color and then of course we're excited, you're excited. Again, just kind of keeping that excitement like we want you here and we want you to be excited about being here. And this is where we go into beyond the benefits, the things that they're going to have access to. And I know that it ranked a little bit lower on the list of what people are looking for, but if you've gotten this far through our website, you're probably pretty serious about coming.

You might be a veteran teacher and you want to know what else is there out for me, or you're brand new to the profession and you're doing that deep dive and you really want to know, okay, is this the right starting point for me? And that's where we come in here as a new teacher, you're going to receive a personal mentor. We have a program where you're paired with a mentor for the first three years and that is what we talk about right here and then it even goes into those drop downs so it isn't becoming super lengthy but you can access that information right there on what is a content mentor or what is the campus lead mentor.

These are all different types of mentors that we have on our campuses and what that can look like for you in terms of support, especially for those new teachers that know that they're going to need that guidance, they're going to need that help as they enter this teaching profession and this career. And then I love the part where it says opportunities that uniquely fit you because everybody has a different path, right? Some people may want to go on, they might want to get their masters, they might want to do some things like that. So this also talks about things that you can do there where you can develop and grow as a professional that you have that advancement opportunity and what that will look like and how you can learn from your peers.

And again, showcasing, one of our great teachers in her classroom. You can see the kids in the background, but again, the focus is on the staff member.

Tyler Vawser: Very good. And I think too, what's smart about this is you're not just thinking about how do we recruit for open positions. You're thinking about new teachers and veteran teachers and bus drivers and IT staff. Right? Like, the more you can speak to an individual versus humanity, the better.

Right? And I think there's a lot of work to be done there. That's maybe not the starting point if you don't have a careers page today, but that is a really good thing to work towards, which is how do you speak to different demographics? How do you speak to, you know, people that are at different points in their career path so that it resonates more with them?

Jennifer Hines: If already do have a careers page and you're ready to take it to that next level with things like this, what we did is we sat down and we're like, okay, what does a new teacher look like?

What are their interests? What would their questions be? And then we went in and tried to answer all of those and cater to that person. As opposed to a veteran teacher, they're going to have a totally different set of likes, dislikes, things that they're interested in.

And so we try and answer those questions for them. Or like you said, best drivers, totally different, separate. We got to cater to them too. We're trying to lure all these people in.

And so yes, like thinking about them as individuals and making sure that you have something for every position and every type of person is important.

Tyler Vawser: What was that like? Did you sit down with the HR team and map out all these different roles and just have those conversations about what are the top three? Did you do your own research internally? Talk a little bit about that.

Jennifer Hines: So it's a combination of a lot of things. Definitely we sit down with HR. What are you seeing right now? What are they interested in?

What are some of the things that you see them doing outside of the school time? You know, Do they like to so and we'll get to this in a minute, but selling the city is a part of it. They love to go on the biking and hiking trails here. So we'll throw some pictures of that up.

And the other thing too is this also helps when you're doing meta ads. So when you are trying to recruit and you're doing a campaign, you've got to come up with those personas. So you're building those personas not only for your website so that you can come up with the information, but at the same time you can use those when it comes to targeting your ads for when you're having those job fairs and you're trying to get those people to see that in their Facebook feed so that they go ahead and apply and come to those job fairs and that sort of thing. So the personas I think are fairly simple.

It's just kind of taking a sample of those first year teachers. What are they looking for? What do they need? What do we offer?

And then putting that all together and packaging up it really nicely with some of this wording. And again, you do have to think about the different stages of a career and where somebody might be and then cater specifically to what that person might be. And I know that y'all have done studies on this before, but it's like, how do you market to Gen X versus Gen Z versus millennials and all the things because they all have different things that they are interested in, in terms of what it is that's going to get them to apply. So while you had your top five and your bottom five, those are going to change according to what age they are, what level of experience they have.

And so that's where you need to kind of bring all of that stuff together and think about it. And then you create these different sections.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, and I think for those that don't have that yet, don't let perfect get in the way of good. Right? Like, start making what you already have more visible and then over time, right, refine that, build out the personas a bit more.

Jennifer Hines: Add to it. I mean, we've we've been adding and adapting as we've gone along and gotten new ideas, and and blogs are a new thing that we'll talk about a little bit later that we've we've started adding.

Tyler Vawser: I've seen some districts where, you know, they're not recruiting new teachers, but they're like, but we have great retirement benefits. It's like, well, forty years from now is a really long time to wait, and it's hard to imagine how good those benefits are given that timeline. Right? So for new teachers or first year teachers, they're giving, say, like, a Netflix subscription for a year. It's like, well, that's only a hundred and twenty dollars a year, but it's enough to get and keep their attention. But it's also something that's, you know, has a quicker payoff and you don't have to wait four decades to start to see that.

Jennifer Hines: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, those younger ones, they definitely want to know more about like, what is it like to live there? What do the facilities look like, whereas the veteran ones they're just like I want to see who I'm working for and if I like them. So two totally different mentalities on that.

Again, just going into some of the different things that we offer, so professional development support. So you can click again clicking on that. We have these throughout where you can go and link to another page with more information, so it does not make it excessively long, but you'd still get like the gist of there. We talk about the mentoring program again, we talk about the multiple levels of support and then the realistic pathway to higher pay.

In Texas, we have TIA where they can get between three thousand dollars and thirty two thousand dollars number is there to show you more pay that's on top of your salary, but again putting that number right there front and center for them to see and then they can click to learn more about what TIA is, how they might qualify to set themselves up to good on the pathway in order to be one of the ones receiving that TIA money. And then career support. We take our podcasts. We have a podcast and this is one of those where, you know, we're like, okay, we want to have a podcast, but where else can we use it?

We've talked to some different staff members. A great place is to chop up some of those podcasts and use it right here on the careers page. This is Michael Sturek. He's one of our former teachers of the year.

He's at our Career and Technology Center, and he actually went through a program to get his master's and he's now helping with the curriculum overall for our Career and Technology Center. So again, that growth from within and those opportunities for advancement and it's putting a face to what you're talking about. I think that's a key. Again, people want to see a real person and how they have succeeded.

So we've kind of done that throughout. And then of course we talked earlier, people want to know where is this place, where is Tyler, what do they have to offer. So we talk about cost of living, know, that's one of the things that we can use as a benefit, that's a plus for us. If the cost of living is more, probably don't want this section, but you may want to put stuff on there about the cool arts district that you have, or if you have hiking and biking trails, might want to share that, or if there's a really neat music scene or whatever it is that your town or city offers, this is where you can sell that because, again, people want to know where they're going to live, especially if they're moving.

Tyler Vawser: Well, and just to add to this is like if people have already noticed this, but getting very granular, you're not just saying it's cheaper to live here and we pay better and you're gonna have better, you know, life work kind of, balance, but you're you're showing it. Right? Getting very specific with numbers. And so, again, we're talking about building confidence and removing doubt. And so it may seem small, but like each one of these small things really adds up to paint a bigger picture.

Jennifer Hines: Yeah, absolutely. Having those statistics and those numbers to back up what you're saying. And again, going back to all the different areas that you can work music, you know, you've got maintenance, you've got, you know, in the classroom. So just again showing all of the different opportunities. You don't have to just be a teacher.

You can be in all of these different other areas. We welcome all different types of people, different backgrounds, different education levels. We've got something probably for everybody. So where do you fit in? And that's what we're trying to show here.

And then again, having fun with it. We're not kidding. We really are a great place to work. So, you know, having fun with that wording, definitely you want to loosen up a bit.

Don't be so rigid in your wording because again, you're trying to have that conversation. Like what would you actually say to somebody if you were trying to get them to come to your district? You'd be like, yeah, no, you really do want to work here. Like this is the best place ever.

And then of course, we're reminding them that we are the best place ever with our Forbes.

There again at the big and at the towards the bottom. And then of course, know, still not sure yet you've made it all the way down here.

We again put faces with what they're doing.

These are just some different teachers. These are their testimonials and then we talked about those blogs a little bit earlier. We have some of those blogs that are on here where you can go in and read about different things that we've got going on. Of course those blogs they help with the SEO when people are searching different things they might come across the blog and then that leads them to this page.

And so that's always just a wonderful extra to have. That's something that we've added recently. So that's one of those like a little bit of the icing on the cake. You got to build the cake first.

So these are things that we've been working on right now.

Tyler Vawser: Looks great.

Jennifer Hines: And then who are you going to be talking to? You mentioned we all know we got to talk to HR at some point. So here are the faces of our HR team. And you can see what each of them do, what their area is that they're over, and of course how you can email them and contact them. Again, making sure that if they want to connect, they have multiple touch points throughout this entire page where they can go directly to a person that can answer their questions and talk to them and get them in that pipeline to apply.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, so smart.

Jennifer Hines: Then these are all the other areas that they can look into. You know, maybe they might be interested in magnet schools and being a teacher at one of our magnet schools, or they want to know more about the facilities. Again, explore Tyler, like what does our city have to offer you? And so you're at the very end there.

Tyler Vawser: There you go. Now, I think before we go back to the presentation, one, thank you for walking through that. I think, you know, putting on our critical hat and people that are on the webinar, feel free to drop questions in the Q and A for Jennifer. But I think one of the first questions you might get is like, oh, it's really long.

Like, who's going to read all of that? And I think the best answer to that is the people that are interested and you have to earn the right for them to keep reading. And I think you do a good job of giving them more information, new information that reinforces what you've said, but still says something new. So how do you think about like the length of the page and how did you decide to include everything that you did?

Jennifer Hines: Well, you definitely have to think about layout in terms of what's going to go where. For example, one of our biggest recruiting tools for our international teacher program is this page. So that's why you see that right there at the top of the page. You get to those testimonials fairly quickly.

That's the other reason why you create those drop downs. You know, if they don't want to know about that, they can go on to the very next thing. You have to give them enough information, but again, you can see there's multiple areas where they can go and find out more. And then again, they can go and just go straight to applying like I've read enough, I'm ready to apply, go ahead and click that button to move on.

But we do want to highlight some of the bigger things and people again at the very top can go directly to those sections and I think that that's very important is to offer those shortcuts right off the bat. And then those that are more interested, they're going to scroll through there anyway because they're hungry. They want the information. We try and give them again those just little blips and then if they want to know more, they can go on and then we try and use that wording again.

Like still not sure yet, you know, kind of keeps them going, oh, that's the next headline. Maybe I should read a little bit more, that sort of thing.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, it's really good. And I think for those on the webinar, right, like think about this is really a forcing function, right? A careers page can be a forcing function to get the superintendent and communications and HR together to have a conversation about what is already true of our district. What are we not telling people until they're in an interview that we should be saying earlier?

And when we walk through this research, superintendents often say, like, you know, we actually have all that. We just bring it up in the interview, or we bring it up after they've signed. It's like that that's good. But what if you take those really positive things and brought that into the conversation earlier?

You likely would have more applicants or a bigger pipeline of people that are interested and curious for the simple reason that you can't talk to everyone that's looking at your web page.

Jennifer Hines: The other thing I would say is that when you're creating it is you're trying to sell yourself, right? So what are your sellable points? For us, cost of living was one. That's huge.

We have a lot of people that want to move from metropolitan areas to where we are. That's why hometown is kind of like that keyword. It gives you that feeling. But we talk about cost of living on our careers page because that for us is a selling point.

So think about who's around you, what do you have that they don't have, and then make sure it's front and center on your careers page.

Tyler Vawser: It's really good. We had a question in the chat about did we survey teachers or new teachers? The answer is all teachers. So some were new, some were veteran teachers, and so you see that in some of the demographics over the ages. But kind of how did you make the decision to leave one district and go to another? That was the primary thing.

And the rest of that comment says, you know, we kind of assume what our audience wants. We don't always ask. And so that's a a really good point too is we'll talk about state interviews. But, also, when someone does choose to work in your district, you might ask them why. What was the reason that you chose this over other options? What did you find on the website that helped you to apply? What made you take that next step?

Jennifer Hines: Yeah, think some of these questions I'm sorry to.

Oh, did Jennifer survey teachers? So what we did is we spoke to the teachers that we currently have. So we went to our veteran teachers and we went to our new teachers to just kind of see like, okay, what what means the most to them? And then we talked to those that lead those teachers on their campuses, like what are they hearing in order for that principal to sell their campus? What is it that they need or what is it that they get asked often? And again, it's anticipating those questions that people are going to have and answering them ahead of time because sometimes they may not even know that they want to know that information or going to have that question and we're anticipating it.

So yes, we definitely went and spoke to some of our teachers like what made you want to come work here or what means the most to you right now?

And some of these are pretty basic, you can assume. Like a kid that's fresh out of college, super excited, they're going to look at the salary and they don't really care about the benefits. One of the things that we ran into is our salary was a little bit lower, but our benefits and our healthcare was better. So the take home pay was actually higher.

So we did a graphic that showed your actual take home pay is this compared to the other districts And we did their math too, again, putting the numbers and putting the facts behind the statement. And that was something that we did in order to make sure that they understood those ones that really it's too far off to even be thinking about retirement or healthcare is something their parents are always paid for. They don't really know what that first paycheck is going to look like. Well, this is we're going to show you.

And that's what you need to think about and maybe ask those questions of the other districts and think about that so that when you do compare us, you're going to see what actually have. It looks like you're getting less, but you're really going to take home more.

Tyler Vawser: Well, in that guidance, right? Like if you could be the district that guides people through the process, one, they're more likely to join you, two, they're less likely to leave. But if they do go start talking to a district that doesn't provide that guidance, they might get frustrated through the process and just say, it's not worth it. Didn't realize how good I have it. Yeah.

Jennifer Hines: Yeah. And again, it's answering questions they may not realize they should be asking or need to ask. So, that was one of those just proactive moments there. But yes, definitely survey those teachers to find out what they're wanting because teachers are going to want different things in different parts of the country. You know, there might be things that mean more to this group than this group, and some of it's, you know, just geographical preferences too.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and share. We'll go through the rest of the presentation here to talk about some other key things. So this to me, I used to run a a people team and an HR team, and job descriptions are something everybody does, but very few companies and school districts do well.

Right? It's sort of this, you check the box and you post the job description, you move on. But what we find often is because the bar for job descriptions is so low, it means you can kinda surprise and delight fairly easily by talking about the district's mission or adding a personal message in the job description because the job description is not just gonna be on your career page or your website, but it's also gonna show up on a job board somewhere or in the state system of open jobs. And so by writing a really good job description, you can actually stand out.

Right? So this is a real world example that we took. We've not named what district it came from, but pretty basic. Right?

Like, if you look at, letter d, like, for work at the assigned hour, does not leave before the assigned time. Like, you know, a new graduate is not gonna call mom and dad and say, you wouldn't believe what this job involves. I have to be there on time, and I can't leave early. Right?

Like, not particularly inspiring. And so if this is kind of the the floor or the baseline, right, like, how do we make that better? And so, this is an example of some different job descriptions that we've seen outlined, and we put it together to kinda see how good could it be. So talking about the culture, talk about who you're looking for.

Right? We want to be part of a productive, supportive teaching community. You love to get into the craft of teaching. Right?

The words that you use indicate excitement versus you know, show up on time and don't leave early. And so as you go through this, right, like, being very clear too about what the culture is and what you expect from other people, not just saying, like, we'll take anybody that's interested in the job. Just please please apply. Right?

That confidence to say, like, we're gonna be a little bit picky about who we put in the position actually fills your pipeline of candidates rather than detracts from it.

Jennifer, how do you think about job description? I imagine that mostly lives with your HR team, but how do you think about that with your career page and everything that you're doing?

Jennifer Hines: So I think that you have to I know that some communications people probably, you know, it's like this with HR because they have certain requirements that they have to do, whether it's for their process that they have, their system that they have to plug in all of this information, or the information that they need in order to legally hire that candidate.

So you have to find that medium ground.

I love this that I'm seeing right here and where it does talk about school culture and what you're talking about, what you're looking for and the impact they'll have and all of that. And then I can see going one step further to appease your HR team and that is putting one of those little buttons on there that links back to the old one that's not super exciting where they can see, okay these are the true expectations, this is what's going to sell it, the other is going to cover you in terms of what they really like. You do have to have a bachelor's degree or you do have to have a master's degree to be this level. And so that way you're able to give them both the information, but you definitely sell it with this information first.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, very good. Alright, keep going through here. So this is the that's part one, The data and the deep dive on Tyler ISD's career page. So I hope that's been helpful.

In the time that we have left, we want to walk through some recruitment and retention strategies, both from the private sector, which generally has a lot more money and time to experiment on these ideas, but also how school districts are taking some of those same ideas and applying them. So there's this idea of employer brand, right? Like Apogee, we talk a lot about brand, like what is your identity as a school district? And that shows up in a lot of different ways, not just to families and students, but also to employees, you know, past, current, and future.

And so we wanna think about how do those people, those people that have worked for us in the past or those people that are going to work for us in the future, how do they think about our employer brand? An employer brand is one of those things that actually helps. It helps with retention. Right?

It reduces turnover. It also can even reduce the cost per hire because you're not forced to pay recruiters as much or you're not having to overcompensate because people are unsure about working there, right? You've removed a lot of those doubts by being clear about who you are as an employer.

So we want to look at a few things. So we've talked a lot about career pages. Applications are obviously what you're driving towards. The purpose of a careers page is to get someone to apply and take that next step.

But what we find a lot at school districts is that applications can actually be quite labor intensive and can take quite a while. And so what we did when we built this presentation is we went through and looked at private sector companies on how long it takes to take the first application step. Now, you don't get a job after one minute at Netflix, right? It's not that simple.

But to take that first step to apply or indicate interest in working there takes less than a minute. Amazon, less than nine minutes. And this is a really high bar, right? I don't think you're going to do this overnight, but this is an idea that you're competing against this expectation that things are fast and easy instead of long and slow.

And so I even noticed on Tyler ISDs, there's you give the time that you can expect to complete the application. And I also believe, Jennifer, they can come back to the application if they can't finish it. Is that right?

Jennifer Hines: Yep. Okay. You can save in progress and you can go even once you're done, you can go back in and update it. And on our side, it will show us the last time they updated it. So both sides know the most, I guess, the latest information.

Tyler Vawser: Very cool. So that's one. Right? Like, really think about the application process and the time. And if you haven't, right, go through it and see how long it takes you. I think it's helpful to know. And it's, again, a helpful way to start that conversation of even if you can't fix that, how do we make our careers page so good that someone's gonna take the time to do a forty five minute application?

Create a Mars team. So if you're the only person from your team on this webinar, right, take this back to them. You're gonna get an email later with all the resources. But you wanna start having a conversation with, you know, your cabinet or the comms and the HR leaders and have this conversation together. And this idea of a Mars team is if you had to go take your district or your business to another planet and replicate it, Who are the five or six people that you would trust to represent the values, right, for Apptegy that's thoughtfulness and high performance? And who would you leave behind? Those are the people you want at a table to start talking about who you are as a district.

This example, I think, is interesting because it's both from the private sector, but it can connect to school districts. Right? Apptegy is a ten year old company. That's different than being a one hundred and thirty year old school district.

But most of us know Radio Flyer because we were all kids once, and Radio Flyer makes sleds. They make these wagons. Right? And so pretty long history, but there was a time not so long ago that they actually really struggled.

And so rather than kind of just give up or say, like, we're not gonna change anything, They went back to say, like, why did we start in the first place? What were those core values? And how do we bring those into the present and make those values work for us every day versus just being part of the history book or being something we put on the wall, but we don't actually live. Right?

And so they actually did that through this idea of a Mars team. Like, who's been here for a long time or who's been here in a short time but feels like they've been here forever? Like, let's start having this conversation about what values are we gonna promote and make decisions by.

So, yeah, who lives your values, who can articulate your culture the best, and who's gonna be really honest. Right? No company's culture is perfect. No school district culture is perfect. And so you want the people that are both champions of your culture but also willing to say the hard truths so that you can fix that gap between what you're saying and what you're doing and bring those things closer together.

Third, get noticed, and we're gonna look at some more, examples from Tyler ISD in a moment. The top two thirds of these pictures are from Apptegy. So, the Little Rock marathon happens in March every year. We send out a bunch of people with funny signs, and it's just a way for us to, one, engage the community and give back a little bit, but also a way to get in front of people that may not know who we are or they're not actively looking for jobs, but they're in the community.

They're gonna talk. Right? And so we want to make sure that they don't only hear about Apptegy from a careers page, but that we're part of conversations within the community ongoing. Right?

Like, the middle picture at the top is from a food festival where we had a photo booth. Picture on the right, we actually entered a cheese dip competition way back in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, which is a bit odd, but it was a great way to meet people that aren't normally looking for jobs because they're happy enough doing what they're doing. And then the two pictures at the bottom are from a district that Apptegy works with in Colorado, where they actually took some of the same ideas. They came to SchoolCEO conference.

We talked about these things, and they're like, well, how do we do this? So now when there's some kind of community event, they offer free hot dogs or they will have a booth with fun school related supplies. And it's been a good way for them to help with enrollment, but in this case, retention as well and recruitment.

All right, Jennifer, you want to talk about your bus campaigns?

Jennifer Hines: Yes, so this is from 2021. Our head of transportation came to us and was like, have twenty seven openings for bus drivers, which was freaking him out a little bit. He was like, what can we do? And I said, give me a little bit and we'll come up with something.

That was about mid May and by mid June, we had come up with this and it was okay, buses drive all over town, they drive to out of town games. I mean, it's literally a moving billboard that we own that we can put stuff on the side of. So we started thinking of concepts, kind of like the signs that you had like go stranger go, that you had for the marathon. What's going to have somebody take that double take and become a water cooler kind of conversation?

Hey, did you see that on the bus? Because maybe somebody that sees it isn't the best driver candidate that you're looking for, but they might know somebody. So prime shipping on Tyler's most precious cargo, children, We obviously went with the whole like travel shipping idea. We also had one that said what can yellow do for you?

Of course that's UPS.

Yeah there's that one so we and then of course again putting the phone number right there and the phone number is super easy to remember. I mean, they're really only memorizing maybe four numbers because they know the other ones.

So just making it really, really easy.

We also, in addition to this, used that as an opportunity to launch a media campaign where we had the buses. They already had these signs on them. We had three or four different versions of it. So those were all lined up, invited all of the media out. They all came.

Within twenty four hours, we already had twelve applicants, five of which said they had seen it through this campaign. The campaign was so successful it was put in a school transportation magazine and I think it's been copied at several school districts around the country. But again, this is like free advertising and they go everywhere. So we had somebody that found out about it because of it kind of going viral a little bit about it from California and he and his wife were bus drivers and they moved here and they ended up working for us.

So you never know what's going to happen, but you want to find something that might reach outside of your area. So doing the media campaign made it to where it could reach a larger audience because again you never know who might be interested in those outlying areas that might want to come here. And so again it was a very successful campaign. We did end up starting school with all of those twenty seven bus driver positions filled and have continued to be able to use this campaign for several years now.

And we even went one step further and realized, hey, could put advertising on your buses here. I don't know about all the other state laws, but here you can.

And so we created a revenue stream coming in and we were able to turn around and use that money to support our staff and therefore make the culture even better because they're having fun. We're giving them breakfast or we're buying them t shirts or we're doing this or that. And so we were able to kind of do two for one there as well.

Tyler Vawser: That's really smart. I didn't know that. That's fantastic. So some action items on this point, right?

Like where could you communicate your culture in your community? And to Jennifer's point, you already have things. This isn't about, you know, creating new budget. This is about taking your buses that you already have and just getting a little bit more creative and putting some messages out there.

Cool. Alright. Creative benefits. We talked about benefits earlier, and of course, you want the standard benefits.

So we're not gonna go through this and say, like, get rid of health care and just give them Spotify for free. But, what you want benefits to do is actually pull people in. Like, if you kinda go back through the history of HR, benefits were not always a given. And so companies that added those recruited more people.

And now, you know, which is a good thing, we have kind of generally good standard benefits. And so it's worth thinking through, like, what are some small but attractive benefits that we can add to get people's attention and to help us stand out and to also help them recall us when they're thinking about different places where they can work? And so this is a screen grab from the Careerspace that we looked at earlier. Right?

So of course, we're gonna talk about salary and compensation and health care, but also about social, emotional support and health and wellness. And so just making those more visible, and also helping people to learn more. Like, if you go through Tyler ISD's careers page, you'll see that all almost every section has a link to something else so that if you wanna go deeper, you can. And, of course, right, Jennifer, I'm imagining you're looking at your Google Analytics and, you know, what's what are people going from the careers page to next the most, and then how do you improve those pages?

And so the more details you can give about the benefits that you have, it's just so important.

Jennifer Hines: Absolutely. And you do want to make sure that not only is this page good, but when you do go to those other pages, they look just as good. So again, start small if you're just now trying to launch a careers page and then just slowly add these pieces because what you don't want to do is add pieces and then they not look good because then you're going to turn them off and have the opposite effect.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, exactly. So here's some others that we had looked at, right? So about development and higher pay and, you know, you can use the word benefits kind of generally. Right? Like, make it a little bit liberal where it's like, you know, supporting a new teacher, that is a benefit. You might not put it, you know, next to health care, but it's real. And so how do you make sure that people know about that and you're not just doing it without telling anyone?

Spotify does this. It's kind of on brand for them. Right? But they provide employees with free concert tickets. And we've seen a lot of districts get creative about we talked about Netflix subscriptions or, for, like, learning and development, they're giving an Audible subscription.

And then we've seen some districts as well where they're getting creative on childcare, where there's a local provider and they have extra space, and they're combining that. And so now they're providing childcare for teachers and, in particular, moms that are trying to get back in the workforce. That's the barrier for them. They wanna get back into teaching, but they just don't know how they're gonna make the schedules work. And so the more you can provide, options like that and get really creative on, you know, business and community partnerships, the better.

All right. Last, this is one of my favorites. So most companies and school districts will do some kind of exit interview, meaning someone's on their way out. We want to find out why, what went wrong, what can we do better.

But the person that asked, like, did you survey the teachers? This is relating to that. Right? We also want to think about why do people stay.

So don't just solve the problem, but figure out what are you doing well and how do you double down on that. And so you see a little bit of that here, whereas if, you know, Jennifer, I'm not sure how you structured it exactly, you could take those stay interviews and put it on the website. But even if you didn't, you're getting more information about why people like to stay in your district and how do you make that more visible instead of just trying to solve for the problems or maybe where, you know, if pay is lower and you can't solve for that, maybe there's something else that's keeping the other ninety eight percent of teachers in your district, right, and thinking through that.

Jennifer Hines: Well, and specifically this section, these are some of our former teachers of the year or something to that effect, and so they have to apply or, you know, they have to go through the process to be the district teacher of the year. They were their campus teacher of the year first, So you can pull information from that of why did they become a teacher? That's one of the questions. What do they love most about teaching?

And you literally can take that, put their picture up there. You don't even have to bother them. They can stay in the classroom and focus on what they're supposed to be doing and you can be working on this over here. And so there's ways that you can pull stuff just kind of like using the podcast pieces.

You have pieces already at your fingertips that you haven't even thought about that are just easy low hanging fruit that you can put on here without having to go out and gather a bunch of pieces of content.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, really smart. And these are some questions that you can think about, right, for stay interviews or to inspire the website. Right? It's like, what do you like most about working here?

What do you like the least? You could take those answers, by the way, back to that Mars team, that core group of saying like, hey, here's some issues that we've identified, and we think we can address this one. And if we do, like, we have a better chance to improving retention, but also recruitment too. And I really like the one on the far right.

What are the three most important things you want to accomplish right now? Like what's top of mind for you? Like what are you what gets you up in the morning? What are you excited about?

And then making that more visible to a prospective teacher. So you're not just talking about the the need for the job, but once you're in the job, what are the things that you can accomplish in getting teachers and bus drivers and classified staff more excited about what they're going to be doing once they're in the role itself.

All right, so three things you can do today. One, I would look at Tyler ISD's career page. If you're not, if you haven't already pulled it up, go search for that. But ask yourself, does it make the case for why? And actually, when we looked at the career page let me see if I can pull it up again real quick.

One of the very first things you find at the top of Tyler ISD's web page is this.

Why Tyler ISD? And this is a great question to bring back to your cabinet or that Mars team is to ask, why would someone choose our district? And then see what the answer is.

Does everybody have the same answer? Is it all over the map? Are they having a hard time answering that? This is really what people are asking.

Right? Like, can I see myself here? And why this district? And so when you click on that, right, it jumps you down here.

So now you're learning more about the benefits, and it's bringing you to where you where you're just answering doubts and building confidence over and over again.

So back to our, our takeaways here. So do you have a careers page? And can you build one? And then if you do have one, you might ask, does it attract attention?

And look at Tyler ISD's page again for inspiration. Like, oh, we're not talking about benefits enough, or we don't have videos, or we don't have quotes from teachers. How do we do that? Right?

And then the second thing, this is, I think, the most important is like, do you get that Mars team? How do you get people talking about this that really care about the employer brand and the culture and the identity of your district? And that doesn't have to just be the HR team. Right?

That can be the veteran teacher. That could be the coach that everybody goes to when they have questions. Or he or she may be the most visible person in the community simply because of Friday night lights. Right?

Like, Tyler ISD is in Texas. Like, football's a thing. And so, like, how do you take those people that have a good read on the community and bring them into it? And then third is what we just talked about.

So can you talk about why people stay and why they've kept on for so long? So that is the end here. We're going to turn it over to a discussion, and there's a few questions already in the chat.

And so let's see. Jennifer, can you see this question from Vanessa here?

Jennifer Hines: Let's see here. What are your suggestions?

Tyler Vawser: So they have thirty two schools over five thousand square miles, and it's, impoverished area, and we have rural school district or rural schools on the reservation. How would you think about that where it's Tyler ISD is a little bit of a smaller geographic area? Right? So how would you think about that?

Jennifer Hines: So we are yeah. I mean, we're we're fairly big, and we do have about about the same number of schools. So I would say don't try and focus on all of your schools. Pick some to focus on first.

For example, we have four magnet schools, and we actually put money behind that with meta ads every year when that magnet school timeframe opens up. Or maybe think about it in terms of, you know, like you want to come work for those magnet schools and like one is fine arts. So if you're looking for fine arts teachers, that's where that they would want to go. So you can lure them in that way because that's kind of a niche way to look at it.

Also, we have a program called Leader in Me, and we have a campus that is a legacy campus. That means it's one of six in the world in order to get that status. That's like one of those things that you could sell for that campus. So find your campus differentiators and then I would just start with a few and then target who you think would want to work there.

Again, it's who's currently working there, what drew them to that campus, and then that will help you to focus on where that person you may be able to find that person in terms of bringing them in. For sure. Would go about it that way. Don't try and bite all of it off at once, but start small.

Tyler Vawser: Very cool. Any other questions? And if not, we will wrap up and I want to share one more thing while we're waiting on questions. If you or your superintendent are headed to New Orleans for the National Conference on Education, AASA is really big event.

Apptegy's gonna be there when we're actually gonna be presenting different research, but our newest research about what parents want from school communication. We actually published this, last week on Friday. If you get the print magazine, you probably have gotten in the last couple of days or you will soon. And we ask similar questions, but to parents about what do they want from their schools and how do they prefer to be communicated with, what are the right channels.

And that's on school c o dot com right now, but we're gonna be presenting, with, the superintendent and the chief comms officer from Anne Arundel County Public Schools, which is one of the largest school districts in the country, about how they've gone about serving teachers and building trust within their community.

Right?

Well, Jennifer, thank you so much. I really appreciate you and your team, your whole team, right? Both the comms team, the HR team, but all of Tyler ISD have done such a great job of really thinking through how teachers want to be engaged with and answering those questions as they explore working at your district. And I love how you've guided them through that decision making process because changing a job is, no small thing. Right? It's a significant decision. And I think the more we make that easier for teachers and other staff, the more likely they are to choose our districts.

Jennifer Hines: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm always happy to help or to talk to anybody that's on here.

I can share my email address is super simple. It's Jennifer.Hines@Tylerisd.org. So drop me a line if you have any questions or want to discuss anything further about how we did what we did. I'm happy to help.

Tyler Vawser: All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, and we hope you have a great weekend and hope to see you in New Orleans. Appreciate it. Thank you.