In this time of virtual connections, filling your open teaching and administrative positions can feel disconnected. But one school district in Texas has been successfully connecting with top talent virtually for over two years. Their two-person HR team handles a very demanding 2% student growth year over year to remain one of the top-rated districts in the state.
About Canyon Independent School District
The Canyon Independent School District serves two communities, Canyon and Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle. The Canyon ISD community is known for its commitment to children and education. Within district attendance boundaries, new homes and new neighborhoods abound. Many new families move into the district’s attendance area because of their schools’ reputations and the quality of life. The school district is a learning community, providing opportunities for all students and staff to reach their learning potential.
Goals for Video Interviewing
Canyon Independent School District is a rapidly growing school district in Texas, and their two-person HR team knew they’d be staffing new schools with growing regularity due to the influx of families. The team wanted to improve their hiring process to spend their time on the most qualified candidates. Their peers at Amarillo Independent School District suggested they look at video interviewing with Spark Hire to achieve that goal.
The First Steps
Canyon ISD’s HR team found themselves completely backlogged by their preliminary interviews. Adding 200+ students every year means frequently opening new schools, which was great news for the district, but intimidating for the small team. They loved bringing candidates in for in-person preliminary interviews, but time constraints limited the number of interviews they could accept. The team knew they needed to improve their hiring practices to screen more applicants faster, while maintaining the integrity of the process.
The Results
After implementing Spark Hire, the team found themselves settling into a new process—after a candidate applies, they now send a one-way interview request through PowerSchool Applicant Tracking, then review and collaborate with other hiring stakeholders. Rather than spending weeks on end completing preliminary interviews, the Canyon ISD team could now complete their initial interviews in 2-3 days. This substantial reduction in time spent on interviews allowed them to free up their schedules and open up their talent pool to a broader base of teacher and administrator applicants. Handing off a wider array of candidates to principals allowed them to include the best talent in their applicant pool, without weeks going by between application and principal interview.
The Canyon ISD team wanted to ensure they uncovered the best teachers available for their kids. The insights and information gained through Spark Hire’s one-way video interviews made it much easier for the team to build a realistic idea of each candidate to send to principals. With video interviews integrated into Applicant Tracking and their hiring process, applicants complete interviews for the team daily, allowing the hiring process to operate almost continually according to their hiring needs.
Want to know more about using PowerSchool and Spark Hire together?
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