Nationally, schools face an increasingly competitive and shrinking pool of qualified teachers. In March 2025, 42.9 percent of SAIS heads shared that retention and recruitment of qualified staff remains a top priority. Further, the September 2025 Trend Tracker highlights the current state of teachers, with teachers reporting working longer hours than contracted, likely contributing to burnout and an overall poor sense of well-being.
To build a pipeline of teachers who are both a mission match and contributors to the school culture, The Westminster Schools – a K-12 school serving approximately 1,880 students in Atlanta, GA – has developed a hiring ecosystem that prioritizes faculty and staff culture and well-being, resulting in a candidate pool that yields team members who want to be a contributing part of the school community.
Defining the Hiring Ecosystem
Rather than relying upon any single tactic, Dean of Faculty Thad Persons approaches the recruitment process as a “hiring ecosystem.” It starts from the top down, he says: “Having the senior leadership team of the school deeply invested in thinking about and sharing best practices in hiring great faculties…has increased the quality of hire and kept the yield really high because our offers get accepted.”
The leadership team at Westminster has been trained in interviewing, not just in the human resources side of it, but in ways to interview that provides good information. Further, those involved in the interview process have different roles so that the candidate is faced with a meaningful experience rather than repetitive questioning.
The structure of the Westminster hiring process is well thought out – a single continuum from the first touch all the way through the onboarding process. Whether it’s a school HR representative, dean of faculty, or associate head, assigning a dedicated person to oversee end-to-end hiring processes is critical to ensuring candidate curation and preparation. “Having that consistent oversight makes a big difference,” says Persons.
Leaning on School Culture
Another crucial part of the hiring ecosystem is the current state of a school’s faculty and staff culture. Prospective employees want to be a part of a work environment that feels like a good fit with their personal values. Likewise, current employees want to bring on new team members who will be a contributor to the community from the outset. To make a good match, Westminster President Keith Evans shares, “It’s really important to understand what it is that your current faculty and staff values about their employment, what it is that’s important to them, not only in terms of benefits and compensation, but also culture and professional development. How do those things rank? What is going to give you a happy and thriving faculty and staff?”
Westminster conducts surveys to uncover what faculty and staff prioritizes and then uses the data to align the way compensation and benefits are structured. The school also considers outside research that examines the role friendships at work play in employee satisfaction and performance. How can a school help staff cultivate friendships at work? One tactic that has yielded great success for Westminster is employee referrals. Happy teachers are happy to refer others.
One of the most successful means of gathering referrals is to ask for them at the end of the onboarding process. New hires have new and robust networks outside of the school, and they are excited to onboard and happy to make the referral. Persons follows up each referral with an introductory call. “It’s completely exploratory, but it’s an incredible way [to open up potential networks],” he says. “I’m suddenly talking to a wide variety of dynamic candidates outside of my network or Westminster’s network. Then, when a position does come open, I often have somebody on the bench that I’ve already had a relationship with.” The yield for referrals at Westminster has traditionally been very high.
Westminster also offers the opportunity for connection. Though not a part of the formal interview process, Westminster’s director of DEI and community engagement reaches out to welcome candidates and offers to make a connection, seeking from the outset to build friendships within the community. For example, someone might say, “Well, I really would like to talk to a single parent on your faculty.” Persons shares, “There’s such a wide variety of identifiers that people find important that they can make a connection with. I don’t know that I have the scientific data to prove it, but my feeling is they are coming in with a stronger tailwind into the end of this process.”
Shifting to a Year-Round Focus
As part of their overall hiring ecosystem, Westminster avoids the mindset of recruiting for a particular role. Rather, Persons focus on maintaining year-round efforts that center on building strong relationships with potential candidates. “I always talk to talent,” says Persons. “I’m always having exploratory conversations.”
In addition to referrals, another means of getting good candidates on the radar is to include future postings on the school’s career page. Persons reads submitted résumés and will have phone calls, even if there is not a current position open. “I’ve screened or had a phone call with every candidate up front,” he says. “I’m trying to solve for high-level qualifications and … a cultural add. Can they bring something to the table that could help us move forward?” Because of this work on the front end, when the school is ready to make a hire, Persons is quick to make a move because he has already vetted interested candidates.
Coaching Candidates for Success
Persons encourages schools to consider how they may best connect with and prepare candidates along the hiring journey, particularly before the campus visit. To set up candidates for success, Westminster offers pre-finalist coaching. For instance, if the school is hiring for an upper school math role, the department chair will contact the candidate to explain what is being sought, what is valued in the classroom, and how the school approaches teaching and learning. “We want our students to do well on tests, and we want our candidates to do well on a sample lesson,” says Persons.
According to Evans, this transparent process eliminates some hurdles for the leadership team in the hiring process. Through pre-coaching, “it was like the dam broke in hiring. People… were performing in demonstration teaching in a way that eliminated … intangible hurdles that kept division heads and decision makers from saying ‘yes.’” The result of the process is a better prepared candidate.
The school also partners with an organizational psychologist for senior leadership hires. The report helps inform the school of how to best support candidates in onboarding and transitioning.
Approximately ten years ago, as he checked references, Persons recognized that the data included powerful feedback not typically made available to candidates. “I kept thinking, I’m sitting on really extraordinarily good feedback. I started asking the references [for permission to ] aggregate and anonymize the three references and put them into one document with areas of strength and areas for growth.” Invariably, people say “yes,” and Persons makes this feedback available to new hires as part of an onboarding session on how to receive feedback. “It is a very powerful experience,” he shares. “It helps a little bit with that imposter syndrome; it’s such a gift.”
Knowing the Market
Depending on their local hiring markets, some schools may be interested to explore teacher fellowships or internship opportunities as another avenue to hiring. “The national [hiring] trend is really bleak,” says Persons. “[There’s] a high burnout rate for teachers across the nation, [with] a fraction of people going into education. Every macro indicator says we’re shrinking. Then the regional macro is everyone’s moving to the south.”
With a potential influx of teachers into the SAIS region, sustainable talent pipelines are not a luxury, but a necessity for independent schools’ long-term success. By making recruitment strategic, intentional, and human-centered, schools can thrive, even in a challenging market.
Whether a new hire or a returning faculty member, schools can reiterate that their community is a great place to be and reaffirm an employee’s choice to be a part of that community. “Here’s the thing I think that is true everywhere – big schools, small schools – everybody operates with a level of confirmation bias,” says Evans. “If I chose to work there, …I have an inclination to believe that I made the right decision. Your world and your life here can be made better. And if it’s made better, then that satisfies that desire that this was the right decision,” he continues. “[To get] that affirmation over and over again in tangible and real ways to me is something that’s possible for any school anywhere.”
Additional Resources & Takeaways for School Leaders
To transform faculty and staff recruitment, consider these key ideas.
Once you’ve made a great hire, consider how you will onboard new employees.
Related Programming
Attracting and retaining top faculty and staff is one of the most pressing challenges facing independent schools today. The Timely Challenge Conference (November 10-11, Atlanta, GA) brings together school leaders to explore innovative strategies for recruitment, retention, and workplace culture.
