Celebrating a Year of Recruiting with KEEB

This week marks 1 year since the state of Kansas launched the redesigned teacher recruitment initiative at www.kansasteachingjobs.com. The year has represented a renewed effort of recruiting in Kansas and many lessons have been learned to apply to the this year's recruitment practices.

Successes
The redesigned KEEB experienced a significant increase in traffic by both schools and potential educators in the last year. At the years end we have 98% of districts in the state utilizing the service and over 10,000 applicant profiles. From September 2007 to today we have had over 670,000 visits from Kansans and approximately 6,708,000 page views. In addition, 35% of the traffic on KEEB is generated from out-of-state visitors allowing districts in the state to recruit from a broad range of experienced educators. Although www.kansasteachingjobs.com represented a significant increase in traffic to school job postings, other efforts ensured that schools in the state of Kansas were represented in a range of online and virtual recruiting tools. KEEB now feeds jobs from the website to 4 different nationally recognized job boards ensuring that Kansas jobs reach potential candidates outside of our state lines. In addition, the use of new technology such as virtual recruiting events has put Kansas on the forefront of recruiting practices. It will be critical in the future that Kansas continues to utilize the latest and best technology to reach highly qualified educators.

Lessons Learned
While there were many successes through the year there were also a number of lessons learned to continue to improve the recruiting effort in the state. Thanks to great feedback from school district personnel and applicants we've identified a number of improvements that are currently in the process of being made. A few of those improvements include:

• multiple security levels for employer accounts allowing various school personnel to access resumes and applicant information
  
• interview scheduler to schedule interviews with applicants via email from KEEB
• search for candidates by geographical area
• additional help notes built into critical steps of the job posting process

In closing, a special thank you to the Kansas Department of Education's Special Education Team for their continued support of the Kansas Recruitment and Retention Program and to the key KEEB staff, Matt Blatchley, lead programmer, and Johnna McColm, support specialist.