Staffing, Concepts of

Arguably the most important administrative task accorded to educational leaders and administrators is staffing schools and school districts with the qualified teachers, administrators, and support staff required to deliver a quality educational program. Stated another way, staffing is the process whereby organizations acquire the human talent needed to accomplish the organization's goals and mission. Staffing includes two [Page 952]subprocesses that overlap to a considerable degree: recruitment and selection. Recruitment encompasses all activities conducted by the organization to generate initial pools of qualified applicants for position vacancies. Selection includes those activities used by the organization to reduce a pool of applicants down to a group of highly qualified finalists and, ultimately, the preferred job candidate who will receive a formal job offer.

Although staffing potentially impacts virtually every aspect of school and school district operations—from instruction in the classroom to leadership at the school and school district levels—many individuals charged with carrying out the staffing function operate under two false assumptions. The first false assumption is that qualified applicants for position vacancies will always be available in sufficient numbers. With respect to the supply of qualified educational personnel, the United States entered the twenty-first century with a well-documented shortage of classroom teachers and a less-well-understood emerging shortage of qualified applicants for administrator positions, especially the position of school principal. Retirements among the post–World War II baby boom generation are resulting in large numbers of position vacancies of all types, and this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. With respect to the supply of teachers, researchers such as Richard Ingersoll note that a teacher retention problem also exists as a long-term staffing trend and is exacerbating the already-critical teacher shortage. Teachers in very large numbers exit the profession within their first 5 years on the job, thus contributing to a shortage of qualified classroom instructors. The shortage is especially acute in certain locations (e.g., inner city schools and small rural school districts) and in certain academic disciplines such as mathematics, science, foreign languages, and special education. Other researchers, such as Diana Pounder, note there may also be a shortage of qualified applicants for principal vacancies with the vast majority of individuals who are principal certified but not yet in the job, failing to apply for vacant positions, possibly because the job is too demanding and stressful in today's environment of high-stakes accountability and school reform. These trends suggest the supply of teachers and administrators is not ensured for decades to come and educational administrators will have to make a concerted effort to generate adequate pools of qualified applicants for position vacancies or lose in the competition to hire qualified educational personnel.

The second false assumption is that employees of the hiring organization are the sole decision makers in the staffing process. To the contrary, it is important for hiring organizations to realize staffing is a dual decision-making process, with both representatives of the hiring organization and job applicants making decisions regarding whether or not the staffing process will continue to a successful conclusion. People doing the hiring make the decisions to retain individuals in the applicant pool after initial screening, invite applicants to interview for the job, and make a job offer to the preferred job candidate.

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