Eteach.com to develop next generation recruitment offering

Working with Oxford Brookes University, leading online education recruitment specialist eteach.com has been awarded Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) funding to develop a unique end-to-end recruitment service for the education sector.

The 88K grant, along with further significant investment from eteach.com, will fund an exciting new project aimed at revolutionising the education recruitment industry. The project will benefit from professional and academic expertise from the Department of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour at Oxford Brookes University Business School.

The project aims to design and develop an online end-to-end HR service for the education market, which will offer a total package of services to both recruiters and candidates.

Professor Mark Saunders, Assistant Dean and Director of Research at Oxford Brookes Business School said: Traditionally, schools and colleges were supported through the recruitment process by their Local Authorities, using national and local newspapers to advertise posts. Nowadays, with their growing independence, and the changing role of Local Authorities, they are increasingly reliant on their own resources for recruitment.

With its enhanced internet service, eteach.com aims to provide a 'next generation', online, end-to-end total recruitment solution, bespoke to the education sector, which will assist schools and candidates in the recruitment process, delivering savings to schools' budgets, whilst ensuring the best possible match of candidates and vacancies at a national level.

Eteach CEO Paul Howells said: Recruitment is a costly exercise for schools and colleges across the UK with an estimated 120 million being spent each year. The Internet is now being embraced by many schools as a real alternative to traditional costly print-based advertising.

Using the joint expertise of eteach.com and Oxford Brookes we are looking to develop our service offering for job seekers and transform the way in which schools and colleges recruit their staff.

The potential enhanced functionalities for the recruiter would include online psychometrics/profiling, support for interviews, guidance on induction, and online mentoring. For the candidate, there would be support for CV development, proactive search facilities, online applications linked to CVs, mentoring, advice and guidance around interviews. There is no such joined-up, end-to-end service currently available online, let alone conventionally, in the education sector.

The opportunity that the partnership presents is to create a greener, quicker, cheaper, better, recruitment process, available constantly to leaders and managers in education. Thus meeting not only the requirements of schools and colleges more closely, but also helping to satisfy government efficiency and environmental targets for education.