The boards of education and school boards play a crucial role in the successful running of the K-12 schools throughout the US. One of the many tasks the boards are charged with is the vetting and hiring of school superintendents.
As you can imagine, zeroing in on the right candidate is always a tedious process that demands meticulous vetting. The process must be carried out with all the due diligence observed. Otherwise, the boards run the risk of introducing poor leadership into their school district resulting in low student outcomes and poor staff and student retention.
K-12 Executive Search Firms
Thus is it often recommended that the board of education and school administration board outsource this crucial task to experts. These experts come in the form of K-12 Executive Search Firms.
As the name suggests, a K-12 Executive Search Firm is an organization formed with the sole purpose of identifying the best candidates for K-12 school administration. Again, it cannot be overemphasized enough on why it is imperative that schools’ administrations get the best leadership skills in the market.
With the wrong school superintendent in place, a school district could start recording higher student drop out rates, poor test scores by the students, lower enrollment, and a general bad work environment for staff in their school district. So clearly, you need to go all out to secure the best management in the market.
A K-12 executive search firm’s sole mandate is to invest their time and money in studying the education system. Thus they have in-depth knowledge of what makes a school operate in the right way and the wrong way. So when you outsource the task of searching for the next school superintendent to them, they have a deeper insight into the desired characteristics to look for in the candidates. They also have access to candidates not visiting job boards for a career change.
Why outsource your next School Superintendent Hire search
These firms have already established a deep network and systems for pooling together the best and brightest candidates for the job. It will be a worthwhile investment of time and money for education boards to solicit the services of a K-12 executive search firm. Some of the benefits you stand to reap are as follows:
- K-12 Executive Firms Has Refined Their Vetting Process
K-12 schools, just like any other school around the world play a vital role in any child’s future. Often, it can mean the difference between an adult life of financial freedom or bondage to poverty and debts. So from the perspective of not just the parent, but the society as a whole, you want school districts equipped with the right management talent to better equip children in the district for a great future.
For that reason, the boards of education and school administration boards cannot afford to let people manging the success of the school district to chance. They need to be deliberate and thorough in their vetting process. Unfortunately, these boards are already grappling with lots of other tasks outside headhunting for a school superintendent.
That means their attention, time, and resources will be split between searching for the superintendent and other equally important tasks in the running of the schools in the district. The net effect of that will be a compromised search for the best possible candidate for the job.
On the other hand, the K-12 executive search firm has one duty; to perfect the process of headhunting the best school superintendent. They have refined their vetting process over time as it is their sole purpose. They stand at a better chance of identifying the best candidate for the job.
2. A Larger Pool of Candidates to Choose From
A K-12 executive search firm is more likely to have the bandwidth to cast its net far and wide while headhunting for the right candidate. Certainly, much further and wider than what boards of education and school administration boards could do, given they are handling other tasks as well.
The boards will likely go for the easiest, fastest, and affordable approach. That could mean vetting just the candidates enlisted in the job search boards and ending their search there. While on the other hand, a K-12 executive search firm can have tabs on candidates both actively and passively searching for work.
While the school boards may miss out on presenting an opportunity for employment to superintendents already having a job at a different school district. Executive search firms are more likely to be aggressive enough to poach a candidate already employed as a superintendent at a well-performing school district.
That is largely because executive search firms are all about delivering results. And it is their full-time job to be on the lookout for the best talent in the market.
3. A Rare Mix of Skills
Qualities that define a successful school superintendent are a mix of rare skills including knowledge, education, temperament, aptitude, and cultural fit among other qualities. The school and education boards compared to the executive search firms, will most likely not have the bandwidth for such an extensive vetting process.
The K-12 executive search firms, given their sole mandate is to identify the right candidate, has systems in place to identify only the best candidates with the best mix of rarest skills. School boards and education boards, ave so many responsibilities – juggling in between different tasks for the education and school systems that to commit the hours it takes to recruit top-talent is an impossibility.
4. K-12 Executive Search Firm Can Bridge Knowledge Gap in Newly Created Positions
There are times when school and education boards create new positions with unprecedented job descriptions. The same goes for the superintendent posts where their tasks are nothing like the boards has ever created before.
In such instances, you find the boards don’t know exactly the full spectrum of skills and qualities they could use for vetting. That is where executive search firms can come in to bridge the knowledge gap. Since they are dedicated to headhunting the best superintendents in the job market, and they do so often, they have data that can be used to model expected traits.
The ability to make informed projections on required skills, traits, and knowledge for a newly created position makes executive search firms crucial. The school and education board might not have enough data to come up with such models. Primarily because they do their hiring at this level very infrequently, compared to K12 executive search firms.
The executive search firms have the time and staff to conduct market research, which will give them informed insight to make their inputs (with regards to newly-created positions) on what skills to watch out.
5. Better Diversity and Inclusivity
Members of school and education boards may want to improve upon the diversity in their school administrations. Lack of diversity, may not necessarily be by out of design, but more like how the institutions have evolved over time.
Here is where the K-12 executive search firms offer additional value. I high-quality search firm will give a school board access to a much larger data set of candidates which increases the diversity and skillsets the board will have access to during the interview and hiring processes.
The executive search firms are cognizant of the overrepresented and underrepresented demographics in the school district administration.
Wrapping up
The role school superintendents play in K-12 schools is so crucial. They can make or break the success of a district. Therefore, they must be ‘cherry-picked’ from a very large set of interested applicants.
It takes trained and specialized eyes to identify the best of the best school superintendents out of the thousands currently in the workforce. With the responsibilities a superintendent has, it is imperative that only candidates with fir the needs of your specific district get hired. And executive search firms stand a better chance of having the right recruiting systems in place that will attract the top candidates and put these candidates through a rigorous vetting process.
The exercise of hiring professionals to steer the course of learning in schools is critical. As they determine the quality of students who will be joining the workforce. If the schools are graduating students not prepared for entry into the workforce or higher education, then you can most certainly expect these families and the economy to suffer.
For such reasons, it is imperative that school boards hire the best talent for their community. Executive search firms consistently will deliver better hiring results due to their experience and the time they have to focus on recruiting top talent to your critical superintendent vacancy.
Article provided by, K-12 Recruitment Group – a recruiting firm focused exclusively on filling K-12 administrative leadership positions throughout the USA
We welcome your inquiries….
Phone: 720-446-5700
Email: info@k12recruitmentgroup.com