Tes has won a prestigious recruitment industry award for the ‘Best Online Candidate Experience’ for a jobsboard. The OnRec Online Recruitment Awards celebrate the success, growth, innovation, talent and achievements within the online recruitment industry. Tes was recognised by the judges for its work to reengineer and dramatically improve the traditional candidate experience for teachers.
Tes launched new online career profiles and a standardised and free application form based on the analysis of hundreds of teaching job applications and responses from thousands of teachers. The form automatically fills dozens of fields leaving the applicant with more time to perfect their personal statement, explaining why they are the right fit for a particular school and its values.
Craig Stevens, Chief Commercial Officer at Tes, said: “Tes is working hard to innovate and support schools and teachers with new technology that makes recruitment easier, saving time and ensuring the best candidates are not overlooked. It’s vital that we make applying for teaching jobs as simple as possible in shortage subjects and in particular regions. We are already seeing schools that use the new application form receive double the applications and I am delighted to see the work of our teams recognised.”
The innovations have already improved the experience for teachers and results for schools. An analysis of more than 9,000 applications found that teachers that began a standardised online application were around twice as likely to complete and submit it on Tes.com than those faced with an application designed by a school.
Schools can also add their own personalised questions to the form when they want additional information that is not normally required. As a result, schools benefit from a greater choice of candidates when filling vital roles—increasing their chances of hiring the best talent.
Up until now, schools’ application forms have largely been different, often lengthy and included a variety of different fields of information. As a result, according to YouGov research, 31% of job searchers said it took too much time to apply for positions, while 79% of job searchers believed it was important for recruitment channels to have a standardised job application process. Individual school applications are normally at least a dozen pages long with a short application window.