Schools eschew convention in hiring

Many are now skipping interviews and asking candidates to send video resumes

Numerous schools mushrooming in the city has meant a different kind of pitfall for existing schools — high attrition rate among teachers. Flooded with multiple applications for every vacancy, school managements are going the corporate way to recruit new staff.

They are skipping interviews and are instead asking candidates to send video resumes, and screening their profiles on business and employment-oriented social networking services. Even online interviews are being conducted.

Dakshayini Kanna, principal of Harvest International School, said the management decided to introduce the concept of video resumes as it would save time and energy for both the candidate and the school management. “People come for interviews from far away places and other States as well. So we want to call minimum number of candidates for the face-to-face interview,” she said.

Schools have now made it mandatory for applicants to send a one-minute video where they have to detail qualification, experience, interests, and capabilities. Most schools have 15 to 20 vacancies at the end of each year and some have received 50 video resumes.

“Earlier, we would get walk-ins of 10 candidates for every post. But now, as we are shortlisting candidates based on their videos, we need to interview only two or three for each post,” she said.

M. Srinivasan, chairman, GEAR Innovative International School,

said he schedules personal interviews throughout the year for teachers, and interviews at least three teachers a week. But for senior faculty positions, they schedule online interviews which they use as an elimination round, which is later followed by a personal interview.

Nooraine Fazal, CEO and managing trustee of Inventure Academy, said the school often screens the profile of the potential faculty member on employment-oriented social networking sites to screen candidates.

However, there are five rounds of face-to-face interviews after that, followed by classroom demo. She said in the last academic year, they had received 2,000 applications for 30 positions.