How Charter School Job Interview Process Improves Recruiting

"Erik: What did you learn about more effective interviewing going through the process at Democracy Prep Charter School? Andrew: There’s two things that I’ve learned, Democracy Prep does something unique, which I think is excellent. Obviously we interview teachers, new teachers every year as we’re growing, we’re adding ten teacher and we’re adding new schools so next we’re going to add thirty teachers and part of the interview process is there’s always a phone interview and then there’s a, in-person interview and then there’s a demo lesson and this is common for educators, when I interviewed for teaching jobs years ago I did a demo lesson where I turned in a lesson plan to my interviewer they said ‘This looks good’ and then they got me a group of ten or fifteen or a full class of kids to do this lesson on so I could be evaluated on what it was I would be doing in the job; makes perfect sense. We do the same at Democracy Prep for all of our teachers and we do it for our administrators as well, our non instructional positions all have to do a “demo lesson” and it’s some sort of task, for me it was analyzing a budget verses actual report and providing comments and analysis, something I would be doing in my job. When we interview for a new student registrar who’s going to do open houses we ask them to put together a Power Point presentation and then come and make a ten minute Power Point presentation on Democracy Prep so there’s always this demo lesson, this sample task that helps us sort out the skills, qualifications and the ability to get things done, of our candidates. It’s a great tool, it’s a great way to assess whether or not someone’s going to be a good fit and see how we think they’re going to work out. Erik: What’s the second one? Andrew: The second one is - this became really clear recently, we interviewed for a new position, a special projects coordinator and you think that means someone that’s going to take care of all kinds of things around the school you want someone who was a teacher, had five years teaching and didn’t want to be in the classroom anymore and we found this one candidate who had never been a teacher but had been lots of different places, interesting places in Ethiopia and Montana and had traveled… I don’t know if this is anything revolutionary but we thought that she had demonstrated an ability to get things done in all kind of unique places and never mind that she had never been in a school before we thought she could come in and get things done in our unique place, in Democracy Prep and three months on the team and she is terrific, not getting caught off the ball, getting things done with the professionalism that was clear on her resume even though she had never been in as school before or a position that exactly matched up with what we were doing. Erik: Wow that’s fascinating. So it wasn’t about industry experience it was more about the ability to get things done? Andrew: Right, which we could tell by talking about her previous experiences which were challenging and unique and I said ‘Well she’s going to be fine here’."