Paper Title
Human Resource Management in Education: Recruitment and Selection of Teachers
Abstract
Education has been shown to be the foundation of social equity and economic progress,underpinning individual
and community, self-sufficiency and sustainability. The correlation between teacher quality and student education outcomes
has been well evidenced in previous research. The purpose of this study isto explore the potential use of Human Resource
Management (HRM) theory and practice to identify and selectquality teachers for the range of individual and contextually
different schools that exist within education systems. The variance between schools in their context, sector, socio economic
status and needs, is considerable, consequently individual schools have quite specific local needs when recruiting and
selecting teachers. The ability to draw on consistent evidence based practices may result in not only rigorous recruitment and
selection processes but also teacher retention. Effective recruitment, selection and retention of teachers has emerged, in
recent studies, to be one of the most crucial school improvement strategies. In order to understand how HRM practices might
improve recruitment and selection of teachers in independent schools it was necessary firstly to identify the HRM practices
being used. To this end an online survey of school leaders was conducted. The results of this survey indicated that a variety
of HRM processes were being utilized by school leaders at the functional level with little cognizance of the strategic
possibilities nor an HRM evidence based structure of practices. These resultsprovide a compelling reason for further research
and indicate there is great potential for use of HRM expertise and practices by school leaders for recruitment and selection of
teachers as part of a suite of HRM practices which may indeed lead to school improvement and eventually to improved
social and economic outcomes.
Keywords: HRM, recruitment and selection, teacher quality, organizational fit, school improvement, cultural fit, personality
testing, human capital