Two weeks ago, my boss, Gina, called me into her office to provide me with some additional work for the week. Among several other tasks, Gina wanted me to start the process of hiring additional teachers. Specifically, Gina wanted me to post the jobs externally, collect resumes, screen the candidates via a phone interview, schedule in person interviews with the top candidates, and sit in on the interviews. At this initial meeting, Gina warned me that hiring staff is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process. Although I usually take Gina’s words and advice seriously, I remember brushing them aside this time. These words seemed to go against my preconceived notions about the nature of hiring. In the hiring process, employers are the ones with the power and the applicants are the ones trying to impress the company or organization. Hiring is difficult and stressful for the applicants – not employers – right? Wrong. Throughout the past two weeks, I have learned that Gina was correct when she warned me about the challenges that lay ahead. Although I have faced several challenges during this process, the biggest challenge has been finding qualified, but no overqualified, candidates for the position.

Before starting this process, I always thought that we lived in an employer’s market: an economy with limitless qualified candidates and a scarcity of job openings. Although this may have been true during the Great Recession, this is not the state of the current employment market for early childhood educators. Although I have probably received over one hundred resumes for four positions, I easily eliminated about forty percent of them for either not having the minimum qualifications or for having red flags on their resume. After attempting to call the remaining sixty, about half of them never returned my calls or responded to my emails. Another ten I was able to eliminate for lack of professionalism or lack of interest on the phone. This left me with twenty candidates. Another five asked to be removed from consideration after finding another job, or discovering that we were hiring for full time, rather than part time or seasonal, employment. Therefore, in the end, a field of about one hundred applicants was dwindled down to about fifteen before we even got to meet them in person.

Even with fifteen candidates remaining, I suspect that additional challenges remain ahead. First, I cannot help but suspect that several of the candidates are overqualified. Although I work at an outstanding four-star facility that has to be a draw for any candidate, many of our candidates have held jobs more senior to the positions for which they applied. This wealth of overqualified candidates has led to an interesting situation in which we have appeared to be doing more of the “selling” than the candidates. During interviews, they have been the ones asking us questions, and we were the ones that felt the pressure to inform them of all of the exciting things happening at the CELC. This was not the dynamic that I was expecting and certainly did not make the process any less difficult.

In the end, between trying to stay organized with one hundred resumes floating around my desk and trying to find suitable candidates, hiring staff is shaping up to be one of the greatest challenges of my fellowship. At the same time, it has also led me to my biggest surprises. Although finding a job is not an easy or stress-free process by any means, it is not necessarily as easy as it appears for the employers across the table either.

(Note: The postings on this site are of my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Columbus Early Learning Centers)