There is a sentence I hear too often in struggling schools: “We can't find teachers.” The phrase usually arrives after months of vacancies, emergency hiring, repeated job postings, substitute coverage, overloaded staff members, and increasingly desperate conversations about where else the organization might advertise. Eventually someone proposes another job board, another recruitment fair, a social-media campaign, or a redesigned careers page, as though the central problem is that talented educators simply have not heard that the school exists.
Sometimes the supply problem is real, and any responsible discussion of teacher hiring must begin there because the United States is experiencing substantial shortages, particularly in certain subjects, schools, and communities. Recent Learning Policy Institute analyses identify hundreds of thousands of teaching positions filled by educators who are not fully certified for their assignments, alongside tens of thousands of unfilled positions, while National Center for Education Statistics data show that many schools report difficulty filling vacancies with fully certified teachers. The teacher supply problem therefore exists, and pretending otherwise would be unserious.
Acknowledging a difficult labor market, however, does not absolve an individual school or district from examining whether its own systems are making that labor market unnecessarily harder. Two schools can recruit from the same metropolitan area and experience dramatically different staffing outcomes because they offer different compensation, leadership, working conditions, hiring processes, professional cultures, reputations, and reasons for talented people to stay. That is why the phrase “we can't find teachers” should trigger a diagnostic rather than a marketing campaign.
The First Recruitment Strategy Is Retention
The most overlooked fact in teacher recruitment is that the easiest vacancy to fill is the vacancy the organization never creates. If a school loses 20 percent of its teachers every year, the recruitment team begins every hiring season trying to replace one fifth of the instructional workforce before adding a single position. No careers page can make that model efficient because the organization is continuously replenishing talent it failed to retain.
Recent national research makes the retention problem difficult to ignore. Learning Policy Institute analyses show significant teacher movement and attrition, with higher turnover among early-career teachers, uncertified teachers, teachers in several shortage fields, and educators working in city, charter, and high-poverty schools. Compensation, school leadership, job satisfaction, and workplace conditions all influence whether teachers stay, which means retention cannot be separated from the daily quality of the organization itself.
The leadership relationship is particularly important because research has found substantially higher turnover among teachers reporting weak leadership support compared with teachers reporting strong leadership. Compensation matters as well, with higher cost-of-living-adjusted salaries associated with lower turnover probabilities. Those findings should fundamentally change the way organizations talk about recruiting because if teachers are leaving due to weak leadership, low compensation, unsustainable workload, insufficient support, or poor working conditions, replacing them without changing those conditions is not recruitment strategy; it is replenishment.
Every Vacancy Has a Story
Leaders should conduct what I call a vacancy autopsy before posting a position. The organization should understand why the seat is empty, including whether the previous teacher retired, relocated, was promoted, left education, transferred to another school, moved to a higher-paying district, escaped poor leadership, struggled with workload, or left because the role was badly designed. Those explanations matter because the solution changes depending on the cause.
Retirement creates a genuine replacement need, while repeated departures from one department may reveal a manager problem. A special education vacancy may reflect a national shortage, but a school losing three special educators in two years should also examine caseloads, compliance burden, planning time, paraprofessional support, scheduling, and leadership. Strong talent systems therefore separate unavoidable attrition from organizationally produced attrition instead of treating every empty seat as the same problem.
The national data reinforce this diagnostic approach because teachers who leave and teachers who move schools describe multiple reasons for their decisions, including dissatisfaction with administration, salary, job assignments, and the profession, as well as opportunities elsewhere. Teacher turnover is not produced by one universal mechanism, which means retention strategy cannot consist of one universal intervention. The strongest organizations know their turnover by department, manager, experience level, certification status, and reason for leaving.
Exit interviews can help, but they should not be the first time leaders ask how teachers are doing. Stay interviews are equally important because an organization should understand why its strongest people remain while those people are still available to answer. Leaders need to know what high performers value, what frustrates them, where they see unnecessary obstacles, and what might eventually cause them to consider leaving.
Marketing Cannot Outrun Reputation
Employer branding matters because candidates notice websites, social media, job descriptions, employee testimonials, recruitment events, communication quality, and the professionalism of an organization's hiring process. A school that looks disorganized to applicants can lose strong people before an interview ever occurs. But branding has limits because no organization can indefinitely market around the lived experience of employees.
Teachers know teachers, and candidates text friends, search online reviews, ask colleagues about principals, talk to former employees, and assess whether the promises made during recruitment resemble what happens inside the building. A beautifully produced recruitment video may attract attention, but it will not neutralize a reputation for chaotic leadership, constant turnover, weak student culture, or unreasonable workload. In that sense, retention and recruitment are the same reputation system viewed from two different sides.
Existing employees produce much of the information future employees use to decide whether the organization is trustworthy. Every teacher who leaves feeling respected can remain an ambassador, while every teacher who leaves feeling mistreated can become an informal warning system. The best employer brand is therefore operational because it is what working there actually feels like.
Speed Is Part of the Talent Strategy
Schools also lose candidates because their hiring systems move too slowly. Strong teachers frequently have multiple options, particularly in shortage fields, and organizations that take weeks to schedule interviews, require unnecessary interview stages, communicate inconsistently, or delay offers until budgets are finalized can lose candidates to employers capable of making decisions faster. The labor market does not wait for the school's internal bureaucracy to become convenient.
A serious talent system should therefore measure time to decision. Leaders should know how many days pass between application and initial contact, between initial contact and interview, between interview and decision, and between decision and written offer. They should also know how many strong candidates withdraw during the process and why.
Speed should not mean lowering standards because schools should continue conducting rigorous selection and a rushed poor hire can create substantial consequences for students and colleagues. The objective is to eliminate organizational delay rather than professional judgment. Hiring teams should know what they are assessing before interviews begin, use common criteria, distinguish nonnegotiable requirements from preferences, understand who has decision rights, and communicate promptly with candidates.
Stop Writing Jobs Nobody Wants
Organizations also create recruitment problems through the design of the jobs themselves. Some teaching positions have accumulated so many responsibilities that leaders would hesitate to accept them under the same conditions, including strong Tier 1 instruction, extensive differentiation, family communication, data analysis, compliance work, staff coverage, supervision, multiple meetings, student behavior management, new program implementation, intervention documentation, and additional duties that continue accumulating because almost nothing is ever removed. Then leaders describe the role as an opportunity for people who are passionate and willing to do whatever it takes.
Passion is not a staffing model because the job itself should be designed for sustainable excellence. This is where workload, planning time, class size, student support, curricular resources, administrative demands, and leadership quality become recruitment variables. Recent teacher workforce research has associated higher turnover with lower salaries, heavier workloads, principal turnover, greater reliance on underprepared teachers, and weaker resource conditions.
Before leaders conclude that nobody wants to teach, they should examine what exactly they are asking somebody to accept. A school can improve recruitment without changing a single advertisement if it makes the job itself more coherent, supported, and professionally sustainable. Job design is one of the least discussed and most consequential elements of the talent system.
Compensation Is Recruitment
Pay is not the only reason teachers choose jobs, but schools should stop discussing teacher recruitment as though compensation were somehow unrelated to the problem. Teachers have mortgages, rent, transportation expenses, childcare costs, student debt, medical expenses, retirement needs, and financial goals like professionals in every other field. Mission cannot permanently substitute for compensation.
Research on turnover is clear that higher salaries are associated with stronger retention, even though compensation does not operate independently of leadership and working conditions. That does not mean every district can immediately outbid every competitor because financial constraints are real and school leaders operate inside state funding formulas, collective bargaining agreements, charter budgets, pension obligations, benefit structures, and other constraints. It does mean leaders should stop pretending compensation is somehow outside talent strategy.
Total compensation also matters, including health insurance, retirement contributions, leave, tuition support, bonuses, stipends, housing assistance, childcare support, loan forgiveness, and other benefits. Employers should be careful, however, about using benefits rhetoric to distract from inadequate base pay because rent and groceries cannot be purchased with professional appreciation. The salary belongs in the recruitment conversation.
Preparation Is a Pipeline Strategy
Strong talent systems also build supply rather than merely consume it. Teacher residencies, student-teaching partnerships, apprenticeships, Grow Your Own programs, paraprofessional pathways, university partnerships, and structured pipelines can create longer-term access to qualified candidates. National teacher shortage research increasingly emphasizes affordable high-quality preparation pathways, mentoring and induction, competitive compensation, improved working conditions, and better workforce data as part of the solution.
This matters because schools often begin recruiting only after a position becomes vacant. By then, the organization is competing in the most expensive part of the talent cycle because it needs someone immediately. Stronger organizations build relationships with prospective educators before vacancies exist and know which local universities prepare strong teachers, which paraprofessionals may want to become certified educators, which alumni might eventually return as teachers, and which current staff members could grow into shortage-area positions with the right support.
The question changes from “Where can we find somebody?” to “How are we building the people we will need?” That is a stronger strategic question because it moves talent work from emergency response to workforce planning. Schools that build pipelines gain more control over quality, fit, preparation, and long-term supply.
The Principal Is the Chief Retention Officer
Human resources can run systems, but principals determine much of the day-to-day experience that makes teachers stay or leave. Teachers experience the organization through their immediate leaders, the quality of meetings, the usefulness of feedback, the predictability of discipline systems, the fairness of workload, the protection of planning time, and whether strong performance is recognized or simply rewarded with additional labor. Principals therefore occupy a central position in the talent strategy whether or not the district formally assigns them that responsibility.
This is why principal development and teacher retention should not be treated as unrelated agendas. Effective leaders create conditions in which teachers can perform difficult work without unnecessary organizational friction, and research linking leadership support to lower turnover should cause districts to view weak people management as a staffing risk rather than merely a leadership-development issue. Talent stability is one of the outcomes of strong school management.
Principals need to know who is likely to leave before spring. They should know which high performers feel underdeveloped, which early-career teachers are overwhelmed, which teams are experiencing conflict, which employees are carrying unsustainable workloads, and where additional support could change a teacher's trajectory. That is leadership, and it is also recruitment.
Build a Talent Dashboard
Schools should manage talent with the same seriousness they apply to academic data. A useful dashboard might include vacancies, time to fill, candidate volume, qualified candidate rate, offer acceptance, new-hire retention, overall turnover, regrettable turnover, turnover by manager or department, staff attendance, certification status, early-career retention, stay-interview findings, and employee experience measures. The purpose is not to reduce human beings to numbers but to make organizational patterns visible.
The dashboard should also connect recruitment to retention. If candidate volume increases while turnover worsens, marketing may be masking a deeper problem, and if offer acceptance falls, leaders should examine compensation, candidate experience, competition, and the clarity of the school's value proposition. If vacancies are concentrated in one department, investigate the department, while vacancies concentrated across an entire region or specialty may point more strongly toward an external supply problem.
The strongest organizations resist simple narratives because sometimes there truly are not enough qualified teachers, sometimes there are qualified teachers but they do not want the job being offered, and sometimes the organization finds them and loses them. Those are three different problems. Talent strategy improves when leaders diagnose which one they actually have.
Treat the Cause, Not the Vacancy
The national teacher shortage should create urgency, but it should also make local talent systems more disciplined. A difficult labor market means schools can afford fewer self-inflicted staffing problems, so retention, leadership quality, compensation, professional culture, hiring speed, preparation pipelines, and job design matter more rather than less. A constrained labor market punishes weak talent systems quickly.
Marketing still has a role because schools should communicate their mission, culture, results, opportunities, compensation, and professional experience clearly and competitively. But marketing belongs at the end of a much longer chain of organizational decisions, and before purchasing another recruitment campaign, leaders should ask why their current teachers leave, inspect the job, examine the hiring process, and determine whether the teacher they recruit will want to remain after arriving. Hiring is not simply the act of filling an empty classroom; it is the outcome of a talent system.
When the system is strong, recruitment gets easier because current employees stay longer, candidates hear better stories, decisions move faster, and the job itself becomes more attractive. When the system is weak, marketing merely helps more people discover the problem. The strongest staffing strategy therefore begins inside the organization before it ever reaches the labor market.
About the Author
Candido Brown is the founder and CEO of BetterEd Solutions, a school improvement, transformation, and growth firm helping our nation's underserved schools become happier, healthier, higher-performing places where every child can thrive. His work includes talent strategy, school leadership, organizational diagnosis, executive coaching, and the design of management systems that improve adult performance and retention. BetterEd approaches hiring as a full talent system encompassing recruitment, selection, compensation, job design, leadership, development, and retention.
Sources and Reporting Notes
This article draws primarily on Learning Policy Institute research on teacher shortages and turnover, including national findings connecting teacher turnover with compensation, leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, preparation, and working conditions, as well as National Center for Education Statistics reporting on school difficulty filling vacancies across teaching specialties. The article does not argue that teacher supply constraints are fictitious; the narrower thesis is that local recruitment outcomes are substantially influenced by organizational conditions that schools and systems can improve even within a difficult national labor market. The vacancy autopsy and talent-system framing are the author's management applications of that broader workforce research.
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