PeopleAdmin’s K-12 Education TalentIndex helps schools, districts focus on student success by revealing the latest talent management trends and challenges

The talent management software company compiles data to offer the education community insights and guidance on the effective hiring, development, and management of top educators and staff.

AUSTIN, Texas— Nov. 8, 2016 — PeopleAdmin, a leader in talent management software for education, today released its K-12 Education TalentIndex, offering key insights into the talent struggles schools and districts face daily — from attracting and hiring top educators at a time of budget constraints and teacher shortages to maximizing teaching effectiveness in the classroom.
Solving for these and other common challenges, the report suggests, is often a matter of implementing available technology and data- and research-based best practices.

“The TalentIndex shows us that now, more than ever, technology, talent management expertise, and data are combining to play a pivotal role in our nation’s schools, as they strive to prepare students for a changing, globalized world,” said Kermit Randa, CEO of PeopleAdmin. “It still all comes down to having great teachers in the classroom.”

New tools and proven strategies, Randa said, can help human resource professionals and school leaders streamline processes and focus on evolving parts of the talent management life cycle — including assessing teacher candidates, onboarding them successfully, and tailoring their professional development.

The TalentIndex: A Comprehensive Report of K-12 Benchmarks, compiles dozens of talent management data points on primary and secondary education growth, trends, and challenges through surveys of K-12 education professionals. PeopleAdmin also used some of its own system data from customers.

“It’s nice to have some information that’s comparative as we look to technology to become more efficient,” said Renee Hyde, Ed.D., assistant superintendent of human resources at Papillion La Vista Community Schools in Nebraska. “TalentIndex data offers unique and useful information to help us make decisions moving forward.”

Today’s release of the K-12 TalentIndex follows PeopleAdmin’s September release of its Higher Education TalentIndex. PeopleAdmin is the only talent management company to serve the entire K-20 community.

The company serves more than 5,000 schools, school districts, colleges, and universities, and its software has helped educational institutions hire, develop and manage nearly 50 percent of all educators and administrators, who in turn impact the lives of more than half of all students in the U.S. and Canada.

“By collecting and analyzing data from kindergarten through higher education, PeopleAdmin is helping the education community at all levels better understand how to identify key talent strategies that support student achievement now and in the future,” Randa said.

Among the findings in the K-12 TalentIndex is that application hiring data indicates an overall decline in the number of applications per job posting, compared to past years … suggesting that the teacher shortage is here for most districts, or at least coming soon.

From 2014 to 2016, K-12 job posting volume increased 23 percent, but the average number of applications per job posting decreased 13 percent. The study also found that there is an increased focus on daily talent management tasks and teacher effectiveness, yet few schools and districts are using data and analytics to track performance metrics, such as diversity hiring, workforce planning and absence management, and professional development.

Schools that do gather and report performance data are better able to handle talent management challenges and secure needed investments in additional HR staff to tackle district priorities.

Among those surveyed, the runaway top talent management priority is attracting quality teachers. The biggest challenges to that goal are budget constrictions, shrinking teacher candidate pools, and difficulties with optimizing curriculum and investing in technology.

The report also shows that nearly 90 percent of K-12 professionals understand the value of using assessments to identify high-quality teacher candidates.

“Research shows that having a great teacher is one of the factors most likely to deliver significant student gains,” Randa said. “Schools focused on hiring quality teachers and offering ongoing professional development for all educators will likely see the most return on their investments, in the form of student success.”

About PeopleAdmin
PeopleAdmin is the leading provider of cloud-based talent management solutions for education. Its software enables customers to streamline the hiring process, onboard new employees, efficiently manage positions and employee performance, develop compliant and defensible audit trails, and utilize industry-leading reporting and data-driven predictive analytics. PeopleAdmin’s integrated talent management suite includes applicant tracking, faculty search committee management, position management, onboarding, performance management, professional development management, and workforce planning, as well as a first-of-its-kind teacher candidate assessment tool created in partnership with a consortium of award-winning scholars, respected universities and research partners. PeopleAdmin solutions are rapidly deployed, easy to use, and supported through a world-class customer service organization.