Building and Retaining a Strong Early Childcare WorkforcePosted by ruchi jain on April 12th, 2021 As a childcare management facility administrator, the choices you make greatly affect the lives of infants and toddlers. The early childcare workforce you choose will bond with your students. It’s an important facet of helping the children learn and grow. Additionally, it showcases your facility’s value to their parents. One challenge to staffing is that childcare providers all have slightly different methods and styles. You want to uphold the value promises you’ve made to parents and your belief and training. So let’s talk about the steps to finding great talent that aligns with your business. 1. Get the Word OutCast a wide net in your community to showcase your job opening. Don’t just pull a job description from the web though. While this can be a great starting point, this is your chance to clearly state your teaching methodology to ensure you don’t have to sit through interviews with individuals who don’t fit your business. If you have key differentiating factors like talents in lesson planning or creative crafts, put that in the job description and ask for samples of work. In many places, you can even request that they come up with a lesson plan or craft that they would do for your classroom, were they to get hired. Now post this job description on sites like Monster and indeed, but also consider community forums like churches or rec centers where local teachers might spend time. 2. Interview and Do Your Due DiligenceWrite your list of interview questions before you sit down with a candidate. This will help ensure you don’t forget to ask crucial questions that matter to you and that you stay in compliance by only asking legal questions. If you like the candidate, follow through and ask for references. Often the people that they’ll choose to list as references will be people who like them, but complete the reference check anyway. Ask leading questions about key things you liked or didn’t like about the candidate to ensure that they tell a consistent story, and listen for long pauses from the references to see if they’re thinking hard about how to cast the candidate in a good light. 3. Complete a Background CheckThese individuals will be spending time with your customers’ most precious possessions – their children. Ensure you’ve chosen well by having candidates submit to a background check once you’ve made a job offer. A background check will cost you a little bit of money, but it’s worth it in the long run to uphold the standards and quality of your facility and not have to go through a bad PR event due to a poor hire. How to Attract and Retain Your Early Childcare WorkforceWith these three steps, you’ve hopefully built a strong workforce. Now the next key is retaining that workforce so that you don’t have to constantly go through the hiring process. Here are perks that your workforce will enjoy having that can help you keep your best people:
Follow these steps and you should have a strong workforce that stays loyal to you for many years to come. Like it? Share it!More by this author |