Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Hiring, again...

The one area that has consumed most of my time to this point is in personnel. I feel like all I have done for the past month is interview and worry about who to interview and find out that I need to interview more folks. When I began working, I knew that I would need to hire 2 new second grade teachers and one new 4th grade teacher. Through a variety of circumstances, from resignations to asking for transfers to be rescinded, I have hired 3 second grade teachers, 1 fourth grade teacher, and I still am in the process of hiring another fourth grade teacher and one more third grade teacher. To add to that mix, I need to hire 2 new teacher assistants and one new office staff member (because of a promotion to the district office)!
At this point, I still have five vacancies to fill and there are only 4 weeks until the beginning of school...so the race is on.
I guess that I have come to the point of exhaustion with interviewing because in my previous position, I helped to interview around 100 candidates to fill positions at my previous school.
I found a great set of interview questions from Mike Rutherford (http://www.rutherfordlg.com/) from a series of seminars that I attended at the Emerging Leadership Academy. There are only 12 questions, but I am able to thoroughly screen candidates that I want to bring back for a second round interview. I have been fortunate that my staff has been willing to sit it on the second round of interviews to give their impression of the candidates. Their opinions have helped to validate the beliefs that I have regarding the candidates. I also believe that it helps to make the team more cohesive when decisions regarding personnel are shared. I hope to have all positions filled by the end of the week. It is ambitious, but necessary so that I can attend the Principal's Induction Program next week and not go completely insane :O)

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