Education Recruitment Advertising: How to Review and Rethink Your Job Board Contracts

As the academic year ends, many schools, education recruiters, and multi-academy trusts are reviewing their contracts. It’s often seen as a routine task: check usage, renew the agreement, move on.

But in a market where candidate shortages persist and budgets are under pressure, renewing without reflection could be a missed opportunity.

Rather than asking ‘Should we renew this?’, a more powerful question might be: ‘Is this still working as well as it could?’

Reviewing Performance: Beyond the Basics

Contract renewals offer a valuable opportunity to stop and reflect. It’s about more than how many job adverts were posted or how many applications came through. Instead, ask:

• Were the applications relevant and appropriate for the roles?
• How many did we consider worth contacting (i.e. the longlist)?
• How many progressed to shortlist and registration?
• How much time did the team spend sifting through irrelevant applications, and what did that cost?
• How long did it take to fill each vacancy?
• Did the platform or provider genuinely reduce time and cost per hire?

Many generalist platforms report on total clicks or volume, but this doesn’t always align with what education recruiters need: fewer, better-matched candidates who stay .

Lisa Savage from the Alternative Provision, MIAG, shares:
‘The overall quality of candidates we are getting via Senploy is a massive improvement on any other job boards we have used in the past.’

The Value of Trialling Something Different

Renewals don’t have to be binary decisions. In fact, running a parallel trial during the renewal window can reveal the real performance of alternative candidate attraction channels.

For example, trialling a specialist job board that focuses on the education and SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) sectors can offer a very different experience from generalist platforms.

Senploy, a job board dedicated to education and SEND roles, currently ranks #1 on Google for most SEN-related job search terms and performs strongly for broader teaching support roles like Teaching Assistants. This visibility ensures jobs are seen by a targeted, education-engaged audience .

Recent data submitted by an education recruiter reinforces this point. Using a controlled data set of job adverts and success metrics, Senploy delivered the highest shortlisting rate from applications received, outperforming several leading generalist job boards.

To enable fair comparisons, Senploy offers a 3-month trial period , allowing recruiters and schools to track:

• Application relevance
• Time-to-hire
• Cost-per-hire
• Conversion to registration and interview
• Retention beyond the first term

This approach accounts for the natural rhythm of school recruitment and enables side-by-side comparisons based on meaningful data, not assumptions.

A Thoughtful Approach to Renewals

Contract renewals may feel like admin, but they’re actually strategic opportunities . Pausing to review performance, consider alternatives, and test new platforms can help recruiters and schools make smarter, more sustainable decisions.

Sometimes, sticking with your current partner is the right choice. But confirming that through evidence and insight brings peace of mind. Sometimes, a well-timed trial unlocks a better, more effective way to connect with the candidates your roles really need.

In fact, in education recruitment, a little FOMO can be a good thing . Exploring new tools or platforms, especially those proven to engage hard-to-reach candidates, might just be the key to finding the hard-to-reach candidates.