Hays is working in partnership with the Examination Officers' Association, to help establish a sustainable professional exam office workforce in schools and colleges across the country.

When it comes to staffing exams, having skilled and flexible support is essential. Whether you are outsourcing all of your exams staffing or looking for additional cover for your existing pool, our bespoke packages aim to give you the flexibility and support you need, helping you to staff exams cost-efficiently and effectively.

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Following the roll out of phase 3 of the National Agreement on Raising Standards and Tackling Workload, head teachers are now responsible for recruiting exam officers to manage their schools examinations.

Many head teachers find it difficult to recruit for this area. It’s a job that they are not familiar with and it’s often done against a tight recruitment deadline.

Attracting the right candidates

When working to time pressures it’s important to make sure that you attract the right people with the right skills. Attracting the wrong type of candidates wastes your time as well as the applicants. It is therefore very important to understand exactly who you are looking for and to look for them in the right places.

The methods available to you for candidate attraction are much dependant on your budget and the time you have available. Often the cheaper options such as online job boards create the highest response rates but the responses are normally very mixed and it can take a long time to identify any potential candidates for the job.

Print advertising is a much more expensive route, the response received is much lower than online advertising but the quality of applicants is high. This unfortunately is reflected in the high price. Adverts can cost hundreds or thousands of pounds based on which publication you choose whereas online adverts start from around two pounds upwards.

Job board advertising can provide substantial numbers of candidates but there are draw backs. It opens up the challenge sifting a large number of candidates, often not suitably qualified. Because of this it is very important to be clear of the minimum requirements for the role in any advertising but also to sell the benefits of the role as strongly as possible to allow ensure it stands out to the quality applicants you need. In reviewing applications it is important to have a minimum set of expectations of what you are looking for, This will allow you to benchmark your candidates against each other.

The simplest and probably the most effective option is to use a recruitment company. A recruitment company will have a huge database of potential candidates, and will assign you a specialist recruitment consultant who will work to build and understanding of the skills you are looking for. Alongside their large databases recruitment agencies have access to most major job boards and CV databases and can pull out a shortlist of candidates very quickly. You can also be sure that an expert recruitment consutant will only the put forward for consideration candidates of the highest quality.

This saves huge amounts of time and costs. You will pay a fee once you have reemployed your right member of staff but in most cases is a much cheaper option that doing it yourself.