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K-12 IT Management: Making the Hiring Decision

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Ricky Gervais demonstrates how not to make an offer in the above clip from the British version of The Office.

This is the ninth in a series of posts on IT management for K-12 schools.

Your interview team has seen several candidates, you have gathered feedback from them, and you’re ready for the next step: making an offer. Here are the important considerations:

  1. You don’t have to make an offer. Is there anyone in the group who you really want to hire? It’s better to NOT hire someone you are not sure about and continue the search. Not matter the time of year or how desperate you may feel don’t make an offer you are not sure about. Trust your informed intuition, a.k.a. gut feeling. If the person doesn’t feel right for position, don’t make the offer.
  2. Bad hires cost a lot of money and emotional capital. Making a bad hiring decision is expensive financially and emotionally. Estimates of the financial costs of bad hiring decisions to organizations range from 30% of the new person’s salary to 5 times that salary.
  3. It’s your decision. As the hiring manager, it is your decision, but some people in the organization my possess veto power, such as the principal, superintendent, or head of school. They can say “no” but they should not be able to say “yes” over your objections. If they do this more than once, look for another job for yourself.
  4. Avoid analysis paralysis. Don’t let fear of making a mistake put you into analysis paralysis. Be chronically understaffed when you have unfilled positions puts your entire department at risk from overwork and under-performance. And if you are somehow able to maintain high quality standards while being understaffed for an extended period of time, some may conclude that you don’t need the headcount and take it away from you.
  5. Make a verbal offer. Call the candidate on the phone or meet with them to make a verbal offer. Convey your enthusiasm and eagerness for them to join your team. Some managers like to use a language common amongst sales agents called “the presumptive close,” but I find such language to be off-putting, pushy, and disrespectful. I prefer to listen carefully to the candidate’s response.
  6. Be prepared to wait, but not long. Many candidates will ask for some time to make a decision. This is reasonable. You have (presumably) taken time to reach your decision and so the candidate must be allowed some time, at least 24 hours, to reach a decision as well.  You will be eager for the candidate to commit and even minor delays may lead you to start re-thinking your decision. Be patient, but firm. Give the candidate a deadline and stick to it.
  7. Negotiate. Be ready to negotiate with the candidate. If negotiations is not your strong suit, find someone in your organization who can help you without undermining your authority. Don’t play the game that so many people identify as the car salesman tactic of needing to always “run this past my manager.” Know ahead of time the maximum salary you can offer and other negotiable benefits. Money is not the only thing you can negotiate about. Remember, you are hiring techies and educators. Access to the latest technology and the ability to to join professional associations and attend conferences may be worth more than cash to many candidates.
  8. Make a written offer. After verbal negotiations have concluded and you have a vernal acceptance from the candidate, it’s time to get a formal offer letter and, if required by your school, a contract to them. The offer materials should be generated by your HR department with your input. These are legal documents, and you need to make sure that everything is in order. In many schools, only authorized personnel can enter into contracts, so don’t be surprised if someone else needs to sign the offer letter. I suggest sending the offer by a means that will guarantee a quickly delivery and signature of receipt. Instruct the candidate to schedule a conference call with you and HR to review the materials to make sure that everything you have negotiated with them is accounted for. (Remember, you may have other finalists who are “hanging in the wind” that you have not officially rejected. If you have a strong #2 candidate, you don’t want the #1 candidate to take too long in officially accepting the offer.”
  9. Notify rejected candidates. When, and only when, you have a written acceptance in hand, notify the rejected candidates. I have sometimes  found this to be an awkward phase. You have probably invested time and energy into cultivating a group of finalists and they, in turn, have an investment in your school and perhaps even an expectation of an offer. You want these people to remain positive about your school despite the news that you are about to deliver to them. Here are some other thoughts about this phase in the process:
    • Candidates may press who as to why they were not chosen. Tread carefully here as you do not want to say anything verbally or in writing that could come back to haunt you should there be a dispute about any sort of discriminatory behavior on your part of anyone in the school.
    • Mention something positive, if you can, about their resume or interview that you especially liked. Everyone likes to hear something positive even within the context of disappointing  news.
    • Do not promise to keep their credentials on file if, in fact, your school does not have a system for doing so.
    • If you believe that the candidate was a good fit for the organization if not for this particular job (see previous post on organizational fit) let them know that and encourage them to remain in contact with the school.

I’d really like to hear from readers about other ideas in this area. Comments?

Other posts in this series:
Space: The First Frontier
Writing Job Descriptions
Using Technology to Manage Hiring
Where to Post Jobs
What to Say in Job Postings
Screening Resumes and Letters of Application
Phone Screening Applicants
Behavioral Interview Questions
Who’s on the Interview Team? 

K-12 IT Management: Who’s on the Interview Team?

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This is the ninth in a series of posts on IT management for K-12 schools.

Having compiled a list of behavioral and situational interview questions you wish to ask candidates, you’re ready to think about who should be part of the interview team that meets with the candidates. You will also want to think through the entire logistics of the candidate’s on-campus experience from initial greeting at your reception desk to their departure, meeting rooms, refreshments, breaks, and support materials and equipment.

Group Interviews
By group interviews I am referring to one candidate with multiple interviewers not multiple candidates in the same room at the same time. Interviewing multiple candidates simultaneously within the same room is not a practice I great experience with nor is it one I would recommend for education where a more personal touch is required.

There are several reasons to conduct group interviews for at least a portion of the candidate’s on-campus experience:

  • it is more time efficient, especially in schools where it is often difficulty to align teaching schedules of interviewers
  • group interviews provide the candidate with an opportunity to see the informal dynamics that operate within a team of colleagues, giving them a sense of the school’s culture
  • group interviews allow for several people to hear and interpret the same verbal and non-verbal messages from the candidate, and these multiple interpretations may result in a richer appreciation of the candidate’s remarks
  • group interviews also provide interviewers from multiple disciplines and departments to come together both before and after the interview to discuss the job opening and talk about what would make a successful candidate from their particular point of view
As with any group or team activity, it is necessary that roles be defined before meeting with a candidate, including:
  • who is leading and introducing the meeting; this person is also responsible for seeing that logistics are followed (see below)
  • which question(s) will be asked by which people
  • who will be taking notes or otherwise recording the meeting
  • who is the timekeeper and what is the time-frame that will allow the most important questions to be posed and how much time should be devoted to the the candidate’s questions for the team
  • interviewers should avoid monopolizing the conversation and allow the applicant to talk and to fully respond to the open-ended questions; the more the applicant talks, the more information the employer will obtain about the candidate

One to One Meetings
Group meetings are recommended when no one person in the group has veto power over the person being hired. Anyone who has that amount of sway in the decision making process should have a one-to-one meeting with the candidate. In addition to the hiring manager, the principal, superintendent, head of school, or some other administrative authority may hold veto power on hiring. Sometimes these authorities may just want to meet the candidate and relinquish decision-making authority to the hiring manager or will intervene only if there seems to be a lack of consensus among the interview team about a candidate.

As with group meetings, one-to-one meetings need to also be planned and the interviewer provided with questions to ask the candidates. Do not assume that your boss or any other senior administrator is a skilled interviewer. As the hiring manager you may determine that the appropriate role of a senior administrator is not so much to interview the candidate as it is to sell the candidate on the school. More about that later.

In your one-on-one meeting with the candidate you must be at the top of your game: cordial but focused, open to the candidate’s questions but determined to get clear answers to your own. You must have your “crap detector” on high alert, probing for real skills that may or may not underlie rhetoric. At the same time, you are assessing for if and how the candidate will enrich your department. In the long run it pays great dividend to find the right person and not accept someone who you think may work out. As Joel Spolskys writes in Smart and Gets Things Done, “Don’t lower your standards no matter how hard it seems to find those great candidates.”

Between one-on-one and group meetings, you should shoot for anywhere from six to ten people to have seen a candidate, including return visits, before making a decision.

Interview Logistics
How the day unfolds for candidates is a reflection of you, the hiring manager. You want the day to go off like clockwork to reflect the professionalism of your organization and to save the time of you, your staff, and the candidate. As I have said before, “how it is comin’ in is how it is bein’ in.” So make sure the details are covered:

  • One week prior to the interview make sure that all of the interviewers have the candidates’ credentials on hand and pester them to read them.
  • If necessary, hold a pre-meeting with interviewers to introduce them to the questions they are to ask, review “illegal” questions that may not be asked, and to clarify the meeting schedule and roles. If you have an experienced group, this can be accomplished via email or through your talent management software system (see previous post, Using Technology to Manage Hiring).
  • Be sure to reserve rooms, double-check interviewers schedules, arrange for refreshments in the room(s), allow for bathroom breaks, and alert the reception desk to be prepared for the candidate.
  • If the candidate will be presenting while on campus, make sure that they have the materials (white boards, projectors, etc.) that they will need and have backup systems available. If guest internet access is necessary, make sure that is up and working before the meeting.
  • Clarify what is supposed to happen after each one-on-one or group interview. I generally ask that interviewers not spend too much time talking with one another before sending me their impressions; impressions which can be on an interview rubric you have created and distributed or more informal. How do you want the feedback to come to you? I recommend using email or your talent management software, keeping in mind that any records could potentially be subpoenaed.

Selling the School
I mentioned above that one purpose of an interview is to “sell the school.” By this I mean that you want all candidates, even those who you can tell within a few minutes were a mistake to bring in, to leave the school with a positive impression that will enable them to be good will ambassadors on your behalf.

There is an important difference between selling the school and trying to convince a particular candidate to join your school. With the former you are conveying a general sense of the organization, its mission, and its fit within the educational community. You are candid about the school’s strengths and its challenges. In the latter case, you go beyond these messages to enumerate the reasons why your position and the candidate are well suited to one another. You are helping them see how their particular set of skills would contribute to the overall organization and how the organization will help the candidate fulfill their professional and personal goals. It’s a courtship.

Demonstrations of Proficiency
 In a future post I will describe how schools can use demonstrations of proficiency as part of the interview process, including formal presentations, problem sets, and tests of candidates to assist in hiring decisions. 

Other posts in this series

Space: The First Frontier
Writing Job Descriptions
Using Technology to Manage Hiring
Where to Post Jobs
What to Say in Job Postings
Screening Resumes and Letters of Application
Phone Screening Applicants
Behavioral Interview Questions

K-12 IT Management: Behavioral Interview Questions

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This is the eighth in a series of posts on IT management for K-12 schools. Before we get to the logistics of how to approach the on-campus (in person or virtual) interview of job candidates it is important to consider the questions that are to be asked, who is going to ask them, and follow-up questions to candidates’ responses. In my career I have been interviewed dozens of times, and been in interviews with candidates hundreds of time, and it has been my experience that on both sides of the table you can tell when interviewers are prepared and who are simply flying by the seat of their pants. The latter are likely to start with questions such as these:

  • Refresh my memory on the highlights of your career experience.
  • Tell me a little bit about yourself.
  • What makes you think that you’d be a good fit for this job?
  • What is your greatest strength? Your greatest weakness?
  • How would you describe yourself?
  • Are you a team player?
  • What do you like most about [fill in the blank].

One of these question at the start of the interview is fine as an icebreaker, but if these are the only types of questions that are asked throughout the entire interview, you will have wasted the time of everyone in the room.

Behavioral and Situational Questions
A much better approach to interviewing is to ask questions that require the candidates to state what they have done in a particular circumstance in their past (behavioral questions) or to ask what they would do if confronted with a particular circumstance in the future (situational questions). Behavioral questions “are past-oriented in that they ask respondents to relate what they did in past jobs or life situations that are relevant to the particular job relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities required for success. The idea is that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance in similar situations. By asking questions about how job applicants have handled situations in the past that are similar to those they will face on the job, employers can gauge how they might perform in future situations.”1 Behavioral questions may work better with more experienced candidates whereas situational questions may work better for entry-level applicants with less job or life experience to draw upon. Behavioral questions usually start something like this:

  • Give me an example of…
  • Tell me about a time that…
  • Describe a situation in which…
  • Have you been in a circumstance when…
  • What did you do when…

Each behavioral question is designed to elicit a description of past behaviors on the part of the candidates. Some candidates may not be used to behavioral questions, and therefore I suggest that you (a) give them time to think about an example, (b) be comfortable with silence, and (c) be ready with follow-up questions to probe their responses for clarification, questions such as:

  • Walk me through your decision-making process.
  • What was your reaction?
  • How did it all work out?
  • What alternatives did you consider?
  • As you think back on this, what are your major take-aways?

Keep the candidates on point. If they start to answer in generalities redirect them to the question, letting them know that you are asking for a specific situation and not generalizations.

Situational questions are much like behavioral questions, simply set in the future.

  • What would you do if…
  • Let me give you a situation and you tell me how you would go about solving it…
  • Here’s a hypothetical problem. Let’s say that…

Be ready with situational follow-up queries to probe the candidates’ thinking, such as:

  • How did you come to this decision?
  • What alternatives are there if your response doesn’t work out?
  • How is your response better for the end user? The school?
  • Are you comfortable with your response as a precedent for similar situations in the future?

Sample Questions by Position
Below are some possible questions for use with several typical positions you would find in a school IT department: Director of Technology, Network Manager, Webmaster, Academic Technology Coordinator, and Help Desk. Questions are behavioral unless otherwise indicated. Some specific follow-ups are suggested, but you can also use any of the general follow-up questions listed above. You may find that some questions are appropriate for several positions.

Director of Technology

  1. Prioritization. Give me an example of a time in which you needed to choose between two or more important priorities in making budget decisions wherein the organization could only fund one of them. Follow-ups: With who did you consult?  What “tipped the scale” for you in making your decision? How did the decision affect the organization?
  2. Employee performance. Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone you were managing who was not performing to standard? Follow-ups: How did the situation work out?  Describe your experience with performance plans. Describe your experience in terminating or laying-off employees. 
  3. Negotiations. Tell me about a time when you needed to negotiate something. It could be costs for equipment or software, salaries, or even a conflict between two people. Follow-ups: Would you describe the outcome as having a “winner” and a “loser?” Did the outcome affect any subsequent relations with the persons involved? What was your emotional state during the negotiations?
  4. Communications. Managers often have to communicate with different groups within an organization. Aside from the people they manage, K-12 IT managers must relate with faculty, staff, other administrators, parents, vendors, board members, and so on. Describe a situation in which you had to deliver the same basic message, but to different audiences. How did  you tailor your remarks for each group? Follow-ups: How did you use different media to make your point? Did you prepare differently for each audience? How do you mix different communication forms (oral, written, multimedia) to get your message across?
  5. Organizational structure. There are a number of different organizational structures in which the K-12 IT function can operate, for example within business operations, faculty, the library, the principal’s or superintendent’s office. Describe the setup from one of your past positions and the pros and cons associated with it. Follow-ups: Where do you see IT best fitting in school organizations of the future? How might cloud computing and software as service (SAS) models affect the reporting relationship of IT departments within 21st century schools? 
  6. Professional development. Professional development for faculty is usually the subject of intense interest and frequent in-service programs in schools. What have you done to address technology professional development of non-teaching staff: those in back-office positions such as accounting, human resources, fundraising, maintenance, transportation, and so on? Follow-ups: What was the outcome? Did the PD of staff and that of faculty have any common elements? What special needs did non-teaching staff have?
  7. Budgeting. Describe the system you have used to forecast and manage budgets. Follow-ups: From whom do you seek advice and input in creating a budget? How do you approach salaries? Describe the equipment replacement cycle that you have used. How far out do you forecast expenses? What have you done when actual expenses were going to exceed your budget?
  8. Hiring. What was the most successful hiring effort that you have led? Follow-ups: How did this process differ from others? What were you able to take from that to apply to other hiring situations? Where does hiring rank in the multiple priorities that confront managers?
  9. Strategic planning. Describe a time when you had to develop and present plans that anticipated new technologies not yet in use in your workplace. How did you go about researching them and creating a case for early experimentation and/or pilot programs? Follow-ups: What were the budget implications for the new technology? How did you convince others that something may be worth investigating? What happened as a result of your trial?
  10. Thought leadership. Who are the thought leaders in Information and Instructional Technology that you listen to and follow? Follow-ups: Describe your use of social media to discuss IT and educational technology and leadership issues with other professionals. What conferences do you like to attend? What makes them worth the time and expense?

Network Manager

  1. Troubleshooting. Describe a time when you experienced the failure of a mission-critical system in your networking or server environment. What were the steps you took in troubleshooting the issue, consulting with colleagues and/or vendors, communicating with system users, and restoring systems to their proper functioning? Follow-Ups: What did you learn from this problem? What steps did you take to minimize the chances of it recurring?
  2. Documentation. Describe a time when someone else had to rely on your documentation to address a technical issue? What happened? Follow-ups: Was the documentation on paper or online? Were they able to resolve the issue from the documentation alone or did they call or email you for clarification? What systems do you like to use to create your documentation?  What technical systems do you believe are critical to be well documented? Was there a time when lack of documentation adversely affected your department’s operations? What was the result and follow-up?
  3. Systems integration. Describe a situation in which you had to rely on different systems communicating with one another through a common protocol or had to create your own mechanism for data exchange. Follow-ups: What directory standards have you used? Why did you choose that one? How have you used open-source software in your postion?
  4. Back-ups. Most system administrators are familiar with backup procedures and recognize their importance within an enterprise. End users are often less fastidious about backing up their data. Describe the approach you have taken in the past in working with end users to assure that their data is properly backed-up. Follow-ups: What policies, procedures, software or hardware solutions did you employ? What was the outcome when you had to restore end-user data? Describe a situation in which data was irretrievably lost.
  5. Security. Describe the elements that comprise a network, server, and end-user computer/device security system to maintain system integrity and information confidentiality including physical security, hardware, software, and human factors. Follow-ups: Talk about a security breach, large or small, that you had a role in resolving. What was the situation? How did it happen? What steps were taken to mitigate the damage? 
  6. Ease of use. Describe a time when you had to balance the need for security and ease-of-use for your end-users. What was the issue and how was it resolved? Follow-ups: How do you work with employees and students to enlist them in your efforts to maintain a secure computing environment? Should employees have administrator access to their computers? What about students?
  7. Cloud-based services. (situational) How do you see the mix of site-based services and cloud-based services changing over the next five years? Follow-ups: What are the pros and cons of site-based versus cloud-based services for the IT professional? For end-users? How might cloud-based services impact networking needs in a school?
  8. Trade-offs. A commonly cited conundrum in information technology is that when it comes to installing new systems you can: get it fast, get it cheap, or get it really high quality. Describe a time when you were involved in choosing a new technology system. Did you find this old adage to be true? What were the trade-offs, if any, that you had to make? Follow-ups: Is it ever possible to satisfy all three? Most schools have limited funding, does this mean that high quality will always be difficult to achieve?
  9. Software releases. Describe the approach to installing, testing, and releasing major network patches and upgrades. Follow-ups: Talk about a time when you had to regress to an earlier version. What happened? What are your pre-release testing procedures? What criteria do you use in determining that an upgrade is worth the time and effort to roll out?
  10. Schools vs. businesses. (situational) Describe what is (or might be) different and what is the same between IT in a business setting and IT in a school setting. Follow-ups: How do the missions of schools and businesses differ? Are “best practices” situation dependent or universal?

Webmaster

  1. Websites and web applications. Describe the websites and web applications that you have worked with, including any interoperability. Follow-ups: Which systems were hosted in-house and which systems were cloud-based? How did the systems communicate with one another? Who was responsible for the “big picture” of all of these various systems?
  2. Content and content management. Describe your role in creating and managing the content of your web site(s). Follow-ups: What content management system did you use? What were the pluses and minuses of this system? Who else was responsible for content? How did you deal with multiple content authors?
  3. Social media. Describe your role in working with work-related social media. Follow-ups: What was your role in creating and pushing content to social media outlets? Describe how you responded to social media messages. Give an example of how you deal with any social media “attacks” or negative messaging about your organization.
  4. Design. Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision about web site design. What were the issues and trade-offs, and how did you determine what to do? Follow-ups: Who else was consulted in making the decision? How did the design work out? What changes were made as a result of end-user feedback?
  5. Metrics. Describe how you gather feedback about the site using site metrics. What metrics do you consider to be the most important? Follow-ups: How have you made changes to a web site based on metrics? Which metrics, if any, are irrelevant in a school setting?
  6. Maintenance. Talk about how you maintain a website to assure that the content remains fresh and accurate. Follow-ups: What tools do you use to check for dead links? How do you create pages that self-expire on a given date? 
  7. Multimedia. Describe how you have incorporate multi-media into web sites, including the types of media and means used to present it to users. Follow-ups: What alternatives did you consider for video content and what did you choose to use? How did this work out? Did you promote your organization’s multimedia content on other web or social media sites? 
  8. Usability. How did you go about determining the usability of your web site? Follow-ups: Describe any usability studies you conducted. Tell me about the experiences that web site visitors with limited vision or other physical impairments had with your web site. What web standards guides your work?
  9. Security. Tell me about a time when you had to work with internal or external resources to address security concerns associated with your work. What was the issue, and how do you go about resolving it? Follow-ups: What are the security considerations for software or practices such as Java plugins, Adobe Flash, passwords, single sign-on (SSO), and https. What do you consider to be the greatest threat to web security? What steps did you take the ensure the privacy of end-user data?
  10. Reliability. Describe how you measure reliability of your web site and services. Follow-ups: What automated systems did you use to alert you to possible problems? How did you work with other IT staff to make sure that Internet connectivity and internal web site servers were up to industry standards? What level of service agreements did you insist upon for external vendors?

Academic Technology Coordinator

  1. Technology integration. Describe a successful technology integration project that you are especially proud of. Follow-ups: What was the “secret sauce” that made this project turn out so well? What lessons did you take away from this regarding other technology integration projects? Describe a time when a project did not go so well.
  2. Leadership and vision. (situational) Imagine that you are ten years into the future in a technology-rich American school. How would this school look different from a typical classroom of today? Follow-ups: What led you to this particular vision? What pre-conditions would be necessary for this vision to come to pass? What could be done today to start on the path towards this vision?
  3. Educational applications. Provide an example from your past when you were able to recommend a focused educational application or web site that was superior to general desktop tools that contributed significantly to teaching and learning. Follow-ups: Describe how you have used educational gaming, science probeware, GPS mapping, or robotics in teaching and learning.  
  4. STEM. Describe a cross-curricular, multi-disciplinary STEM project that you initiated or assisted with. Follow-ups: What was your exact role? How did the curriculum planning process work? What were the take-aways? Did the project spur interest in similar efforts?
  5. Assessment. Tell me about a time when you helped a teacher use technology as part student assessment, something beyond the simple use of grade book software. Follow-ups: Was this individual or group assessment? Was the technology component assessed separately from the project content? What was your role in designing the assessment rubric?
  6. Student co-curricular activities. Provide an example of a student club or co-curricular activity you were involved with that went particularly well. Follow-ups: What was the extend of your involvement? What other adults were involved? What could have gone wrong but didn’t? How did you maintain student engagement?
  7. Standards. Tell me about a time when you used standards such as ISTE NETS, P21, or other technology standards in designing professional development activities for educators. Follow-ups: Which standards did you use? What led you to make this choice? Who else was involved in making this decision? What was the outcome?
  8. Change. Describe a situation in which you were able to change a negative opinion of educational technology to a more positive one. Follow-ups: How do you determine what might be the right approach to use with a teacher? Tell me about a situation where you have failed to influence someone in the desired direction. How do you approach working with change-resitant users?
  9. Acceptable use. Handheld portable devices are increasingly being used in schools in both official and unofficial capacities, creating IT and classroom management challenges. Describe a time when you had to deal with inappropriate use of a portable device by one or more students. Follow-ups: How do you approach the subject of “acceptable use” policies? How might the definition of acceptable use be changing? What role should students and parents play in determining acceptable use?
  10. Online learning. Describe an outstanding online experience you have had, either as a student or as a leader. Follow-ups: What are the hallmarks of a great online experience? What makes an online experience fail? At what age should students make use of online instruction? What is the role of online learning in K-12 schools?

Help Desk

  1. Diagnose and solve technical issues. Tell me about a time when you were presented with a technical glitch (hardware or software) that was difficult to diagnose. What did you do when normal diagnostic procedures failed to yield the expected result? Follow-ups: With whom did you consult? How did you keep the user(s) informed of progress on resolving the issue? What was the outcome? How did you document the problem?
  2. Hardware repair. Describe your experience in making simple hardware repairs. What components have you replaced or fixed in laptops, computers, printers, copiers, or other devices? Follow-ups: How did you acquire these skills? What tools do you use to diagnose hardware failure? What resources do you rely upon that guide you in making repairs?
  3. Inventory. Tell me about your experiences in receiving, tagging, inventorying, and tracking new equipment in an organization. Follow-ups: Describe a time when equipment appeared to be missing. What was the outcome? How did you use bar-codes in your inventory process? How were assets tracked in your organization?
  4. Disk images. Describe a time when you found an error in a disk image. Follow-ups: How do you perform quality assurance on disk images? Describe the step-by-step process you use in creating a new disk image. What disk image and management tools have you used? How do you deal with different drivers and operating systems?
  5. Preventive maintenance. Describe a time when preventive maintenance processes you had in place warned you of an imminent hardware failure before it could become a serious problem. Follow-ups: What systems do you like to use for preventive maintenance? What do you recommend to end-users to enlist their assistance in preventive maintenance? When a computer comes for repair or other problems, what other work do you routinely perform before putting it back into service?
  6. AV support. Tell me about a time when you were providing technical support for an event and there was an equipment failure of some sort. What happened and how did you address it? Follow-ups: How do create contingency plans in case of equipment or connectivity failures? How do you check that all AV systems for a presentation are in place and functioning correctly? How do you prepare for outside presenters who bring their own equipment and/or content for use?
  7. Help desk software. Tell me about your practices with help desk software systems. What were its primary functions and how did you make us of it? Talk about a specific feature that made your job considerably easier (or harder). Follow-ups: How did end-users interact with the system? How did the system interact inventory, preventive maintenance, disk imaging, or other help desk tasks? Did you manage the help desk queue or were tasks assigned to you by someone else?
  8. Computer labs, carts, and loaners. Provide an example of how you worked with a teacher to support a group of students in a computer lab or in a classroom using a laptop cart. Follow-ups: How did you deal with problems the students may encountered that required your intervention? What systems did you have in place to make sure that the lab was ready for students to use? Where did students store their files, and what were the pros and cons of that system? What systems did you have in place to make sure that labs would not serve as entry-points for computer malware?
  9. Consumable supplies. Describe how you manage consumable supplies (such as paper, toner, batteries). Follow-ups: What systems do you use to alert you that certain consumables may need replacement soon? How do you track use of consumable supplies to help control costs? What procedures do you follow to make sure that e-waste is properly disposed of?
  10. Work and storage areas. It departments can often have an unkempt, even messy look to them. Describe how you have organized your work area so that tools, current projects and repairs, trouble tickets, and the like are maintained in an orderly fashion that allows you and others in your department quick and easy access to needed tools, equipment, and supplies without compromising physical security. Follow-ups: Describe the system you used for organizing spare parts and tools. Describe how you set-up staging areas for new equipment. Describe your practice for maintaining secure storage areas.

Soft Skills

The behavioral questions provided above are in large measure designed to elicit responses for sets of job responsibilities. Equally important, and perhaps arguable as important in a school setting, are “soft skills,” what Wikipedia defines as ”relating to a person’s ‘EQ’ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient), the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people. Soft skills complement hard skills (part of a person’s IQ), which are the occupational requirements of a job and many other activities.”

Listed below, courtesy of my brilliant daughter and organizational management expert, are examples of soft skills questions that can and should be part of interviews for any position within your school.

  • We’ve all had occasions when something that was our responsibility escaped our attention at work. Give me an example of when this happened to you and how you handled it.
  • Give me an example of when you took initiative to improve a process or situation.
  • Tell me about a time when you had to adjust quickly to a significant change in priorities. How did the change affect you? What did you do?
  • Not all organizational changes are clearly explained and/or communicated. What have you done when you found out about an unexpected change or were confused by a change?
  • Tell me about a time when you had to change your plans to help a peer at work. How did it affect you? What did you do?
  • Sometimes we need to make changes when the way we’ve been doing things is no longer effective. Tell me about a time when you had to change your approach or method of work. What did you do? What were the results?
  • Tell me about a time you had to climb a steep learning curve. How did you approach the new learning?
  • Tell me about a time when you felt overwhelmed by a situation at work. How did you respond?
  • Walk me through a situation in which you asked a lot of questions of several people to get the information you needed to make an effective decision. How did you know what to ask?
  • Describe a situation in which you needed to analyze and interpret a situation in order to make a recommendation.
  • Sometimes we have to make decisions very quickly. Tell me about a time when you made a decision TOO quickly – what happened? 
  • Give me an example of an idea you had to improve your organization’s processes. How did you come up with the idea? What happened?
  • What strategies have you used to encourage others to challenge established assumptions?
  • Tell me about the greatest lengths you’ve gone to in order to satisfy a user.
  • Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a user who made unreasonable demands. What did you do?
  • Tell me about a situation in which you had to understand the exact nature of user needs or problems. Walk me through the situation and what you said to draw out the information you needed.
  • Tell me about a particular user and how you went about establishing a relationship of trust and respect.
  • What have you done to understand a user’s point of view about a problem? Please give me an example.
  • Tell me about the most memorable presentation you made in the last year. 
  • Tell me about how you have adjusted your presentations to different audiences. Give me a specific example.
  • We’ve all made presentations in which something went wrong – tell me about a memorable time when something went wrong.
  • Describe a time when you had to provide support for an end-user who was using a computer or device that you were less familiar with. Follow-ups: How did you approach the problem and what was its resolution?
  • Describe a time when you had a major disagreement with a subordinate, co-worker, or your supervisor. What steps did you take to resolve the issue and what was the outcome.
  • Describe a time when you have worked (or volunteered) with a mission-driven organization, such as a non-profit, volunteer organization, school, place of religious worship, etc. What brought you to that place? How important was the organization’s mission to your job or volunteer satisfaction?
  • Describe the best boss you have ever had. What were the characteristics that made that person stand out?

Other posts in this series:

Space: The First Frontier
Writing Job Descriptions
Using Technology to Manage Hiring
Where to Post Jobs
What to Say in Job Postings
Screening Resumes and Letters of Application
Phone Screening Applicants

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_interview#Behavioral_questions ↩

K-12 IT Management: Phone Screening Applicants

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This is the seventh in a series of posts on Human Resources for Information Technology Managers.

Having sorted through resumes and letters of application for your technology department opening you may find yourself wanting to phone screen candidates to whittle down the numbers a bit more before conducting on-campus interviews. Online interviews, by phone or videoconference, can be very time-efficient. As with the sorting and scoring that occurred in the previous step, the hiring manager can delegate this step to a trusted colleague or perform it personally. Under most circumstances I recommend that hiring managers make such calls.

Logistics
While I recommend that hiring manager conduct the calls, there’s no reason why they need schedule them. Anyone knows who has tried to coordinate the appointment calendars of several people knows that this can prove to be time-consuming. I recommend that the scheduler not use email for this step, but instead call the candidates to make the appointments. Be prepared to offer several different days and times based on the hiring manager’s schedule. Be reasonably accommodating to candidates’ needs, especially if they need to exercise discretion with their current employer or reside in a time zone different from your own.

Allow for ten to fifteen minutes before the scheduled call to test connections and make sure that hiring managers and anyone else on the call are settled into a quiet space before actually starting the interview. You will also want to allow for 20-30 minutes following the call for hiring managers to make notes and, if there were others on the call, discuss the interview.

Video or Phone?
My personal preference is video calls as they can convey so much more information than voice alone can. One can pick-up on non-verbal cues and clues that are more opaque in voice only communication, especially the so-called soft-skills of communication styles, friendliness, openness, professionalism, optimism, humor and so on.

However, video will also reveal characteristics of the candidates such as race, ethnicity, handicapping conditions, age and other “protected class” attributes that could trigger bias in some interviewers. Such bias is unethical and illegal. Be sure to treat the candidates as if they are in the room with you, making sure that neither you nor anyone else involved with the call engages in any discriminatory non-verbal behavior or off-screen messaging.

Having declared my predilection for video, lat me also say that a good phone connection is vastly superior to an interview with poor video performance. Teleconferencing company Polycom has a practical guide for good video conferencing should you want to review checklist prior to the call.

Recording the Interview
You may wish to record the interview. Screen capture software makes this very easy for video and audio conference calls made through a computer. A recording also makes it easier for you to review what was said to make sure you have an accurate recollection for your notes and to share the interview with others involved in the interview process.

However, recordings of this kind are subject to certain federal and state laws which may not be easy to sort out. Your school’s attorney may need to provide guidance. One place to start for advice on recording phone calls is the Citizen Media Law Project which cites relevant federal and state statutes.

Phone Screen Rubric
In my previous post I wrote of the need to use rubric for screening resumes and letters of application. You will want to use a different rubric for the phone screen, one that clarifies any significant questions you may have and which looks at the previously mentioned “soft skills” that can’t be easily assessed by simply reading the candidates’ materials.

Listening and Selling
This is also your opportunity to listen carefully to the candidates’ questions and to “sell” your school and why it is such a great place to work. Have the major points of your pitch outlined before the meeting, preferably engineered to what you believe may be the specific interests of the candidate.

Salary and Benefits
My feeling salary and benefits should be discussed in person with candidates. If it comes up during the phone screen, speak in vague terms and only if candidates initiate the question.

Discuss Next Steps
Candidates who are phone screened know that they have already passed one hurdle. It is appropriate to tell them where you are in the hiring process and a general timeline for making decisions about next steps. Hiring managers will usually know within a day of the phone screen if they are interested in going to the next step, which might be additional phone interviews or even moving to on-campus interviews. My advice is to not drag out this step, but let the candidate know as soon as you have made a go/no go determination. It’s up to you if you deliver the news via email or a phone call. If you have the time, a phone call is more respectful even if it may feel awkward.

Others in the IT Management series:
Space: The First Frontier
Writing Job Descriptions
Using Technology to Manage Hiring 
Where to Post Jobs
What to Say in Job Postings
Screening Resumes and Letters of Application

 

K-12 IT Management: What to Say in a Job Post

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This is the fifth in a series of posts on Human Resources for Information Technology Managers.

Having identified where you want to post your job opening, you are now faced with what to write in it.

In my experience, most job openings seem to be written by formula, and a dull one at that:

[Insert school here] seeks a (choose adjective(s) here: dynamic, innovative, experienced, creative, etc.] for the position of [insert boring job title here]. [Insert School here] is a [insert adjective(s) here: leading, rigorous, challenging, etc.]  located in [insert chamber of commerce description here, e.g., dynamic, peaceful, affordable, beautiful.] blah, blah, blah.

At this point, the text usually starts to list qualifications, requirements, and job duties which no one person could possibly perform and also lead anything resembling a normal life. You might as well tack on “walks on water and then turns it into wine, heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, and is willing to die a horrible death.”

Despite these unearthly expectations, people still apply for these jobs because (1) it’s a terrible job market and (2) they stop reading after the first couple of items.

But let me be clear: Job  postings are not always about the applicants. Sometimes its about the candidates who see your posting but don’t take action.

Steve Jobs reputedly hired John Scully away from Pepsi by asking him “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” While many people may argue that Scully’s tenure at Apple was a really bad hiring decision, Jobs question was nonetheless one heck of recruiting ploy. The query altered Scully’s mental framework. Knowing how to frame a question, or how to frame a job posting, can make the difference between finding good candidates and great candidates; between the solid and the spectacular.

Consider using different text depending on where you are posting the position. For example, on your school’s web site you may reasonably expect that candidates are interested in K-12 education in your geographical area. You can reasonably infer to use text that is more in keeping with other job postings and overall marketing message of the institution as a whole.

On job boards, especially those frequented by geeks, perhaps you’d like to be a bit more experimental and bold.

You could try issuing a challenge:

  • Think you’re re really smarter than a third grader? Prove it!
  • Did high school suck for you? Make it better.
  • Would you rather fix the computer for some marketing nerd who could care less about you or thirty kids who think you’re the goddess of computerdom?
Or you might try appealing to a candidate’s sense of public purpose and mission:
  • Anyone can make money. Only a few can make lives.
  • American education is broken. Fix it.
  • Would you rather build your resume or build the future?
And the a dash of humor might even be worth a shot:
  • Work for the coolest school this side of Starfleet Academy.
  • Geniuses wanted. The merely brilliant need not apply.
  • Dilbert wishes he had gone to school here.
Another “out-there” idea: A video job posting. Put your posting on Vimeo or You-Tube, following a scripted description of the opening. Don’t have time to make one for a specific job? Consider making one just about working at your school, being sure to involve multiple people (faculty, staff, students) talking about why your school is a great place to be, revealing a bit more about your culture and facilities. Schools aren’t Google, but you can get a sense of what Google’s culture is like from this video:

Getting a Bit More Specific
When you create a job posting, whether somewhat formulaic,”edgy” or something in-between, there are certain elements that it should always contain. In no particular order, be sure to:
  • describe why someone should be interested in your school. What distinguishes you from other schools? How is this particular job going to be better than a similar one in another school? (Tip: substitute a competitor school’s name for your own and see if it still holds true. If so, you have not distinguished yourself.)
  • get a second opinion. Run your posting by a trusted colleague, especially someone from another school, and ask them how they would respond if they saw it online.
  • describe how to take action. Be very clear about the steps candidates should follow to apply including any or all of the following: letter of application and what it should include, a resume or longer curriculum vitae, an online portfolio, and to complete any online application that your school uses.1 Don’t include phone numbers if you don’t want calls. Don’t include personal email addresses but rather one that can be auto-forwarded to whoever is handling your hiring process. Do include physical addresses so applicants can Google your location and get a birds-eye view of it.
  • use an industry-standard job title. Assume that some candidates might find your job by using standard search query terms. Even if your posting is on the creative end of the spectrum, try to include more common terminology to allow for search engines and searching humans to discover the information.
  • keep it short. The posting is not the same as a job description nor is it a reiteration of annual performance objectives. It should be relatively short, 2-3 paragraphs in length. See “walks on water” above.
  • format for the web. Depending on your posting site, you may be able to embed graphics and hyperlinks in the posting. If you can, make strategic use of these to draw attention to your posting and make it convenient for applicants to take action.
What have you found to be useful in creating job postings? Feel free to comment below.
  1. The reason you ask for candidates to complete an application is that it often concludes with a statement indicating that the information in it is true and factual. If you later discover that the candidate lied on the application, that can be grounds for dismissal whereas misrepresentation on a resume may not. ↩

K-12 IT Management: Where to Post Your Jobs

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This is the fourth in a series of posts on Human Resources for Information Technology Managers.

You’ve been informally advertising and building your department’s IT “brand” by word-of-mouth through parents, vendors, and other school visitors and they’re impressed by what they see. You and your colleagues have been participating in listservs, social media, and conferences to further enhance the word on the street about you. You have up-to-date job descriptions and are confident that you have the right positions in place, or will have with your next hire. And you have a job management system to track the hiring process. You’re ready to start recruiting. What’s the next move?

Your Recruiting Strategy depends on several factors:

  • your capacity to read and process letters of application and resumes. The larger your capacity, the broader you can search.
  • the seniority of the position. The more senior the position, the more focused the search needs to be.
  • the amount of time you have to conduct a search. The greater the lead time, the more deliberate the process can be.
  • your budget. Some recruiting efforts are free or low cost. Using search firms will incur fees, usually equivalent to about 1-3 months of the candidate’s starting salary.
  • the “mix” of skills required in the job. Schools sometimes talk about hiring teachers who are “triple threats,” candidates who can teach, coach, and perform dormitory duties. Triple threat candidates in an IT context might be those who can teach one or two classes, provide professional development training to adults, and manage highly technical systems. The more unique the mix, the longer the search may take.
  • academic requirements. I personally think that community colleges can be a great place to look for entry-level personnel, but if the baseline for your job is a bachelor’s degree, don’t even look there.
  • your school’s geographical location. Rural, isolated schools will need to have a broader geographical reach than those located in urban areas.
  • the job market. It is currently an “employers” market, meaning that there are many un- or under-employed potential candidates; however, that is no guarantee that there are a lot of really good candidates.
  • your school’s commitment to affirmative action. Women and certain groups of people of color are underrepresented in IT fields (http://goo.gl/Db3tD). By law, all schools must have statements of non-discrimination in hiring, but this does not mean that de facto discrimination in hiring does not occur, and it can start with your recruiting efforts. If you’re not looking in the right places, you will not find underrepresented candidates.
  • “fit” to culture. In a previous post (http://taffee.edublogs.org/2012/05/14/fit/) I wrote about what people mean when they talk about an employee as being either a “good” or “bad” fit, and how “too much “fit” may not always be a good thing [and] we need the right mix of friction and fit in order to keep the gears of our schools moving smoothly.” If your IT department is highly functional, admired, generally perceived to be on the right course, then you will want to advertise in places where you are more likely to find candidates that will blend with your existing culture. If, on the other hand, your IT department is dysfunctional, stagnating, or in need of re-invention, then looking for non-traditional candidates who can “shake things up” might be a better bet.
Answering these questions should help you decide on how much time, effort, and money you want to invest in finding your next hire. Hiring may be the most important task a manager faces, so in my book you should maximize all of these items, but money dictates that this is not always possible.
The Usual Suspects for Recruiting
  • Print Media. Just say “No!” Since you are recruiting for an IT position, unless there are extenuating circumstances or policy obligations, forego traditional print media.
  • Craig’s List.  Posting to something with a huge readership such as Craig’s List will likely inundate you with applications. But it’s affordable and if you have time and capacity to sort through the applicants you may turn up some great people. Be strategic in determining the geographic spread for your posting.
  • General Job Boards such as Monster.com, Indeed.com, and CareerBuilder.com. You will pay a bit more than Craig’s List but reach a broader geographic audience.
  • Government-sponsored Job Boards such as American Job Center and its state affiliates for the unemployed.
  • Specialized IT Job Boards such as Dice, JustTech, 37 signals, The Ladders IT Jobs, Slashdot Jobs will get you to highly technical people, some of whom may be interested in working in schools and (perhaps) a few who are actually qualified to do so.
  • University and Community College Job Boards. Entry-level personnel can be often found in two-year programs be both interested and willing to work at a school, particularly if your school offers some form of tuition-reimbursement or other incentives for them to complete a 4-year degree.
  • Social Networks. Use both your personal and school-based social networks including the usual suspects, Linkedin and Facebook’s Social Jobs Partnership, but also smaller groups such as Nings, blogs, and other sites frequented by you and others in your school community.
  • School Association Job Boards. NAIS and their state/regional affiliates. You’ll need an account with the National Association of Independent Schools, but its part of your membership fee. Likewise, look to the National Association of Girls Schools, the Council for American Private Education. and others.
  • Professional Listservs and IT Association Job Boards. My personal favorites are the BAISNet (SF Bay Area) and ISED-L (national, independent schools) listservs, and the ISTE job site. Please add a comment about your own favorites.
  • Underrepresented Candidates Job Boards such as Mentor.net, Women in Technology, Systers, POCIS (Northern California People of Color in Independent Schools EdNet), National Minority Employment Network, LatPro (Latin American, bilingual candidates), The Black Collegian, Saludos (Hispanic professionals), Diversity Jobs, Native American Jobs, and others.
  • Hyper-local News Job Boards, such as those run by AOL Patch, Everyblock, DNA Info (New York and Chicago), Daily Voice (CT, MA, RI), OutsideIn, see others listed by the Columbia College of Journalism. The jury is out on whether or not hyper-local web sites will be economically viable, so use them while you can.
  • School and Alumni Web Site. Listed last because your school’s web site is (a) both obvious and (b) likely to be seen only by candidates who are looking in your specific region or at your particular school, so they are finding you, not the other way around. When you do use your school and alumni web sites, be consistent when you post, keep the information current, and make the ad copy something that a reader can confidently forward to friends.
The Unusual Suspects
  • Former employees. Perhaps this should be in the category of “usual suspects,” but it has been my experience that when someone leaves a school or company little effort is expended to stay in touch with them. Yet former employees, especially those you valued can be a fantastic source of referrals. They know your school and presumably liked working there. Keep in contact with them, and not just when you need them. Make them part of your schools alumni network.
  • Parents. I’ve mentioned how parents can be given positive impressions of your IT department simply by how it conducts its business and maintains a professional looking operation. Many schools have an technology advisory committee including parent representatives. That is a start, but ask your Development or Advancement office to provide you with the names of parents who are in IT careers and reach out to them. After all, parents have e deeply vested interest in seeing their child’s school be the very best.
  • Places of Worship. Members of the clergy often know who in their congregation is looking for work. Places of worship can also be means for recruiting underrepresented candidates.
  • Geek hangouts, such as computer and electronics stores, computer user groups, Comic-Con, Trekkie conventions, science fiction book clubs, libraries, book stores, and coffee shops. Just as good hocker players skate to where the puck will be, good recruiters know to go to where the geeks and nerds hang out.
  • Senior Centers. Gray hair and gray matter often go together. Senior centers may be great places to find part-time, entry-level help, consultants, and experienced full-time employees who are less interested in money but highly motivated by benefits and a mission-driven organization.
In the end, your best recruiting strategies will cluster around the category of “word of mouth.” It’s important, therefore, to have as many mouths getting the word out as possible. How you do that is dependent upon your personal, professional, and extended networks which is why you need to be constantly expanding and tending to them.

Others in the IT Management series:
Space: The First Frontier
Writing Job Descriptions
Using Technology to Manage Hiring 
What to Say in Job Postings
Screening Resumes and Letters of Application
Phone Screening Applicants

K-12 IT Management: Using Technology to Manage Hiring

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This is the third in a series of posts on Human Resources for Information Technology Managers.

If you have had the pleasure (yes, I mean that) and responsibility for hiring someone, you know that there’s a lot of organization required to do it right, including managing:

  • job descriptions
  • job postings and other recruiting efforts
  • reading and evaluating resumes
  • scheduling interviews
  • making and managing offer and rejection letters
  • handling on-boarding and new employee orientation
  • moving data between various business systems
And as techies, we know that if there’s something that needs organizing, it’s probably a good candidate for using technology to help. And there are a lot of options available for organizations to use that go far beyond spreadsheets and email.
In the commercial sector big players in the field include Taleo (acquired by Oracle), SuccessFactors (recently acquired by SAP), Kenexa (recently acquired by IBM), and ADP (so far not acquired by anyone.) These are expensive, complex systems. Fortunately, there are more affordable, smaller solutions available.
Before going much further, it may be helpful to think about the specific tasks and requirements that a school might need from job management software. (Such software may also be called talent management, applicant tracking, or recruiting management software)
  1. Integration with your current email, document sharing and calendaring systems. There will be letters of application, resumes, recommendations, interview questions, interview results, and other documents that will need to be shared among a variety of people. You will want a robust file permission system so that confidential documents are treated appropriately and deleted or archived according to school policies. Automatic routing of emails to the right people at the right time can save a lot of manual oversight. There will be phone screening calls, interviews, and other deadlines and meetings to manage. Ideally, this will be happen seamlessly through your existing calendaring and scheduling application.
  2. Integration with web applications, job boards, and social media. You may be using social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to communicate with your school community. Wouldn’t it be great if your job management software could automatically post to these services on your behalf? Similarly, the ideal solution would also post job openings and updates to your school’s web site. Finally, there are probably several job sites you use to advertise your position. Integration with big job sites such as Monster.com and Craig’s List are likely to be part of some systems, but postings to smaller boards such as NAIS or POCIS will not be a standard part of such offerings. Colleges and universities often have systems that share openings with one another. It would be ideal if your system could email an opening or fill out and online form to targeted higher education institution, search firms,  and area newspapers.
  3. Integration with your school’s HR Management system. If your HR or Payroll management system is from a larger software company, they may offer a talent management module.  Some HR departments want to track all applications whereas others wish to track only those candidates who are hired. At the very least, most HR departments require that candidates complete an application in addition to submitting a resume and letter of introduction, so look for a system that support web-based job applications.
  4. Support for multimedia. More and more candidates are submitting or being required to submit videos, portfolios, and other multimedia could take a lot of disk space and, of course, leaves open the possibility of incompatible file formats. Your system should be able support multiple media types. In the case of IT candidates, it is not too much to ask them to submit their files in a given format. In the case of faculty, you may wish to be more lenient and be able to convert their files to something viewable by all necessary personnel.
  5. SIS and other systems. In the case of teachers, especially mid-year hires, it may be helpful to simply be able to replace one teacher with the new hire’s name in your Student Information System and transfer ownership of class folders and other work-related files.
  6. Auto-replies and updates for candidates. Candidates often feel like they are throwing their information into black-holes. Treat them as professionals and worthy of respect. They may represent a future colleague, and all represent people who will remember how they are treated by you.
  7. Resume scoring. If you are a school with a lot of openings and a lot of applicants, you may want software that pre-sifts resumes on your behalf, based on searching for key-words and scoring resumes accordingly. I personally think that this is overkill for most independent schools, but I could see its utility in very large school districts.
Products that Work with Google Apps
Longtime readers know that I am a big supporter of Google Apps for schools. In that spirit I offer some job management software systems that purport to integrate, in various degrees, with Google Applications.
If you are a Google Apps user, here are several systems you may wish to consider:
In smaller schools, IT departments may hire infrequently, but chances are that your school hires a number of people each year. So, IT Managers, if you make the job easier for yourself you will also be investing in technology that will pay dividends for others across the school. Come on, you’re techies. You know you want to use tech to manage this.

Unions and Independent Schools

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transformationAmerican labor unions are in decline both in terms of their reputation and their membership numbers. Public service unions are in particular under attack as negotiated benefits stress empty government coffers. Private industry workers, the self-employed, retirees, and others whose perks have stagnated or been eliminated through years of assault by American business leaders resent those workers whose  benefits seem superior. Instead of asking “why don’t I have benefits like theirs?” they ask “why do they get something that I don’t?”

Membership in American labor unions is at an all-time low, representing only 11.9% of the workforce, its lowest number in seventy years.1 An article in Alternet posits three reasons for the decline of American unions:

  1. Modern corporations roam the world looking for low labor costs, lax regulations, and weak labor unions. This pits workers and communities against each other in a classic race to the bottom to attract and retain jobs.
  2. Corporations have abandoned the old vertically and horizontally integrated organizational structures, in which companies sought to keep most aspects of production and distribution in-house, in favor of newer core/ring systems in which they perform only core functions while farming out the rest to complex supply chains of contractors and subsidiaries. Workers making the same product, or providing the same service, may be employed by many different employers, making solidarity and collective action difficult.
  3. Corporations divide the remaining in-house workforce into a core group of workers with standard jobs and at least some expectation of long term employment, and a secondary group of contingent workers: part-timers, temps, contract workers, on-call workers, and day laborers usually with sub-standard wages and benefits and little or no job security.[2. The future of work: Where the labor movement is heading. (Aug, 31 2008). 2
While corporate executives may not like unions, and may do whatever they can to discourage their success, unions themselves have not helped their cause. A report from the Pew Research Center indicates that unions have a significant image problem amongst the general American public:

 

Teacher Unions Also in Decline
When it comes to public education, documentary films like Waiting for Superman, Race to Nowhere, The Lottery, and the forthcoming fictional account Won't Back Down portray educators as lazy, rigid, uncaring bureaucrats and teacher unions as protectors of incompetence, impediments to reform, and special interests in the pockets od the Democratic party.3 Competent teachers are, according to such films, the exception rather than the rule.

The nation's largest teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA), reports that its membership is in decline, with a loss of over 100,000 members since 2010. 4

Independent Schools and Teacher Unions

There is no national union for independent school teachers.[5. Teaching in independent schools.] Few independent schools are unionized, and my personal (admittedly limited) experience in discussing teacher unions with independent school faculty and administrators shows that many of them harbor misgivings, even resentments, about the NEA and and the other major union body, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Among them:

  • teacher unions are obstacles to change, protecting the status quo and incompetence.
  • public school teachers are, in general, less skilled and less knowledgeable than their independent school counterparts; despite this difference, the salaries of public school teachers are higher, especially when compared to religious schools.
  • union leadership is subject to corruption and political deal making.
  • the ecosystem of independent schools is significantly different from those of public schools; funding is different, the clientele is different, measures of success are different, curriculum standards are different, and bureaucracy is different.
  • unions are for  ”blue collar” jobs, not professions such as teaching.
While I agree that unions are far from perfect organizations, for independent school teachers to dismiss them out of hand is not in their personal financial or professional interest. Here’s why:
  • The rate of tuition increases that support many independent schools is not sustainable. Patrick Bassett, President of the NAIS, often talks about the challenge to independent schools in making tuition affordable for middle and upper-middle class families. [6. http://www.peje.org/blog/?p=825 ] With tuitions at top-tier independent school hovering around $40,000 per year, with a few approaching $50,000 per year, even rich families are balking at such costs. Some independent schools may price themselves out of a market in areas where quality public school alternatives exist.
  • Revenue pressures will, of course, mainfest themselves in cost-cutting measures. With salaries the largest component of a school’s budget, independent school teachers may find class enrollments increasing, along with the number of classes taught per day and  expectations for extra-curricular work. Some of the very things that may have led them to pursue teaching in independent schools may be threatened, with little recourse available to them.
  • Everyone agrees that the cost of healthcare is rising at an alarming rate, leading employers to seek new ways of trimming theses costs by shifting more of the financial burden to employees.
  • Similarly, schools will examine their other benefit programs such as matching contributions to 403.b retirement plans, sabbatical leave, and professional development.
  • More experienced teachers may find themselves being “nudged out” of schools in favor of younger, and lower cost, educators.
Who is going to give voice to concerns that faculty and staff have about the changing financial environment in independent schools?

And some additional thoughts about unions and independent schools…

Many independent schools are secretive about their salary practices, withholding salary information even from the supervisors of employees. Competitive salary information from national groups such as NAIS are limited to heads of schools and school business officers. The result is a system in which information pertinent to salary negotiations are significantly tilted in favor of school administrators. In a like manner, the dismissal of a school employee is often shrouded in mystery and innuendo. No one wants to violate the privacy of employees or the rights of employers to dismiss for cause, but questions about due process must to be answered with more than a “just trust us” response. Who is going to level the playing field in salary negotiations or assure that employees are protected from arbitrary and capricious discipline, up to and including firing?

Financial pressures in independent schools, coupled with the need to demonstrate curricular leadership, may lead to the expectation for teachers to adopt new practices despite diminished support for professional development activities. Sabbatical programs, educational travel to conferences, released time for course development and collaboration may be compromised. Who is going to protect the ongoing investment in faculty and staff to guarantee that the quality of teaching and learning is maintained?

t may be argued that elite independent schools, with their high tuitions and pressure on endowments to support financial aid to assure a diverse student population, may simply become one more enclave of the so-called 1% of Americans, the super wealthy and (according to many in the Occupy Movement) a morally and ethically bereft group who build profits at the expense of everyone else. Extreme rhetoric aside, Who is going to assure that the resources continue to be available to ensure that student bodies are culturally, racially, and financially diverse?

Needed: A New Model for Education Unions

Independent school teachers are among the smartest and most talented people I know. And it is to them that I issue a challenge to create a new model for collective action and solidarity, a new type of union that avoids the problems associated with traditional teacher unions, enhances their professional status, guards their financial future, ensures that students remain at the core of their mission, and demonstrates common cause with their public school counterparts; a collective that can experiment and model new ways of engagement between school administrators, parents, students, alumni, and other stakeholders for the mutual good of independent schools. It does not have to be a matter of non-union or and NEA/AFT affiliation. There can be a another way.

Now is the time for conversations to begin, before crisis drives people to opposing corners. Now is the time for savvy school administrators  to welcome greater transparency about money (which is what much of this is about) and other policies. Now is the time for faculty to think further ahead than a week or semester, but five, ten, and twenty years down the road.

  1. Greenhouse, S. (Jan, 21 2011). Union membership in u.s. fell to a 70-year low last year. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/22union.html ↩
  2. Retrieved from http://www.alternet.org/story/96979/the_future_of_work:_where_the_labor_movement_is_heading ↩
  3. The anti-teacher union rhetoric has even inspired its own web site, Teacher Unions Exposed, operated by the The Center for Union Facts, PO Box 34507, Washington, DC 20043. Also operating at this address is the Conservative Alliance Foundation. Both of these organizations are run by Berman and Company, which has also mounted campaigns against organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and trial lawyers among others. (Wikipedia citation). ↩
  4. NEA membership decline heralds loss of power and influence. ↩

Who Should Pay When Employees Break Stuff?

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Among the more frustrating situations faced by school technology leaders is the teacher or administrator who breaks their computer (or iPad, phone, printer, etc.). Whether the equipment was dropped, drenched, stolen, stepped on, cracked, whacked, thrown, or electrocuted makes little difference as the result is the same: a broken computer. In the best case (which, following Murphy’s Laws has .0001 percent chance of happening), a reboot or other simple fix will restore the device to operating condition. Anything else is likely to be expensive. “Bench fees” alone can be $100, and repair technicians are more likely to simply swap out parts than try to repair them, leading to even higher costs. The net results is that it can often cheaper to replace a device than to repair it. This is a problem for cash-strapped schools.

It is therefore understandable that school administrators want to pass some or all of the expense of equipment repair or replacement along to the person who broke the item.

The problem is, in almost all cases, you cannot legally require employees to pay for tools they use on the job that are broken or stolen. You can write all the policies and employment agreements you want, but they won’t stand up in court. Instead, schools need to consider such losses as a cost of doing business. Regulations covering such practices are made at the state level, so YMMV.

In the unlikely event that your particular state allows you to deduct the cost of the equipment from an employee’s wages, I urge caution. You want to encourage the use of technology, and financial penalties for using tech equipment is counterproductive.

“But,” you counter, “what about the employee who is willfully negligent and has a record of breaking equipment?” If this is happening you have a larger issue for which broken devices are but a symptom. There are likely other reasons to discipline and put such  a person on a performance improvement plan. My advice is to not press for repayment, but instead focus on overall job quality and take the necessary steps to help the employee either get better or to lead them to the door.

It is important, therefore, that school administrators factor breakage into their technology budgets along with normal wear and tear, planned obsolescence, performance upgrades, and everything else that may affect your school’s technology adoption cycle.

Educational technologists may quibble about specific length of usable service but you must create a replacement schedule for technical equipment. Some schools like to “buy high,” getting state-of-the art equipment and passing it through a succession of users before finally retiring it. Others may choose to “buy low” and simply figure on a more frequent upgrade cycle. Recommended replacement cycles for computers and peripherals are the subject of a future post.

Visitor Management Software for Schools

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I recently had occasion to look into the field of visitor management systems. Like many schools, we were reliant several different logbooks and hand-printed visitor badges. We also knew that a few people (both students and adults) were not diligent about checking-in or out of campus. Finally, having visited more than a few area companies with computer-based visitor systems, we knew that there was a better way to track who is in our school, even if their names were “who, what or I don’t know.” (see above)

I started by thinking about all of the people we have coming and going on campus everyday. They include:

  • employees
  • students
  • parents of students
  • vendors
  • substitute teachers
  • contractors
  • construction workers
  • volunteers
  • prospective students and their parents
  • tutors
  • visitors to athletic and arts events
  • delivery personnel
While many of these people are checked at the front desk, not all of them are. Some quietly slip in and out of campus with much notice, some are “known” people whose familiarity has led to our trust in them, and some come at such odd hours or in numbers (e.g., athletic contests) that we don’t bother with a check-in procedure.
If any of this sounds familiar, you may also be wishing you had a better system. My research unearthed a multitude of options, ranging from systems meant to deal with thousands of visitors to those geared specifically to the K-12 market. Some systems are based on a client-server architecture which you host on site, while others are stand-alone kiosks, and still others are web-based.
Visitor Management Systems and Other Computer Systems
While you may think that a visitor management system will be an isolated technical system, you should consider these potential interactions:
  • Access Control. If your school uses an electronic access control system (proximity badges, swipe badges, keypads, biometrics) you probably already are using a visitor management system. If you are still using keys, but are considering electronic access control, then you should pay attention to whether or not the visitor management system will support this. Systems from larger companies with a broad range of security services are more likely to offer such support.
  • Directory Server Integration. At the very least you will want the ability to perform bulk uploads of employee, student, and parent information into the system. Ideally, the system could link to your director servers such as LDAP, Open Directory or Active Directory.
  • Field Trips. Students and teachers regularly leave campus where attendance must be monitored. It could be quite helpful if there’s a mobile app associated with the system to scan student IDs as they get in and out of vehicles for field trips. A nice side-benefit might be electronic health forms for students that could be carried with the adult mentor.
  • Emergency Operations Plan. If you need to evacuate a building, shelter-in-place, or lockdown is extremely helpful to be able to print a list of all campus visitors for your emergency responders.
Web-based or Client-Server?
Call me new-fashioned by I don’t understand why anyone would purchase a system that is not cloud-based and browser-based. Clearly the entire industry is moving this way for all of the obvious reasons such as rapid software updates and patches, cross-platform support, ease of deployment, often better security and data back-up than what can take place in-house, and lower costs to name a few. Despite what I see as overwhelming advantages, the majority of the systems I found are still client-server applications meant for installation on a LAN.
Common Attributes of Visitor Management Systems
All of the systems I found share a number of common features:
  • print visitor badges, often with scannable barcodes and visitor photos
  • scan government issued ID cards and/or business cards and check names against a national database of registered sex offenders
  • send alerts via email, SMS, or both when a positive match of the visitor to the sex offenders database is made
  • run additional checks against your own database to check for restraining orders, non-custodial parents, VIP visitors, or any other individual who may require special considerations
  • pre-register visitors
  • automatically alert hosts when visitors arrive
  • scan barcodes for ease of entry/egress
  • print visitor reports by name, date, host, reason for visit, etc.
  • multi-language support
  • create automatically expiring badges
Systems that are focused on K-12 markets, often include these additional features:
  • track volunteer hours
  • print tardy passes for students who arrive late to school
  • track early dismissals
Alphabetical List of Selected Visitor Management Systems
See the attached file, Visitor Management System Survey for a list of attributes you may wish to consider in evaluating a system for your school.