Hiring a teaching assistant
Three hundred and forty applications, safeguarding requirements that are absolute, and a hiring window measured in days because the post has to be filled before term starts.
It is not just the volume. It is that the volume arrives at once. Teaching assistant recruitment is seasonal in a way almost nothing else on this site is: the vacancy goes out, and within about a week the school has several hundred applications and a fixed date by which someone has to be standing in a classroom. Every one of them requires enhanced vetting, which is non-negotiable and slow. And the applications themselves are unusually hard to separate — a large share come from parents, career-changers and graduates whose relevant experience is real but informal, described in the same warm generalities: patient, good with children, keen to support learning. The classic false negative on this role is a genuinely gifted candidate whose only classroom experience was voluntary and who therefore under-describes it.
Which children, and what support actually means here
Selene establishes the year group and whether this is general or targeted support, because those change the criteria far more than the job title does.
Year group, needs, and how much of it is one-to-one
General classroom support and one-to-one support for a child with an education plan are different jobs with the same title. The second needs specific evidence and often specific training; the first needs range. Establishing which comes first because it determines what counts as relevant experience.
One sentence changes the guide
That last part matters more on this role than almost any other. The manager’s answer describes a skill that is most often demonstrated in unpaid settings — reading groups, parent helping, scouts, tutoring a nephew — and a guide that only recognises paid classroom hours will systematically discard the evidence it most needs.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The ones who can tell a child has stopped understanding about three questions before the child says anything.”
→ Noticing-and-adapting became the top-weighted scored criterion; voluntary classroom experience became admissible evidence.
What the guide ends up measuring
Seven criteria, three of them facts for the application page. The qualification sits at important rather than must — deliberately, because the manager described a skill that a Level 3 certificate does not test and plenty of strong candidates acquire elsewhere.
Three questions, and one of them protects the start date
Vetting, right to work and term-time availability are facts. The vetting question is doing something slightly different from the others here: it is not only removing ineligible applicants, it is telling you on day one which candidates already hold a current check — which, on a post that has to be filled by September, is often the difference between a start date that works and one that does not.
Scored so that unpaid experience still counts
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads voluntary and informal experience as evidence rather than discounting it — which on a pile with this many parents and career-changers changes the shortlist substantially.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Turning the safeguarding and availability rules into application-page questions before the flood arrives
- Reading all 340 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist, with voluntary experience read as evidence rather than discounted
- Drafting the declines, so several hundred applicants hear back rather than nothing
Yours
- Advertising the vacancy — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- All safeguarding checks and references before anyone starts; she records what candidates state, she doesn’t verify it
- The interview and any classroom observation, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Nearby roles
Where the most important experience is highly specific and described in the vaguest possible terms.
Qualification and vetting are absolute — and the room can't run short.
Where eligibility questions do half the work before scoring even starts.
Have it ready before the advert goes out
The pile arrives in a week — describe the class now and the questions and guide are waiting when it does.