Every year, CHS has to make staffing adjustments. Whether it is retirements or reassignments, a hiring committee is in charge of finding someone who is the best candidate for the position. This year, there are teaching positions, pivotal administration positions — such as the athletic director — along with open head coaching positions.
“This is actually pretty typical to have this many changes. Every year, at least five to six different staff changes [occur],” administrative assistant Vanessa Fisk said.
Certain positions require different skillsets: ones that aren’t always easy to find in a candidate. The hiring staff has the ability to pull up current teachers from other CSD buildings that meet the required criteria for the job. This makes it a little easier to find qualified candidates.
“Sometimes you get people moving from the middle school or one of the other schools, and they’ll move to the high school to fill a position as well. So it just depends on what the needs are,” Fisk said.
The hiring staff makes it their main goal to ensure that students are the first priority. That is, if there are no appropriate candidates for the job, they will not hire someone, even if that means they won’t have someone for the coming school year.
“We try to complete our hiring process while students are still in school so that we are not having to fill positions after the school year begins,” Superintendent Michael Kapolka said.
If a position cannot be filled in time for the school year, which is a rare occasion, then adjustments have to be made. The hiring committee would then pause the process for the school year, and then begin again when the timing is better.
“We would utilize one of our premier subs in the district or would hire a long-term substitute for the position until we are able to report the job and begin the interview process again,” Kapolka said.
Because there is not enough time to interview every applicant, there must be a way to narrow the hiring pool. In order for the candidate pools to shrink the applicants go through different levels of interviews.
“The principals and human resource [employees] from across the street go through the pool of applicants, and they pull screeners. They screen all of them. Sometimes they’ll do an online screener interview for 10 minutes. Well, they’ll just talk with them for 10 minutes, and then kind of limit down to how many they want to pull into [the] actual interview,” Fisk said.
The primary worry when finding the right person to fit the position is making sure their personality can match what the students need. These candidates must be able to adapt to different bodies of students in order to fit the standards.
“The main concern is that we ‘get it right’. That is always the goal of the interview process as hiring individuals to work with students is one of the most important responsibilities we have as administrators,” Kapolka said.
