How many teachers have you hired over the last year only to have them leave within a few months?
Is it frustrating to be constantly turning people over, training, and answering the same questions repeatedly?
Hiring isn’t just about meeting student-teacher ratios. It’s about creating and maintaining environments where children thrive and workers are happy. While the temptation to hire “warm bodies” to stay compliant with staff-to-child ratios may be strong, this reactive approach often leads to burnout, turnover, and a fractured organizational culture.
Plus – this “warm bodies” strategy is likely costing your program more than you think.
Hiring for cultural fit isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. Finding the right fit might take longer. But parents want consistency for their children. If parents meet a new teacher every week in their child’s classroom, what do you think their likelihood of staying enrolled for five years will be?
When employees buy into the mission, vision, values, and classroom philosophy of your business, they’re more likely to stay longer, contribute meaningfully, and create consistency that children need for healthy development.
Why “Warm Body Hiring” Misses the Mark
- Short-term fixes create long-term instability: Employees brought on just to fill space are less likely to be committed, leading to frequent turnover. They are there for the paycheck, not the impact they have on children let alone how their interactions help brain development.
- Quality suffers: Teaching is relational. A misaligned staff member may struggle with classroom management, curriculum delivery, or parent communication. When they’re misaligned, they will skip. They’ll skip to the next job sooner than later for another quarter per hour.
- Morale takes a hit: Teams comprised of mismatched hires lead to internal conflict, increased stress, and feelings of disconnection among staff. This leads to increased turnover within your core staff and people who buy into the mission.
Culture-Driven Hiring: A Sustainable Strategy
When programs hire based on their core identity, they build more than staff. They build a community that leads to longer retention periods.
Here’s how to make culture fit central to your hiring strategy:
- Start with clarity: Know your mission, vision, and value proposition. Are you focused on play-based learning, inquiry-based exploration, or Reggio Emilia principles? Let that guide your candidate search.
- Communicate your “unique brilliance”: Every program has something that makes it special. Whether it’s a strong parent partnership model, outdoor learning philosophy, or trauma-informed care. Highlight this during interviews.
- Standardize your interview process: The Program Administration Scale Third Edition (PAS-3) Item 1 – Hiring and Orientation, Strand 1 indicates the highest quality programs interview candidates, provide the job description to the candidate during the interview and include at least six additional interview practices. Three we recommend include including at least two staff members in interviews, allowing other staff to be included in the hiring decision, predetermining specific interview questions be used for each candidate interviewing for the same role, and including interviewers who reflect the diversity of the children enrolled in the program.
- Use behavior-based questions: Ask candidates how they handle conflict, collaborate, and find joy in the classroom. Their answers will tell you whether they belong in your culture. By utilizing behavior-based interview question banks like this one from the University of Virginia, your questions can be selected based on the competencies and values you want in your program.
- Do more than one: Anyone can be on their best behavior one time. Anyone can ace one interview. But to truly get to know someone, invite them back for second and third rounds. PAS-3 also recommends using multiple sources of evidence during your evaluations. This can include observing the candidate in the classroom with children, checking references, checking their transcripts, and having the candidate provide a teaching demonstration.
- Encourage and empower dissent during the post-interview discussion: Encourage those involved in interviews to be honest about their evaluations even if they are the only one who disagrees. This idea is called the Rule of the 10th Man. When everyone agrees, it should be someone’s job to constructively poke and prod to make sure the collective isn’t missing a well-hidden red flag.
Understand the actual cost of turnover
It costs you much more than you think to make a bad hire. Not only are there the costs of promoting the vacancy, but there are also hard costs associated with onboarding and training a new hire before they are ready to contribute to the classroom.
There are also the costs of another employee’s time to train and onboard. There may be costs associated with closing rooms due to insufficient staff-to-student ratios.
All these hidden costs can stack up and cost you two or three times what you think it actually costs to hire and onboard someone.
If you’re interested in quantifying the actual costs of turning staff over, check out this Cost of Turnover Calculator.
If you’re interested in some strategies and processes implemented by participants in our Leaders Revitalizing Workforce Recruitment and Retention cohort, check out this Toolkit.
Conclusion
Every decision you make has a financial impact. Good hiring decisions often take more time, effort, energy, and resources. However, they also save you money and make you money.
When people connect to your purpose, they engage differently.
Hiring well isn’t just an administrative task. It’s a cultural act.
So next time you’re tempted to hire for speed, take a breath. Hire for fit within your program and your program’s culture. That’s how you build a team that lasts.
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Jason Nitschke is Zero to Five Montana and Montana Child Care Business Connect’s Senior Child Care Business Advisor. He is a nationally recognized economic development professional and former business owner.
