A few weeks ago, I was sitting with a district HR team reviewing their hiring patterns from the past three years. We were talking about where candidates were falling off in the process when one director paused and said, almost to herself, “It feels like we’re speaking a different language than the people we’re trying to hire.” Everyone around the table nodded.
A familiar moment, the kind that captures why the traditional employee life cycle no longer fits the workforce we serve. Education may be rooted in tradition, but the people who make our schools come alive bring wildly different expectations shaped by different generations, perspectives, and cultural shifts. The traditional model of attract, recruit, onboard and retain was built for a different era. Today’s model has to feel more like a relationship and less like a sequence of steps.
Let’s reimagine the traditional attract, recruit, onboard, and retain framework into a modern employee lifecycle that reflects the needs and expectations of today’s workforce.