How to build a talent acquisition strategy that supports long-term growth.

Before I came to Kelly, I spent nearly a decade teaching middle school and high school science. I have been the one standing in the classroom on mornings when no one showed up to cover the room next door. Twenty-two years later, running Florida operations, filling that room is my job. What I see now is that the shortage started six or nine months before the room was left empty, in a hiring plan that was never built.

Too many organizations build their hiring plans around the vacancies in front of them. When that’s how talent acquisition works, growth always feels like an emergency, because every new demand arrives as a surprise.

Developing a talent acquisition strategy that supports long-term growth means changing what you plan against. Here is how we do it across 14 Florida school districts, and how the same approach is applied outside of education.

What a strategic talent acquisition function looks like

A talent acquisition strategy is a plan to build the workforce you will need before the need arises.

In K-12 education, that means recruiting long before a district calls. We run community events, partner with local colleges and universities, and hold orientations continuously, so that when a school has 40 absences on a Monday morning, we have 120 people ready to work. An effective strategy means the answers already exist before the question is asked.

In K-12, that is what workforce continuity means. The classroom is covered by someone who was screened and oriented weeks earlier, and the school day runs as planned.

Meeting that standard is harder in education than in almost any other sector. The Learning Policy Institute's 2026 scan found at least 425,412 teaching positions nationally either unfilled or filled by teachers who are not fully certified for their assignments. That’s roughly 1 in 8 positions, and it’s the third consecutive year the combined figure has risen. Districts are not competing for a comfortable surplus of candidates.

Recruiting ahead of an opening works the same way outside a school building. Starting from zero is slow in any labor market, and an organization that waits for a role to open before thinking about who might fill it starts from zero every time.

Four signs your hiring is running reactively

Reactive hiring is hard to spot from the inside, because the work feels busy and the requisitions do eventually close. These are the four signals to watch for.

1. Your team posts a job and hopes. Posting and crossing your fingers is the first thing I look for, and on its own it is never going to work. A job posting gives you whoever applies, while a pipeline gives you people that you already know and have screened and oriented. That means the only question left is whether they are available.
   
   
2. Leadership is surprised by attrition. Surprise means nobody was watching the leading indicators. People rarely leave without warning, and an organization that gets caught off guard by departures will get caught off guard by growth too.
   
   
3. Time-to-fill is your headline metric. Speed tells you how fast you closed a requisition, but it says nothing about whether the person you placed was right for the role or how long they stayed. Quality of hire and retention rate tell you more about whether a hire is working.
   
   
4. You're reading the output when you should be reading the input. In Florida, we track our substitute educator pool weekly. If the pool drops below threshold, we act that week. If we wait for the fill rate to fall, the problem has already reached the classroom.

These four signals show up in any industry. A manufacturer that measures only how fast requisitions close is running the same play as a school district that measures only its daily fill rate.

Build a bench before you need one

When you plan against attrition, the best you can do is replace what you had last year. Growth-based planning asks where the organization needs to get and who we need to bring in to get there. That requires a bench, and you have to have one regardless of what service line you are delivering. Without it, you are already behind.

In education, our working target is three substitute educators for every teacher eligible for coverage, adjusted for absence volume in each district. Most districts start the year well short of that. Public schools averaged six teaching vacancies heading into the 2024-25 year and filled 79% of them with fully certified teachers before classes began.

When we started a new Florida district contract this past August, we began recruiting the day it was signed, because we knew the employees already working there would not be enough on their own. By the first day of school, we had brought 900 new people into the pipeline.

None of that would have been possible if we had waited for the first absence report to start recruiting. The most effective work happens in the months when nothing appears to be wrong.

Match people to assignments on skills and preference

Volume alone does not fill a classroom. In K-12 education, we match people to assignments based on background, experience, and what they want to do. For instance, a candidate with an Exceptional Student Education (ESE) background is a strong fit for a special education classroom. A retired educator often prefers a long-term assignment at one school. An education student usually wants general substitute educator work that fits around classes. Preference matters as much as qualification, because a placement someone wants is a placement they keep.

That discipline is what made it possible for The School District of Lee County to open last school year fully staffed. The district came into spring 2025 with 575 advertised teacher vacancies. Under its Project Believe initiative, we identified certified guest teachers (Lee County’s term for substitute educators) already in our pool, connected degree-holding guest teachers to certification pathways, and gave principals a single certified list so schools could request credentialed talent without routing every request through central HR. The district cut vacancies by 81% year over year against a statewide average of 18%, and the 37 positions still open on the first day of school were covered by certified guest teachers.

Lee County could do that because every person in the pool was already matched to the roles its schools needed filled.

Develop pipelines through referrals and local partnerships

Education hiring is relationship driven, so most of our strongest substitute educators arrive through referrals, community events, and local colleges and universities. In Lee County, that last channel became a bridge. We hired education interns and placed them in classrooms before graduation, so they learned the district's systems and built relationships with students before they ever held a full-time role.

Job boards still have a place. We run our Indeed spend district by district and track what every new employee costs to bring in. But a job board is one channel. The pipeline is what we develop through direct sourcing, and it keeps producing candidates whether we have an opening or not.

Run the same hiring framework across every role

Across Florida, we staff substitute teachers, paraeducators, and ESE-certified teachers, along with speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, food service workers, and custodial staff. Each role carries its own sourcing channels, credentialing requirements, and onboarding steps.

Every one of those roles shapes a student’s day. A therapy caseload with no one to cover it is a gap for that student, just like an empty classroom.

The difficulty runs across all of them. Before the 2024-25 school year, 69% of public schools reported trouble filling at least one non-teaching vacancy, with transportation staff the hardest to fill at 90%.

No matter the role, the operational framework stays the same in every case:

1. Develop the pipeline before the requisition exists
2. Qualify candidates against the credential each role requires
3. Match people to assignments on skills and preference
4. Track performance and feed what you learn back into the pipeline

That consistency is what makes a master vendor arrangement workable. A district that starts with substitute educator coverage and later needs therapists is not starting over, because the same four steps run with different credentials attached.

Get ahead of the next vacancy

Most school systems are not staffed to run a pipeline on their own. One HR administrator is often handling recruiting, screening, credentialing, fingerprinting, training, scheduling, and payroll at once, and the recruiting gets pushed down the list every time something urgent lands. The same is true in any organization where HR is stretched and pipeline development keeps losing to whatever is on fire today.

If your hiring plan tells you only what you lost last year, it is worth asking what it would take to build a bench. Kelly does that work at scale. Let's talk about what it would look like for you.