This is for recruiters, trust HR teams and university talent acquisition staff who've been handed a digital transformation lead vacancy and a salary band that makes corporate rivals smile politely. Follow the steps below and you'll have a role profile that makes sense, a proposition that competes without matching the City, and a shortlist you can judge on evidence rather than gut feel.
The short version: schools and universities rarely win on salary, so they win on scope, mission and speed of decision. Each step below is about making that case concrete enough that a candidate can repeat it to their partner over dinner.
1. Decide what you're actually hiring
Most education digital transformation roles fail at the job description stage. A multi-academy trust wants a CIO, a data protection lead, a project manager and a trainer, then wonders why nobody suitable applies. A university advertises a "Head of Digital Strategy" when what it needs is someone to rescue a stalled student records migration.
Pick the first eighteen months. Write down the two or three things that must be different by then: a single sign-on across twelve schools, a retired legacy MIS, a learning platform staff actually open. Everything else is a nice-to-have.
How you'll know it's worked: your head teacher, CEO or pro vice-chancellor can describe the role in one sentence without using the word "transformation".
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2. Set a salary band you can defend
You won't match a bank. Accept that early. What you can do is publish a range, be clear about pension (the Teachers' Pension Scheme or the Local Government Pension Scheme are genuinely valuable and candidates from the private sector often don't price them in), and be upfront about annual leave and flexibility.
If you're a trust, benchmark against other trusts and sector roles on similar scope, not against the first corporate salary survey you find. If you're a university, check your own professional services grading before you promise anything, because a candidate who gets an offer above the grade and then watches it unravel in a moderation panel will tell people.
Say it in the advert: "Salary £70,000 to £85,000 depending on experience, plus LGPS membership." Hiding the number costs you the best people first, since they've got options.
How you'll know it's worked: applicants stop asking about salary in the first call, because the advert has already answered it.
3. Write the pitch candidates will repeat
A corporate digital lead might touch one product line. An education lead might touch every pupil, parent and teacher in a town. That's a real selling point, and it needs saying with specifics: how many sites, what systems, who reports to whom, how much sits on the roadmap already.
For your outreach, try wording like: "You'd own the technology strategy for eleven schools, report directly to the CEO, and have a mandate to retire the three systems staff complain about most. No committee of twelve to get through first."
That last sentence matters. Decision speed is something you can offer that a large corporate often can't, but only if it's true. If your governance involves three committees and a six-week cycle, don't claim agility. Candidates check.
How you'll know it's worked: people you approach reply with questions about the work, not the pay.
4. Look where corporates aren't looking
Don't limit yourself to people who already work in education. Strong candidates often come from local government, the NHS, housing associations and charities, where budgets are tight and stakeholders are many. A good ed-tech or MAT-side IT director can also be your hire, but they've often hit a ceiling in their own trust.
If you're a school-level recruiter, a part-time or fractional model is worth considering for smaller trusts: a senior lead two or three days a week, shared across a group. It won't suit every role, but it opens a talent pool that can't commit full time.
A visible presence on LinkedIn helps more than most trust HR teams expect. A named head of digital posting honestly about what the work involves will attract more suitable applicants than a polished careers page. OHUB's employer tools can also help you put a video-first pitch in front of people who wouldn't browse a sector job board.
How you'll know it's worked: at least a third of your longlist comes from outside education.
5. Interview for judgement, not jargon
Candidates can talk fluently about cloud migration and AI policy. Fewer can tell you how they'd handle a headteacher who refuses to give up a failing system everyone relies on.
Ask scenario questions drawn from your real problems. "We have a safeguarding platform that staff dislike but the DSL trusts. How would you approach replacing it?" Listen for how they handle people, risk and sequencing, and whether they mention data protection and the ICO's guidance for schools and education settings without being prompted.
Involve someone who'll work with the hire, ideally a teacher or lecturer, not just senior leaders. Candidates read the room, and a panel with nobody from the front line suggests the role sits far from the people it's meant to serve.
How you'll know it's worked: your panel disagrees about scores for sensible reasons and can name specific answers they'd quote.
6. Move fast and be honest about the constraints
Top candidates often have two or three live conversations. A process that takes eight weeks loses them. Fix your interview dates before you advertise, and tell candidates the full timeline up front.
Be frank about what's hard: legacy systems, term-time rhythms, limited capital budgets. People who've been burned by overselling elsewhere tend to trust a hiring manager who says, "The MIS contract runs until 2028 and we can't change that."
How you'll know it's worked: offers go out within a fortnight of final interview and acceptance rates hold up.
If a step goes wrong
If your advert draws no strong applications, go back to step one: the brief is probably doing too much. If shortlisted candidates withdraw, ask them why, plainly, and fix the cause before the next round. A recurring answer about salary means revisit step two; a recurring answer about governance means you've got a sales problem or a structural one, and only one of those is fixable by wording.
If you lose your chosen candidate at offer stage, ring them. Often it's pension detail, start date or a misunderstanding about flexibility, and a ten minute conversation recovers it.
And if you've run the process twice and still can't land anyone, consider whether a shared or interim lead across your trust or partner institutions would serve you better for now. A good fractional hire beats a vacancy.
This week: pull your current job description and cut it to the two or three outcomes that must be true in eighteen months. Send that shorter version to one person who'd never apply, and ask whether they can tell what the job is.
