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It can be very frustrating and demoralizing to search endlessly for a job and not find one. That's the reality, unfortunately, of this post-recession job market. Common sense would tell you that well-qualified, credentialled, experienced teachers should be able to find a teaching job in fairly short order, say 90-120 days, right? Wrong. That's the sad truth about the current economic conditions. Here's why.

Many school districts have cut teaching positions.

It has been hard to avoid hearing reports in both national and local media about cutbacks in public school district teaching staffs. Public school districts depend on real estate taxes for most of their revenues. They also expect their state legislatures to contribute additional funding. However, these traditional sources of revenue have been shrinking at an alarming rate. Even with the usual kind of accounting maneuvers, such as delaying expenditures for maintenance projects and upgrades of systems and infrastructure, school districts still find themselves in the uncomfortable and extremely unpopular position of having to cut teaching positions. Increasing class size is another outcome of these financially hard times.

As a result, thousands of teachers are actively looking for jobs. TMarket conditions have intensified the competition for the limited number of jobs available in both the public and private school sectors.

Colleges and universities have reduced their teaching staffs.

A quick scan of will reveal the tough employment environment in higher education. If you are tenured faculty, hopefully, you still have a job.

Congratulations! You managed to land a place on the interview list. That's significant because interviewing candidates is time-consuming. The school has little time to waste. Now is the time for you to make the best possible impression. Accomplishing that means answering many questions during the interview.

Part of any private school interview process is answering questions that you know will be asked. Having said that, you need to prepare for your interviews with the same care and attention as you give your lesson plans. Think through the entire interview. Imagine the questions being asked. Imagine your answers. Remember: not only does the content have to be the best it possibly can be, but the style and delivery you use must present you in the best possible light.

Some of the more obvious questions include:

• Why do you want to work at St. Swithin's?
• Why do you want to leave St. Hilda's?
• What is the most enjoyable part of your teaching day?
• What books have you read lately?
• When do you plan to finish your master's degree?

Regardless of what the actual questions are or the precise wording is, you must try to figure out why the interviewer is asking the question in the first place. Let's use the questions listed above to give you an idea of the sort of thing an interviewer might be looking for.

Why do you want to work at St. Swithin's?

This question or some variation of it generally is used by interviewers to determine what you know about

If you are one of thousands of teachers who have been let go because of budget cuts, you are probably looking for another teaching job. Teaching is what you know. Teaching is what you love. After all, you sacrificed greatly to earn your degree. You could have gone into another profession or business and made much more money. But your idealism and sense of service to your nation's future got the better of you. You became a teacher.

Unfortunately, finding a new teaching position can be a very unsettling experience. Nothing is the same as it used to be. Years ago, you became a teacher. You went through a probationary period of several years. Back then, you were granted tenure, generous benefits, and a pension.

No money=no teachers

The economic meltdown of 2009 and the pandemic of 2020 were game-changers. Those events hit hard. In both situations, school districts struggled with budgets slashed deeply because of declining tax revenues. Suddenly, thousands of teaching jobs were eliminated. Maybe your job was one of them.

Downsizing is a phenomenon that has struck just about everywhere. What is even worse is that the available teaching jobs often don't come with the kind of generous benefits and tenure to which we all have grown accustomed. That's a thing of the past in most parts of the country.

The irony is that we as a nation have never needed talented teachers more than we do now. Our students are doing poorly when compared

An employment application is no place for half-truths. You have to understand that private schools have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients. They cannot afford to hire somebody who might jeopardize the school's reputation or, worse yet, cause harm to students. That is why it is so important to answer all the questions on an employment application truthfully.

Background Checks

Most private schools will use a service to do background checks on any potential new hires. They will not run the background check until they have interviewed you because background checks are expensive. That's another reason why you need to be truthful about anything in your resume which will arouse probing questions and nix your chances of even being interviewed.

What the background check really examines is your criminal and credit history. If you were charged with a criminal offense or have bad credit, that will show on your background check. Take the offensive and point out that your credit was destroyed by huge medical bills as a result of your mother suffering from Alzheimer's. Don't be creative. Just tell the truth.

Expect a drug test at some point in the hiring process. Since views about pot and even alcohol vary widely from one part of the country to another, make sure those tests come out clean. If you have been prescribed a controlled substance that will show up in a drug test, mention it proactively and file a copy of your doctor's prescription just in case

Finding a private school job was fairly simple years ago. You kept your resume and curriculum vitae up to date, did a bit of networking, attended a couple of professional conferences and that was pretty much it. News of job openings would come your way. You followed up with your application, were interviewed and, hopefully, won the appointment. It doesn't work that way any more.

As a result many teachers and administrators used to doing things the old way will look askance at the idea of using online sites and online tools to conduct their private school job search. I would suggest that you might want to think twice before you cast aspersions on these new ways of finding a job. You just might be on your way to becoming a digital dinosaur. Now, you wouldn't want to be a digital dinosaur, would you?

First of all, understand that online tools are simply that - tools. A chisel in the hands of a novice makes clumsy cuts and produces amateurish results. The same is true of most online tools and social media. You need to learn how to use them effectively to land the job you really want. Each of these tools and applications is effective when used by itself. But for the best results I recommend that you use all of them. Using these new tools effectively takes practice and patience. You cannot realistically expect results within hours of your first posts. Give it time.

Let's focus