Paper Title
Human Resource Management in Education: Recruitment and Selection of Teachers

Abstract
Education has been shown to be the foundation of social equity and economic progress,underpinning individual and community, self-sufficiency and sustainability. The correlation between teacher quality and student education outcomes has been well evidenced in previous research. The purpose of this study isto explore the potential use of Human Resource Management (HRM) theory and practice to identify and selectquality teachers for the range of individual and contextually different schools that exist within education systems. The variance between schools in their context, sector, socio economic status and needs, is considerable, consequently individual schools have quite specific local needs when recruiting and selecting teachers. The ability to draw on consistent evidence based practices may result in not only rigorous recruitment and selection processes but also teacher retention. Effective recruitment, selection and retention of teachers has emerged, in recent studies, to be one of the most crucial school improvement strategies. In order to understand how HRM practices might improve recruitment and selection of teachers in independent schools it was necessary firstly to identify the HRM practices being used. To this end an online survey of school leaders was conducted. The results of this survey indicated that a variety of HRM processes were being utilized by school leaders at the functional level with little cognizance of the strategic possibilities nor an HRM evidence based structure of practices. These resultsprovide a compelling reason for further research and indicate there is great potential for use of HRM expertise and practices by school leaders for recruitment and selection of teachers as part of a suite of HRM practices which may indeed lead to school improvement and eventually to improved social and economic outcomes. Keywords: HRM, recruitment and selection, teacher quality, organizational fit, school improvement, cultural fit, personality testing, human capital