The Knox County schools in Tennessee have enjoyed a rarity over the past two years: starting the school year essentially fully staffed, a feat many districts nationwide have struggled to achieve.
That stability is due in part to Alex Moseman, the district’s executive director of talent acquisition. Over his three years in Knox County, Moseman has focused on streamlining hiring processes, eliminating unnecessary paperwork, and giving principals more autonomy over staffing decisions.
The payoff has been significant: plunging turnover rates, soaring retention, and fewer than 10 teaching vacancies among a staff of more than 4,700 educators at the start of the 2025-26 school year, at a time when districts across the country are struggling to do the same.
Moseman, a 2026 EdWeek Leaders To Learn From honoree, spoke with Education Week about how the district pulled it off—and what other district leaders could learn from the approach. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s one seemingly small but impactful change you’ve made to the employee-recruitment process?
The first thing that we built was a fresh-lead and interest form on our website.
It is set up where, no matter what you put in—demographic information, your education or interest areas—you’ll get some type of customized response that’s going to suggest the next step for you.
If you want to be a teacher, the email or the response that you get, is going to say, “Hey, superexcited to hear from you.” If you already have a teaching license, it’s going to connect you directly with our recruiter. If you don’t, it’ll tell you how to go about getting one or specific circumstances [when] you might not need one.
If you want to be a school leader, you get a different response. If you want to be a security officer, you get a response.
We sat in front of a whiteboard for a lot of hours and drew out the “yes and” events and then we mapped out this process on the back end to where we’ve written it into the logic that drives that system.
That work invested means that now we don’t actually spend time on that. That system runs itself.
One of our recruiters, his name is Clarence, he’s very interested in the University of Tennessee basketball team. Last year, while the team was in the [NCAA championship] Elite Eight, I could see Clarence sitting behind the team’s bench. At the same time, I saw our lead form triggering as well, which sends the automated emails from Clarence.
It’s just an example of how we can always be engaging with candidates and making sure we’re keeping those balls in the air to cultivate and convert folks.
How do you give your district principals ownership over staffing decisions?
We have a process internally [that] we call “flexible resources.” It ostensibly just gives principals more autonomy to do something different with a vacant position.
It all spins around this fundamental human-capital question of, we want to make sure that we’re maximizing time, money, and people, but we want to do that in service and alignment [with] the unique needs of your schools
The ... process gives [principals] a way to do roster management for their staff and have a clear plan for how they want to grow and develop staff, which then turns into a plan for how they want to retire.
It sets our school leaders up to be more strategic and, for longer term, more holistic staffing and planning.
So, how it works is the average cost of a teacher is $84,000, inclusive of salary benefits. An instructional assistant is closer to $45,000. So, we have a school that had a vacant EA position, but what they decided to do instead of hiring that role was to buy essentially a half of a clerical position and took the remaining $20,000 to create teacher-leadership positions across their school.
We had two high schools that combined two half positions to create a shared instructional coach for both buildings. It was known that they needed more instructional support in their buildings, but they didn’t have full positions, so we allowed them to combine those positions to get what they need.
What’s the next iteration of your work for Knox County?
We’ve done the capacity building and we’re at a place where we feel like we’re consistently producing acceptable results, but there’s just so much more good work to think about.
Like, how every staff member in the district can feel seen, heard, and valued; that people feel like they can launch and grow a career in KCS; that at any given time as a district, we can have a line of sight into the specific supports that staff members need, and making sure all of those things are aligned the best that they can with our academic strategy.
I think the part that I get excited about is, how do we do that in a resource-constrained environment? Because the path to that is also going to require us to get tight and lean and efficient with how we’re doing that.
What advice do you have for other districts navigating staffing shortages?
You have to get really focused on what the specific, actionable outcomes [are] that you need to drive.
What we have the habit of doing as district leaders at times is we can make a problem so big that it’s impossible to get to the core of what we’re actually talking about and the steps we want to take to fix it.
When you are in a context where you’re struggling to fill positions, it can feel hard to say “no” to some initiatives that sound and feel good but maybe aren’t the biggest bang for your buck, or maybe [they] aren’t going to drive specific outcomes that you’re looking for.
You’ve got to have a model—whether it’s in an Excel sheet somewhere or just a mental guide—when you start something to assess whether it’s worth the time and energy and how effective it will be at solving a problem.
If you’re in a context where you’re struggling to fill positions, that can be really, really hard, because there’s a lot of intense pressure to feel like you should be trying everything.
Strategy is pain, and it’s deciding to say ‘no’ to otherwise good ideas because they’re just not good for us. It’s really just the courage and confidence and expertise to walk away from things that, frankly, don’t fit in the model of what we want to accomplish
None of this work is possible without folks being willing to set aside some sacred cows around some of the touchy-feely work and wanting everyone to feel good about this.
There are times in the year when I’m clear and just say, “As a team, this is not gonna feel good. This is like the last five miles of this marathon. It’s going to hurt. But if we want to accomplish something great, that’s what it’s going to feel like. That’s what we signed up for.”
