K-12 recruiters and administrators are racing throughout the summer to hire qualified candidates by the start of the upcoming academic year. Some may turn to a new tool to help them in the process: artificial intelligence.
While current data show that only a small percentage of recruiters from various industries are tapping into AI, recent year-over-year growth suggests that’s about to change. About a quarter of companies globally use AI for hiring or talent management—up from just 12% in 2023—according to the 2024-25 Criteria Hiring Benchmarking Report.
Recruiters in the K-12 space have joined the ranks of those interested in learning how AI can expedite the recruiting process. This March, 75 members of the American Association of School Personnel completed an online microcredential in AI, according to AASPA’s executive director Kelly Coash Johnson, and more cohorts are planned. AI also is slated to be the focus of a professional learning session at the association’s annual meeting in the fall.
It’s good timing, as job applicants have started to rely on AI to help them get ahead in the hiring process.
Dale Fisher, assistant superintendent for human resources at Deerfield Public Schools District 109 in Illinois, has spent the last year or so researching best practices and dabbling in AI to support his district’s recruitment efforts, and will be presenting his findings at AASPA’s upcoming session on the subject. He shared with Education Week what he sees as some of AI’s recruiting capabilities, and warned would-be users how to avoid its potential pitfalls.
Start internally with low-stakes tasks
Fisher suggests that K-12 recruiters and hiring managers experimenting with AI start with internal processes such as job descriptions, job responsibilities, and interview questions—either by updating existing and potentially out-of-date documents or creating new ones. Fisher considers using AI to create these types of documents “low risk,” largely because it allows the user a fair amount of control over the content being generated.
But ultimately, district employees have to take responsibility over the content that AI produces, Fisher cautions.
“You still have to look at the final product and ask yourself: Is this something that I’m going to put my name on? Does this match what we really want as a system and as a team and as a district?” he said. “If you’re blindly throwing your weight behind any [AI-generated] document, that’s dangerous.”
The secret to useful AI? Better prompts
How a district or school presents itself online can be the difference between someone clicking on one of its job descriptions or moving on in a competitive hiring market.
As Fisher’s district started to use LinkedIn to promote job postings, AI helped them stand out, he said.
“We went from no presence [on LinkedIn] at all to, in the last six months, putting up our job postings using a lot of great colorful graphics that AI helped generate,” he said.
Just as AI can generate eye-popping images, it can also craft messages to be used in job postings and other aspects of recruiting. But district employees taking an active role in prompting AI during this process—or any involving generating recruiting-oriented content—is critical to getting the intended results, Fisher said.
Such prompts can influence all aspects of messaging, from the target audience to the tone, said Fisher, offering this example: If you’re creating a job posting for a middle school teaching position, you can ask AI to consider warmth, empathy, and an inviting tone.
“If you’re not good at prompting AI, that leads to bad data going in, and bad data coming out. You actually have to practice how you ask [AI] the questions,” Fisher said. “Once you get good at asking the questions, the output suddenly makes exponential leaps in credibility.”
Don’t let AI screen candidates for you
AI advertisers tout its far-reaching powers, from scanning “millions of resumes” in real-time to pinpointing the perfect job candidate for an open position. But users should exercise caution, Fisher advises.
For starters, “millions of candidates” seeking K-12 positions likely don’t exist these days. In fact, in a National Center for Education Statistics’ School Pulse Panel that collected data from 1,392 public schools in August 2024, 62 percent of respondents said “too few candidates applying” was a top challenge.
Even if there were a healthy number of job candidates vying for positions, Fisher warns against allowing AI to be the sole vetting source. One of his main concerns? Bias.
“Bias is, to me, one of the scariest parts about being in HR,” Fisher said. “And if you’re solely reliant on AI to screen out candidates, that could be dangerous.”
If, for example, a district historically hired candidates mostly from a limited pool—say, from local universities or a certain racial/ethnic background—the AI tool might learn to prefer similar profiles and deprioritize more diverse candidates, Fisher said.
District employees can minimize this potential for bias by vigilantly interjecting “prompting” questions throughout the process: “We teach people as they start to use AI to continually ask it, as it generates a result, ‘Is there potentially any bias in your response?’” Fisher said.
Watch for AI tricks in applicant materials
District human resources should also keep in mind that some of the resumes or cover letters applicants are submitting are generated by AI.
And some of that AI-generated content is designed to slip through the cracks. Some job seekers purportedly are embedding “hidden language” into resumes that AI can detect, but the human eye won’t—for instance, adding phrases such as “I’m the best candidate for the position” in white font, which AI takes at face value.
Fisher said he’s not sure whether this example of hidden language has actually happened or is, rather, the stuff of modern-day recruiting myths. But there are still ways that recruiters can avoid falling into such traps, he said. Again, it comes down to prompting.
“You could ask AI to look at the formatting of the document and tell you if there’s something that stands out as hidden,” Fisher said. “Ask AI: Are there any font color changes? Is there any language that you would perceive to be hidden?”
Human judgment still matters most
Recruiters can enlist AI for just about every aspect of the hiring process—even assessing job candidates. Whether it actually saves (human) recruiters time and effort in the long run, as advertisers suggest it does, remains to be seen. But for now, even AI enthusiasts like Fisher plan to keep interactions between job candidates and recruiters limited to humans.
“Our ability to do a phone interview based on questions where we’re identifying specific things that we’re trying to hone in on is not going to be something that AI can produce on the fly during my career,” Fisher said. “Phone interviews matter. It still comes down to human interaction, in my opinion.”
