Don’t beat yourself up; you’re competing against the for-profit sector. That being said, be prepared to present in a positive light the positive aspects of your school. A rebuilding mode can be exciting for an IT professional who likes to tear down and redesign systems, or an academic technologist who wants to design a new professional development program. A new building project can be exciting for someone who likes to implement new technology. A school with the IT systems all perfectly working can be exciting for someone who wants to focus on more strategic issues.

Good people are everywhere; you just have to find them. Just as we talked in the last article about building your own farm system, recognize that there are farm systems all around you. Local colleges are a gold mine: community colleges, four-year universities, and graduate programs. The NAIS ecosystem has countless partnership organizations and associations, many of which have people working in them who would love to get into a school.

Regional associations, ed tech meet ups, and gatherings of technology professionals are a great way to move one degree closer to the right candidate. Public schools are perhaps the most underrated potential hiring source because their employees have already chosen to not work in the for-profit sector. Many public school technology professionals would love to work in an organization with fewer rules and restrictions, and the less they are invested in the retirement system, the more willing they might be to jump ship. Finally, think about all the vendors that have a relationship with your school. Your contacts at each of these companies undoubtedly is colleagues with a technology professional, and if you strike pay dirt you just might get introduced to someone who is ready to change jobs.

Rather than playing it safe, school administrators would be better served to inject ambiguity, awkwardness, and a little tension into the interview. Moreover, the entire on-site experience should thoroughly vet a candidate’s composure, communication skills, and improvisational skills. Some questions to consider asking include:

• Why did a teacher tell me that the servers we have on campus act no different from cloud servers when he’s at home?
• What are your technical weaknesses?
• What’s the most annoying thing about technology?
• Why is it so hard to train people on new technologies?

Some unconventional interview approaches to consider include:

• Have them give a simple demonstration on the fly. Ask them something random, like how to sort unique records in Excel, or how to exclude search terms from Google. If they don’t know, ask them to show you how they’d search for an answer on the spot and share that knowledge with someone seeking help.
• Ask a totally bogus question, disagree vehemently with one of their positions, and see how they react. If possible, persist with your faulty reasoning to see if they stay calm or instead get flustered.
• Ask them to write a help document on the spot. Give them a computer and a simple situation like the Excel example above. See what their approach is—text, images, video, etc. Ask them to do it again with a different approach.

Whatever you do, don’t play it safe! No one else will once this person is hired.