Overseas Teaching Job Fairs - too many interveiw invitations!

You will need to be prepared with a mechanism to quickly and easily turn down interview requests because the chances are you will be invited to interview with schools that you have no interest in teaching for.

One way to prepare for this contingency is to prepare ‘thanks but no thanks’ notes ahead of the job fair. You can then fill in the blanks on the refusal letter and either pass it on to the recruiters at the sign up session on the first morning of the fair, put it in the recruiter’s mailbox, or slip it under the door of their hotel room.

When you are preparing your application packs to take with you to the teaching job fair you simply prepare and print some copies of your refusal letter and take them with you to the fair.

A major problem with this plan occurs if you have not prepared enough of the notes, as my colleague experienced when she received interview invitations from 26 schools, of which she was only interested in two! What do you do then? You will have to resort to hand-written notes.

Another option is to take along a pad of Post-It notes. Post-It notes can be stuck to hotel room doors or on to the recruiter’s table at the sign-up session. A bonus to using this method is that your note will not be accidentally mixed in among other papers because it is both sticky and colourful.

Before you turn down interview requests you need to consider how much practice you have had recently with job interviews. Do you feel confident? Going to job interviews with schools you are not very interested in teaching for will give you an opportunity to practise rusty interview technique in preparation for the schools you really are interested in. Additionally, through interviewing with these recruiters you may discover that an international school you were not very interested in is actually the perfect place for you to move to.