The 5 Hiring Mistakes Every New International School Makes…and How to Avoid Them
The Principal's Perspective
I have co-founded multiple international schools across Japan and Thailand. At each one, hiring was the single most consequential activity of the founding year, and at each one, I watched the same patterns of error play out with enough regularity that I stopped being surprised by them and started building systems specifically to prevent them.
The five mistakes below are not theoretical. They are observed. They are named here because naming them precisely is the first step to avoiding them, and because new international schools make them at a rate that the industry does not like to discuss plainly.
Hiring for Credentials Over Character
Most FrequentA candidate with a Master's degree from a recognised university and five years at a well-known international school looks compelling on paper. Those credentials are real, and they matter. But they tell you almost nothing about whether this person has the character to build something new, work through ambiguity, and remain professional when a founding-year school fails to deliver on its promises to staff, as every founding-year school inevitably does at some point.
Character, in a hiring context, means specific things: how a candidate has handled professional situations that did not go their way, how they talk about former colleagues and schools, whether they take responsibility for outcomes or explain them as the result of external factors, and whether they show genuine curiosity about students as individuals rather than as a group to be managed. None of these signals live in a CV.
Shortlisting based on school names and degree institutions. Moving a strong-credential candidate forward without probing their professional history. Assuming accreditation from a recognised institution equals reliability of character.
Build character-specific questions into every interview stage. Ask candidates to describe professional situations they would handle differently now. Listen for how they talk about former schools. The quality of a candidate's self-reflection is one of the most reliable indicators of how they will behave when things are hard.
Moving Too Quickly from CV to Offer
Most Dangerous in Founding YearFounding schools are almost always hiring under pressure. The opening date is fixed, the curriculum needs teachers, and there is enormous internal urgency to fill seats. This urgency is the single biggest driver of hiring errors, because it compresses the process in exactly the phases where compression is most costly: the evaluation stages between shortlisting and offer.
A hiring process that moves from CV review to offer in fewer than three substantive touchpoints is not a process. It is wishful thinking with a contract attached. Every additional evaluation stage is an investment that costs time and saves multiples of that time if it identifies a wrong-fit candidate before they are in a classroom with your students.
A 30-minute video call followed directly by a reference check and an offer. Skipping stages because a candidate "feels right." Treating urgency as a justification for bypassing evaluation. Offering positions verbally before any assessment of teaching ability has occurred.
Commit to a minimum three-stage process: screening, structured interview, and live teaching assessment. Build the timeline to accommodate this before hiring begins, not after. Urgency is a planning failure, not a reason to compress evaluation.
Not Testing Pedagogical Approach in a Live Context
Most Preventable"Every teacher can describe excellent teaching in an interview. Almost nobody is asked to demonstrate it. The gap between the two is where most hiring mistakes live."
A candidate who describes themselves as inquiry-led, student-centred, and differentiation-aware in an interview may be telling the truth about their aspirations rather than their practice. The only way to know which is which is to watch them teach something, to a real group of students or an equivalent simulation, and observe how they behave when a student does not respond as expected.
The live teaching assessment is the most under-used tool in international school hiring, particularly in new schools where leaders are managing multiple priorities and rationalise skipping it as a time-saving measure. It is not a time-saving measure. It is the stage where the most expensive mistakes are prevented.
Accepting a candidate's description of their teaching philosophy without observation. Reviewing lesson plans as a substitute for a live demonstration. Conducting teaching assessments as a formality with a predetermined outcome rather than as a genuine evaluation.
Require a 20 to 30-minute taught session for every classroom candidate, with a topic specified in advance from the actual curriculum. Observe specifically for: how the candidate handles a student who does not understand, how they pace the session, and whether their classroom presence matches their stated pedagogical approach.
Ignoring Cultural Fit Signals
Most UnderweightedCultural fit is not a polite euphemism for demographic preference. It is a specific, assessable question: will this person's professional values, communication style, and expectations of institutional culture align well enough with this school's identity that they will contribute positively to the environment rather than eroding it?
In a founding-year school, this question carries more weight than at an established institution, because there is no entrenched culture to absorb or redirect a poor-fit hire. The culture of a new school is made by the first people hired into it. One staff member who operates outside the stated values, who complains to colleagues rather than raising concerns through proper channels, or who treats the founding year's inevitable imperfections as evidence of institutional failure, can damage a staff culture that takes years to rebuild.
Cultural fit signals appear in candidate behaviour throughout the hiring process, not just in answers to direct questions about values. How a candidate handles a delayed response from the hiring team. Whether they research the school's actual mission or ask generic questions about "what makes your school different." How they respond when asked about a professional situation that tested their values. These signals are available if the hiring process is designed to surface them.
Treating cultural fit as a subjective "feel" rather than an assessable quality. Not defining the school's values specifically enough to evaluate fit against them. Hiring strong credentials despite clear signals of poor values alignment, and expecting the school's culture to absorb the gap.
Define your school's cultural non-negotiables in writing before hiring begins. Build specific scenarios into your interview process that reveal how a candidate actually behaves under the conditions your school will create. Treat candidate behaviour throughout the hiring process itself as data.
Making the Head of School the Hiring Bottleneck
Most Structurally CostlyIn a new international school, the Head of School is almost always the most experienced evaluator in the building and the person with the clearest picture of what the school needs. It is therefore completely logical that the Head becomes personally involved in every hire. It is also, in practice, one of the most costly structural errors a founding school can make.
When every hiring decision routes through one person, three things happen. First, the process slows to match that person's availability, and in a founding year the Head of School's availability is perpetually constrained. Second, the quality of evaluation becomes uneven, because the Head's attention is divided across too many competing demands for any single hiring decision to receive the depth it deserves. Third, the school never builds the internal hiring capability it needs to function independently, because all expertise stays centralised.
The Head of School should be the final checkpoint for senior hires and a critical voice in defining what the school is looking for. They should not be the person screening 40 CVs, scheduling first-round interviews, and writing the shortlisting rationale. That is not the best use of 22 years of experience in an institution that needs its leader thinking at the strategic level.
Every CV reaching the Head's inbox before any filtering has occurred. The Head conducting every first-round interview. Hiring timelines extending because the Head cannot respond quickly enough. Other strategic priorities deprioritised during recruitment cycles.
Build a hiring architecture with distinct stages and distinct decision-makers. The Head defines the criteria brief and attends the final-stage interview. The screening, shortlisting, and first-round evaluation is handled by someone with the expertise to do it well, freeing the Head's attention for the decisions that genuinely require it.
Every one of these five mistakes is preventable. None of them requires a larger budget, a longer timeline, or capabilities a new school does not already have. They require a hiring process designed with deliberate structure before the pressure starts, and a willingness to hold to that structure when urgency makes cutting corners feel rational.
The schools I have seen get founding-year hiring right are not the ones with the largest candidate pools or the most competitive compensation packages. They are the ones that knew what they were looking for before they started looking, and that built a process rigorous enough to find it.
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Dr. Allen A. Dubolino, Ph.D. is the founding Head of School at New American Chinese International School (Nonthaburi, Thailand) and Head of School at Four Leaves International School Tokyo. He has 22 years of international school leadership experience across Japan and Thailand and is the founder of Dubolino Education Advisory.
