The International Schools Review Forum

How can you tell?

Unfortunately, you generally can't really tell for certain until you see the effects of one (i.e. you don't get the job). Even then, unless a prospective employer or recruiter shares the information (or at least hints at the reason you missed out) you won't really know.

You should ask all of the other administrators/supervisors for whom you currently work or interact with at your school to write recs. SEARCH allows you to add as many references as you want. You can also add extra parent recs. I think that if there is a large amount of positive admin/parent recs, one negative or neutral one won't carry much weight.

If you have a friend who is a recruiter at another school they can look at your profile and may be willing to give you a heads up.

It seems from these forums that sometimes SA Associates have hinted that one of the recs is suboptimal and encouraged other recs be added, but that's generally been in very vague terms from what people have related.

Otherwise wrldtvlr123 is right, that you may not know for certain.

Is there a reason you suspect or fear you have a bad one?

Eion

1) Your application process is going great and then vanishes abruptly.
2) Your associate or consultant tells you.
3) Your HR contact or someone at your prior IS/DS tells you, or you have some kind

I could write more line items but unless someone tells you or you have some type of access to your prior DS/IS than you probably wont know until you realize your recruiting efforts are stalling at the same point.

HOS and higher level leadership recs are worth more than lower leadership and non-leadership recs. What a colleague, student or parent thinks of you is different than what a supervisor does, and at a certain level of leadership only those members are going to be privy to the deep and potentially somewhat darker stuff.