Online job site showcases Peabody High School

PEABODY – Peabody Veterans Memorial High School is currently the feature school on the fast-growing online community YouSchools.org.Based out of a downtown Peabody office, the Web site strives to be the most comprehensive and thorough career search engine for prospective teachers looking for the right school and schools looking for the right teacher.”What we wanted to do was give schools a way to compete with the larger companies,” said John Ivester, who founded the site just over a year ago. “A lot of their advertising is limited to line ads in newspapers because they just don’t have the money to build brand identity that other large companies have.”To help solve that problem, Ivester’s site gives schools a free place to post profiles and promote why teachers should come work there. The site features contact information, student-made promotional videos and faculty commentary, as well as a list of current job openings. There’s also a component that allows job seekers to post resumes for administrators to view.Peabody was the first school featured on the site, and since going live in October, more than 160 other individual cities and towns from 18 states have joined.”It’s more sophisticated than a one-dimensional advertisement,” said PVMHS Principal Ed Sapienza. “It takes a job opportunity you might find in a newspaper to the next level. Seeing it online with the video, (teachers) get a sense of who we are. It makes it a bit more personal.”The five minute video for PVMHS features Sapienza, who gives a brief introduction and overview of the school, student interviews spliced from the school’s NEASC commercial and Superintendent Milt Burnett speaking about the opportunities and benefits Peabody Schools have to offer.”Anyone coming in to an interview will have a head start on what I look like and what the school looks like,” he said. “We’re getting the word out there that PVMHS is alive and thriving.”And knowing what teachers are getting themselves into is an important part of their selection process, said Ivester.”I know a lot of teachers and they work in various school departments,” he said. “Some who love working in Chelsea would never want to work in a rural type of community?Teachers who find the site and find job listings can watch a video and get a good flavor of what the school is really like.”Sapienza hopes that when job seekers come across Peabody’s page, they’re encouraged to apply.And that’s exactly what Ivester had in mind when creating the site.”It attracts the right kind of applicants,” he said. “Don’t just find a job, find a school.”To view Peabody’s promotional video and many others, or to start your job search, log onto www.YouSchools.org.