Where to find childcare teachers when you're the one doing the hiring

Ask ten daycare owners where to find childcare teachers and you’ll get the same eight answers. Post on Indeed. Post on Care.com. Ask your current staff for referrals.

Call the early childhood education program at the community college. Check your state licensing agency’s provider job board. Try the local parent Facebook group.

Put a sign in the window. If nothing else works, call an agency.

None of that advice is wrong. It’s also not the actual problem.

The channel that gives you a candidate you’d actually trust rarely gives you enough of them. The channel that gives you enough candidates hands you a pile you can’t get through on your own. That split is the real obstacle, and it’s why “where to find childcare teachers” keeps coming back up even after you’ve tried every item on the list.

Every list of places to find childcare teachers says the same eight things

The standard advice clusters into two groups, and almost nobody names the split out loud. Referrals, ECE program partnerships, and word of mouth in your parent community are the trust channel. People come with a real vouch attached: a director who worked with them before, a program instructor who knows their classroom presence, a parent whose kid they used to watch.

Indeed, Care.com, state licensing job boards, and local Facebook groups are the volume channel. Anyone can apply. Nobody vouches for anyone.

Most hiring guides list both groups in one undifferentiated bullet list, as if they solve the same problem at different speeds. They solve two separate problems, each with a weakness the other happens to cover. That’s the part the standard list leaves out, and it matters more for a childcare teacher than for most roles, because this one gets refilled unusually often.

The trust channel can’t keep up with how often this room turns over

A referral is a great way to fill one opening a year. It’s a bad way to staff a classroom that needs a new teacher every few months, which is closer to the real pattern in this field.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 150,300 childcare worker openings a year nationally over the next decade. Most of those are seats left behind by people who quit the field rather than brand new classrooms opening up. Employment in the role is actually projected to shrink slightly through 2035. The openings keep coming anyway, because people keep leaving.

Your referral list doesn’t refresh at that pace. You get a good lead when a director you trust happens to know someone between jobs, or when your program contact’s cohort happens to graduate around the same week you post. That’s a coincidence you can’t schedule.

Wages are a big part of why the churn is constant in the first place. CSCCE’s Early Childhood Workforce Index puts the national median wage for early educators at $13.07 an hour, against $22.92 across all U.S. occupations. People leave for jobs that pay more, and the classroom needs someone again.

The trust channel works. It just runs on a timeline this role can’t wait on every single time it opens. Keep it running quietly in the background, and lean on it when the timing lines up, rather than treating it as your only plan the moment a spot opens.

If you’re staffing the classroom itself and the role above it, our daycare director hiring guide covers the leadership hire separately, since it’s a different search with different stakes.

Job boards solve the volume problem and create a new one

Post the same opening on Indeed and Care.com, and you’ll get candidates. That part of the advice is genuinely true. What nobody tells you upfront is what those candidates look like once they land in your inbox.

Childcare resumes in particular tend to describe duties rather than outcomes. “Supervised a classroom of 12,” “planned activities,” “communicated with parents.” The work doesn’t produce the kind of measurable result a sales or ops resume does, so a resume alone can’t separate a genuinely patient, steady teacher from someone who’s wrong for the room. Our resume screening examples walk through how to spot a real red flag next to a good signal that looks similar on paper, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity a duty-list resume creates.

Now put twenty or forty of those resumes side by side. They all say roughly the same thing, because the job description is roughly the same everywhere. You’re not looking at a shortlist. You’re looking at a flooded, undifferentiated pile that’s every bit as hard to read as the pile a corporate hiring manager gets, just with fewer measurable words in it to sort by.

This is the trade the standard advice never states plainly. Job boards fix your volume problem and immediately become your reading problem. You didn’t fix sourcing. You moved the bottleneck downstream, to the part where you’re the only person available to read forty vague resumes at 9pm.

A staffing agency sounds like the fix, until you look at the math

If the pile is the problem, paying someone else to sort it seems obvious. Here’s why that rarely pencils out for this specific role.

Agency fees usually run as a percentage of first-year salary, often somewhere around a fifth of it, charged per hire. On a role paying close to the BLS median of $16.82 an hour, that fee eats a real chunk of what a small, independently-run center has to work with, and it repeats every time the seat turns over. Agencies also gravitate toward roles with higher margins and lower volume. A recurring, lower-wage classroom seat isn’t where their business model wants to spend time.

That doesn’t mean an agency is never right, especially for a hard-to-fill leadership seat. For the teacher role you’re refilling every few months, the fee structure fights against the exact pattern this field has: frequent, recurring, modest-wage hiring. You need something built to match that cadence.

Run every channel at once, and screen before you read

Running both channels at the same time works, provided the volume channel’s pile gets handled before it eats your week.

Keep the trust channel alive all the time, before you need it rather than after a spot opens. Tell your current staff you’re always open to a good referral, even when nothing’s posted. Stay in touch with the ECE program’s job placement contact so you hear about a strong graduate before the posting goes live. That channel produces slowly, so give it a long runway.

Run the volume channel at the same time, but change what happens the moment resumes start arriving. Say you post a lead teacher opening on Indeed and Care.com the same week. By day three you have thirty-some applications, most of them the same duty list in different fonts. Reading each one closely, the way you’d want to, is hours you don’t have between drop-off and pickup.

This is where a screening layer earns its keep instead of an extra step. Resume screening can confirm relevant age-group experience and rule out the clear mismatches before you open a single application by hand. A one-way video interview does more work for this role than almost any other, because it’s the fastest way to hear someone explain a classroom rule to a four-year-old or walk through a nap-time routine, the things a duty list can’t show you at all. Layering in an employment personality assessment adds a third signal on patience and judgment under pressure, before you ever spend an in-person trial day on someone who isn’t right.

None of that replaces the trial day itself, and it shouldn’t. It just means the thirty resumes you can’t read by hand become the five you can, with the evidence already attached. AI surfaces what each candidate showed you. You still decide who gets the trial.

You’re not filling a seat. You’re staffing a room that resets every year

Treat “where do I find a childcare teacher” as a one-time question and you’ll keep answering it every few months, each time from scratch, each time surprised by how tired the search leaves you. The field doesn’t work that way. It resets on its own schedule, driven by wages and burnout you don’t control, and the sourcing system you build has to survive more than one round.

Build the referral relationships once and let them run quietly in the background. Build the job-board-plus-screening loop once, and it’s ready the next time a seat opens instead of something you reinvent under pressure. What the standard advice leaves out is that the volume channel only works if something stands between the pile and your evening.

Truffle handles that middle part: resume screening, one-way video interviews, and assessments in one place, so a flooded posting turns into a shortlist you can actually act on. Plans start at $49 a month, with a 7-day free trial and 30 credits, no card required.

Frequently asked questions about finding childcare teachers

Where’s the best place to post a childcare teacher opening?

Run both channels at the same time. Post on Indeed and Care.com for reach, and separately keep a live connection to your state licensing agency’s provider board and the placement contact at a nearby ECE program. The job boards bring volume fast. The program contact and your own staff bring the occasional candidate you don’t have to screen as hard, but you can’t count on that alone to fill a seat by a specific date.

How long should it realistically take to fill a childcare teacher role?

Once a strong candidate clears your screen, move fast. Good candidates in this field don’t stay available long, and a slow process usually means losing them to a center that decided first. Build in the lead time your background checks and required certifications actually take, since that’s often the longer pole in the timeline than the search itself.

Is a staffing agency ever worth it for childcare hiring?

It can make sense for a hard-to-fill leadership role, like a director, where the fee is a smaller share of a higher salary and the hire is less frequent. For a lead or assistant teacher seat you’re refilling every few months, the agency fee repeats each time on a role that doesn’t carry the salary to absorb it comfortably.

Why do childcare teacher resumes all look the same?

The job produces care rather than the kind of measurable outcome a sales or ops resume can point to. Most candidates end up describing the same duties in similar language: supervised a classroom, planned activities, communicated with parents. That’s why screening built around this role leans on more than the resume, since the resume genuinely can’t do the differentiating on its own.