Is it just me, or do Churches have the hardest time letting bad employees go?
Often times, Church employees are also Church members, so this creates a difficult dynamic. If the Church “let’s-you-go” because you’re not a “good-fit”, how does the employee feel about “fitting-in” to the congregation afterwards?
Difficult, indeed!
The solution isn’t necessarily to hire outside of the congregation, either. This brings it’s own set of problems, too.
So, here are six hiring tips to help hire good employees, so you don’t have to worry about handing over a “pink-slip” to a Church member:
1. Take Your Time
Don’t let urgency dictate the situation! Take your time. If you can’t find the right person, wait until the right person comes along.
2 .Start Looking, Now!
The best way to avoid an urgent hiring situation is to start looking before the situation is urgent. Look ahead, and start looking to fill the position before things get dire.
3. Don’t Be Too Narrow
Be careful not to pitch someone out of the running because you don’t like one thing. Don’t get tunnel vision. If you need to, ask for some else’s opinion.
4. Resume’s Are Lame
Better to take the time and schedule extra interviews and allow more candidates to find the right fit, than weed out potential employees based on a sheet of paper.
5. Is There a Need
Non-profits, especially, tend to be fat. Without a profit margin staring them in the face, it just happens. A lean staff is a healthy staff. Do you really need to hire for the position, or can someone on staff absorb it?
6. Let’s Just Be Friends
Be extra careful when screening a staff member’s refereed friend. Friends are biased.
1 Great Tool
PeopleFlow is an excellent ChCMS module from LOGOS Management Software. It does an excellent job of streamlining Church volunteer and employee management.
What helpful hiring tips and software solutions have you heard about?
[via ChurchLeaders | Image via thinkpanama]
Rich Stone says
Here are some additional suggestions:
1)Try it before you buy it –
hire someone as a temporary or contract employee so that if they don’t work out, there is less “drama” – or if there is someone within your body who volunteers, see if they are willing to try doing one or more aspects of the job as a volunteer to see if there is a good fit, then make the move to paid staff if it works out. again, less drama if they don’t believe that a final decision hasn’t been made.
2) Work on interviewing skills – there are many resources available to help you improve your interviewing. Focus on asking behavior-description questions rather than hypotheticals. There are great tips for interviewing on the following two sites:
http://managementblog.org/
http://www.jrothman.com/blog/htp/
Neither of these are ministry related, but much of the advise on interviewing found in either one can easily be appropriated to any hiring or leadership selection situation.
Eric Dye says
Great stuff, thanks!