Recruiting and hiring in the corporate world is challenging enough, but hiring for ministry can be a formidable task with stakes increasing in senior pastoral positions. For those of you who’ve hired in both worlds, you know that church staffing is unlike any staffing out there. It comes with a unique set of dynamics; it needs a unique and "smart" approach to ensure retention and success.
In the corporate world, there are key factors driving hiring decisions and determining the best fit among a candidate pool. This is the responsibility of the HR department and hiring team. In ministry, you have the same factors as in businesses (i.e. salary, job, and skills fit, etc.) but with the addition of family, staff, community, and calling fit. There are more critical criteria to match and ensure agreement, therefore it’s important to approach your church staffing using relative tools and technology available today. To complicate matters, some churches are too small to have an HR department, hire an executive search firm, or sink money into recruiting. Oftentimes, church staff are already overloaded so filling church positions can become an area of increased stress.
PeopleKeys has been passionate about implementing best hiring practices in ministries and churches for over 35 years. Our consulting team has been called upon to hand-select church staff, and we’ve created online tools enabling others to find the best church fit. Ministries that have used PeopleKeys hiring tools, over time, have made the PeopleKeys hiring platform “smarter” by creating benchmarks for specific church positions. This is important so that similar churches, too, can find top-performer qualities in candidates. PeopleKeys hiring tools and performance benchmarks have worked for thousands of successful church, ministry, and non-profit placements. Below are tips that have helped PeopleKeys clients effectively recruit and hire for their ministries.
There are tools beyond the resume, references, and gut feelings that help you better predict the success of your candidates. The extra steps you take before your candidate search will ensure the best match.
Using short surveys will give you a behavioral snapshot of your candidate.
Benchmarking ideal behavioral attributes for the position can forecast success.
Beyond these tips is, of course, prayer. The peace your search team receives from effective prayer will be the greatest factor in hiring decisions. PeopleKeys can help supplement the discernment of prayer with time-tested behavioral analytics and hiring tools designed to make your work smarter, not harder when staffing your church. Contact us today to learn more about implementing a more successful and smarter hiring system into your ministry.
Interested in learning more about performance benchmarks for hiring? Watch this short video.