I love football (if you know much about me you know that I have an unhealthy obsession with Florida Gator Football) and I love watching the draft. I actually DVRed the first three rounds…and watched them. I caught the highlights of the other four rounds on social media. It’s fun to root for kids you’ve seen play college ball, it’s fun to cheer on the home NFL team, and it’s fun to try to figure out the strategy of it all.
Selecting new players for your team can make or break your team. Get the right people and there is an infusion of new talent, new ideas, fresh eyes and a new well of experiences to go to. One new hire can literally improve the performance of the entire team. But hire the wrong people…well that can literally set the ministry at your church back years. The good news is that people will tell you who they are during the process…you just need to listen to them and believe them. Stop hoping for them and seeing all of the potential in them and look for reality. Here are a couple of tips that will help you along the way.
1. Turn on the Tape
Great teams turn on the tape. They don’t draft for potential, they draft for production. What have they actually done? What results have they produced?
2. Interviews
Don’t do interviews alone, do them together as a team so everyone hears the same things, and then debrief it later together without the candidate in the room. Ask them about past real life situations and see why they acted they way they did and what the results were. Then give them some hypotheticals that they may encounter in the role you’re looking at them for.
3. Dig Deep
Do your due diligence. Don’t just settle for the references they give you. No candidate is going to give you references that speak poorly of them. Dig. Talk to at least two past or current supervisors, two peers and two subordinates. And then ask them who else you should be talking to about the candidate. And don’t forget background and credit checks!
4. Fit the Scheme
You’ll notice that a lot of talent was passed up in the recent NFL Draft. While there are a lot of reasons a team may pass on a talented player, one of them is fit. Do they fit the team, the culture, the role, your approach and where you’re going?
5. Improve the Locker Room
What will their impact be like on the team? You want to bring people in that are going to positively impact the whole team, not just play their position well.
6. Best Available Player
Are they the best available player? Sometimes teams pass up great talent that would be a fantastic fit on their team because they’re waiting on the perfect candidate who isn’t available.
Want more help figuring out how to build a great hiring process and hire the right people at your church? Check out these
10 articles that will help your church make better hires!
This article originally appeared here.
