My 6 Go-To Interview Questions for Church Staff

Whether interviewing a candidate for a teaching pastor position or an administrative support position, these are my go-to questions that continue to give me insight into the person during my initial interviews. Maybe they can help you in your selection process…

1. You have several strengths (and I would name some), but tell me what the “shadow side” to these are. Tell me about how you’ve seen a strength of yours come out as a negative in certain settings.
2. Which of the nine “fruit of the Spirit” is most evident in your life currently, and which “fruit” is least evident in this season of your life?
3. When you’ve had a hard day or a hard month, how do you typically re-energize?
4. Thinking about supervisors you’ve had in the past, tell me a supervising characteristic one of them had that really was good for you to work under. Next, tell me a supervising characteristic that really bugged you at times.
5. What does self-development look like for you? If you have intentional practices, please describe.
6. What is the greatest joy and greatest challenge in your current position?

These aren’t original. They don’t always provide significant insight. But for me, more often than not, I learn something valuable from the person’s response. In the selection process for my church, we have a robust Selection Tool Kit (this is where some of the above questions came from). And these six questions represent a small fraction of the questions we ask. These six are typically asked in the first couple of interviews (discovery phase), and as we move along, they get more in depth. But as I’ve written about before, you need to model transparency in your interviewing exchange, and when possible, ask open-ended questions that provide an opportunity for you to see them in reality and not in an aspirational version of themselves. Happy interviewing– This article originally appeared here.