Hiring The Right Kind Of People

Hire the wrong people and your church will pay for it in numerous ways for longer than you’d expect. Hire the right people and you’ll reap the rewards for years.

A common mistake we can make when hiring is paying too much attention to the job description and not enough attention to the kind of person we’re looking for. If you want to hire the right person, you have to know the kind of person you’re looking for.

The NY Times recently interviewed Jim Collins. As I read the article, the attention he puts into the kind of people he hires for his research team caught my attention:

He prefers to learn as much as he can about them before he meets them. “Because if I meet them, I may like them, and then all the assessment of the person is going to be filtered by the fact that I like them, and what I really want to see is the quality of their work,” he says.

If they clear other hurdles, he will finally meet them in person. He’s looking for four intangibles: smart, curious, willing to death-march (“there has to be something in their background that indicates that they just will die before they would fail to complete something to perfection”) and some spark of irreverence (“because it’s in that fertile conversation of disagreement where the best ideas come, or at least the best ideas get tested”).

We know the kind of person we’re looking for here at Browns Bridge and at the other two campuses (North Point and Buckhead) and North Point Ministries. The job descriptions and job details may be different, but we’re looking for a certain kind of person to work here:

• high capacity
• value add
• self directed

When you know the kind of person you’re looking for, it’s easier to spot them. And it’s easier to know when you have not found them.

If you’re interested in more on hiring, I wrote 1, 2, 3 other posts about hiring around the end of last year. And I’m pretty sure we will be spending some time at Drive 2010 in the Admin breakouts talking about hiring and “freeing” staff. Go register now!