6 Reasons Your Church Should Use a Search Firm to Make Your Next Hire

Jun 16, 2013

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Hiring a new team member can be exciting because it means there is going to be fresh eyes on old problems and status quo ministry, new ideas, and a new well of experiences to go to. If you’ve read much of my blog you know that I enjoy the hiring process and helping churches recruit and hire great teams. In fact you can check out this series of posts on “Recruiting and Hiring Teams that Make Vision Real” or take a look at how I help churches build a staffing and hiring strategy. But sometimes the best move that you can make is to enlist the help of an Executive Search Firm. Here are 6 reasons you should consider using an Executive Search Firm when you make your next hire.

1. Broaden the Candidate Pool

What do you do after you run through your network of relationships and post the job online? An Executive Search Firm can bring a broader, deeper, and more talented candidate pool than you can usually gain access to on your own. Simply put, they have a “greater reach.”

2. Make the Right Hire

At the end of the day you just don’t want to make any hire…or even a good hire for that matter. You want to make the right hire. A hire gone wrong can cost you and your church not only a significant amount of time and money; but a ministry can literally be set back years by making the wrong hire.

3. Save Time

Depending on the unique aspects of the role and the church it can take anywhere from 3 months to a year for many churches to fill a staffing vacancy. That’s a lot of time in which the ministry is treading water or worse moving backwards. A Search Firm can speed the process up considerably. Not to mention who on your Staff has the time to run a search right now?

4. Expertise

Most Pastors aren’t experienced professional recruiters. In fact most people in ministry have never had any professional Human Resources training at all. An Executive Search Firm brings years of experience and training to the table.

5. Process

Most Churches don’t have a proven and successful process to make a hire. The old standby “Personnel Committee” isn’t getting it done. No other industry successfully operates by letting its “customers” who have no industry or hiring expertise run a hiring process. A Search Firm will bring a tested and proven hiring process to the table.

6. New Challenges

In a growing church it’s not uncommon to go through multiple staff restructures. When those moments come it often exposes a need that can’t be filled with the talent that’s already in the room. Likewise it’s not uncommon in a growing church to have need for a more specialized and highly trained skillset for some roles. These are perfect opportunities to enlist a Search Firm to help in these unique situations.

There are a growing number of Christian Search Firms out there that you can look into, but here are a couple to help get you going in the right direction.

Minister Search is a full service search firm that helps churches and candidates find the right fit. They’ve been going at this for more than 10 years now.

Shepherd’s Staff helps churches find the right candidates and is willing to customize their level of involvement in each search.

Slingshot Group has a created special niche for itself in helping churches staff the Creative Arts.

Vanderbloemen Search Group is quickly becoming recognized as the nations foremost Christian Executive Search Firm working with many of the leading churches in America.

Comments

2 responses to “6 Reasons Your Church Should Use a Search Firm to Make Your Next Hire”

Bill Weisler

July 23, 2013

I do have some issues with this because research shows that successful organizations are more apt to train and move people from within the organization than to look outside of the organization for the next hip/popular leader is. So with that…

1. I believe you should be developing your candidate pool from within the organization. Then instead of hiring someone you hope will adopt your philosophy, you have someone who has been living it.

2. If leadership is done well, you are developing people to be able to take over, so searching for that person isn’t necessary.

3. If your developing someone, you save all the time in the world, then you can take your time finding the next person to be trained.

4. I completely agree, sometimes pastors have a tendency to reach beyond their capabilities and not trust either professional opinions or those around them.

5. I agree here too. Many times churches have an elder board that need to approve major hirings. This can drastically hold up the process if one or more of the board simply doesn’t “gel” with a proposed new person.

6. I notice that most organizations have to reorganize because the organizations leaders have stopped paying attention to the changing needs of the organization. Instead of making slight adjustments as time goes on, they tend to let things go until they are out of control and the only way to fix it is to re-organize to fix organizational responsibilities.

Jim Collins has done a fair amount of research in this, which shows successful organizations learn how to grow their leadership. John Maxwell states that a great leader is one who can leave at any time and has done such a good job setting up their organization, that it can then operate in their absence.

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Tim

January 20, 2015

Great list. I humbly submit my company to the list as well – http://www.providentstaffing.com

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