When recruiting takes too long
By Dave Miller, Co-Founder
I just received a Slack from Paige on our team that a certain church “already has three amazing candidates in front of them!” We’re less than 2 months into their journey. This is great news!
In helping churches architect leadership residency programs across the country, the Leadership Pathway team has learned that if the recruiting phase goes beyond six months it starts to feel long.
So, teaching a church how to recruit through our monthly training and helping them recruit through our channels is everything in those first few weeks.
Is six months too long? No. Based on everything I’ve learned over the last decade in staffing and recruiting, a year is more normal. But it starts to feel long because of the ministry calendar. Churches move on from launching a residency to the next challenge. It’s hard to keep a staff team motivated around what they were excited about 9 or even 18 months ago.
Lp’s average recruiting phase is about six months. Many take less than a month because the church already has candidates. We love this, but our six-month average means we have some that take much longer. What’s true of executives and senior leaders is also true of residency candidates. It takes a while.
What happens when it goes long?
I was in Portland earlier this year at a gathering of church leaders and my phone buzzed. It was a Senior Pastor from a partner church in Salt Lake City. The Lp team is awesome and it’s unusual for me to get the call. His residency search was well beyond a year. A WHOLE YEAR+ we had been putting this opportunity in front of candidates to no avail. The posting on our website was at the bottom of the page. This means it’s got some age on it. Our team was feeling it every day and talking about them every week at meetings.
But there had been a candidate out there interviewing and I thought I remembered the team saying that it went well. So, for Mike to be calling me must mean something was up.
“This is Dave….what’s wrong?” Is how I believe I answered the phone with fear and dread that something had gone wrong.
“Bro…nothing is wrong, I’m calling to say thanks. Your team is amazing and long-suffering. I’m so excited that our resident is coming here. I honestly think she could be our youth pastor already, so we are fortunate to have such a great candidate. I’m so glad that it took this long because we are in a much better place to receive her onto our team now than if it had happened a year ago.”
I know people who have recruited nannies, nurses, executives, and pastors. They all say the same thing…there’s so much that’s out of our control on this stuff. The good news for Leadership Pathway is that God is at work.
He’s working upstream on people and he’s working inside His Church for just the right time. At our Masterclass I describe this similarly to farming. It’s a partnership. We don’t farm like we used to 20 years ago and we don’t raise the next staff leader like that either. We just have to be faithful, do what we said we were going to do, day after day and then we trust…God is either in this or he isn’t.
I choose to believe He’s in it.
If you have questions about how to find interns or staff, or how to launch a Church Leadership Residency reach out to Leadership Pathway.