Hiring Without Clarity Will Break Your Church

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses the pitfalls of hiring staff without clear job descriptions. He highlights the consequences of unclear roles, such as confusion, misalignment, and turnover. He offers practical advice on how to achieve clarity before posting a job, emphasizing the importance of defining job expectations and ensuring team alignment.• Hiring without clear job descriptions leads to poor outcomes.• Rushing to fill vacancies can result in unclear roles and metrics.• Consequences of unclear roles include confusion, misalignment, and turnover.• Clear job expectations and team alignment are crucial before hiring.• Key questions to address include the role's objectives, budget considerations, and team integration.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Hiring Clarity Problem
• 0:48 Why Churches Rush Into Fuzzy Hires
• 2:01 The Hidden Costs of Unclear Roles
• 3:21 Three Questions Before Posting Jobs
• 4:53 Final Thoughts on Clear Hiring
• 5:46 Call to Action and Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Have you ever posted a job online before you knew exactly what you were hiring? Yeah, that's a problem. We're gonna talk about that today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast because hiring without clarity is like building a house without any blueprints. Sure, you can do it. Chances are you're gonna regret it. And so will the person that you hire. So today we're gonna talk about that and why being unclear on a role is one of the worst hiring mistakes your church can ever make. And hopefully I'll tell you how to fix it. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes. I am one of the co-founders over chemistrystaffing.com, and you're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. All right, first of all, maybe we need to look at why we why we kind of rush this. Sometimes we rush into fuzzy hires. Maybe it's the pressure to fill a gap really fast, especially after somebody leaves suddenly. You get a knock on your door, 10 minutes later you've got a resignation in your hand, and five minutes later you're thinking, oh crap, what am I gonna do? So what do you do? The first impulse, the impulse that you should not do ever, is to go to a church website or a church staffing type website and post a really fuzzy job description because you gotta find somebody right away. So maybe it's just the pressure to fill a gap. Maybe it's your desire just to get somebody in the seat, just so you can keep ministry going. A lot of times that happens when you get the resignation too. Maybe you're getting just some pressure internally. Your internal team, maybe your elder board, maybe other people on your staff have just been crying and screaming for help. And they've got expectations. We've always had somebody in that role, or we really have to have somebody in that role. So find somebody, right? But here's the truth. Rushing to hire without clarifying the job description or the clarifications or the measures of success almost always, I was gonna say always, but almost always backfires. The result, you get confusion, you get misalignment, you get frustration, and unfortunately, usually another hire within the first 18 months. Okay? So all of this comes at a really big cost. So there's a lot of hidden costs and unclear roles. Maybe the new staff member feels lost or confused or micromanaged. Maybe other team members don't know how to collaborate with a new hire because they don't know what the heck's going on either. Success metrics, usually, if your job description is fuzzy, your success metrics are really gonna be fuzzy and vague as well. So any kind of evaluation after the hire becomes subjective and really awkward because you weren't really sure what to expect, they weren't really sure what to expect, and now you're gonna try and put some metrics around that. It's gonna lead to stress and performance issues and eventually more than likely turnover. Hiring someone before defining exactly what success looks like is unfair to them, the person that you hire, and it really is unfair to the church. All right, so Todd, how in the world do we get clarity before we hire? I think really it falls into three questions, three important things that you need to know. What are the three here are the questions, okay? Number one, what are the three most important things this rule needs to accomplish in the first year? Okay. Let's get this straight. You're hiring somebody, you're taking tithes and offering money, you're taking money out of the church budget, and you're paying somebody. You need to you need to know what you want them to accomplish. So before you hire, you need to ask this question. What are the three most important things this person, this role, will accomplish here at the church in the next year? And just to do that, create a results-focused job description, not just a task list. So involve multiple leaders and refining and affirming those expectations. But you have to make sure that you know exactly what you want this person to do in the first year. Can someone outside the church understand what this role is and why it matters? And only then should you post the job description. A couple other things that you need to think about is first of all, can you afford to hire? You need to be able to afford the hire. And is the rest of your team on board? Does everybody know what this person's going to do and how they're going to fit into the existing team? These are just some of the questions that you need to ask before you go and start posting job descriptions or job offers on internet websites or before you open your search. Okay? Here's the bottom line. Here's the final thought for today. And I know that some people listening to this would say, I would never do this, but I want you to really put on your thinking cap here and think, have I ever really done this? How have my last hires gone? Have they lasted longer than 18 months? And if not, it could be that you've been hiring with kind of fuzzy details. Okay, so here's the bottom line. Fuzzing, fuzzy hiring leads to hiring frustrated people. Clarity isn't optional, it's leadership. Okay. So I'd love to hear from you today. You can reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. What's one role on your team that you've already hired for? Then maybe you do a little bit of cleanup here. What role on your team needs a little bit clearer expectations? I'd love to hear that. If there's any way that I can help you or your church, reach out to me anytime. Podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today's podcast. We're here every Monday through Friday. Hope you'll join me again tomorrow, right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.