The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
When the Search Drags On_ What Long Hiring Timelines Do to Your Church
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That open staff position that you've been putting claws on delaying on, it's interesting more than you're telling. And today on the podcast, we're gonna unpack unpack the real toll of long, drawn-out hiring process. From team morale to momentum, we're gonna show you why waiting too long can finally unravel your ministry health and what you can do to get on stuff without rushing on the wrong hire. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes. I'm the co-founder over at ChemistryStaffing.com, and I'm your host right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. The position's been open for six months, and your team's exhausted, and Sundays keep coming, and that gap keeps growing, and everybody keeps asking, when are you gonna hire somebody? Sound familiar? Today we're gonna talk about what happens when your church staff search drags on and how to find momentum again. This the reality in today's kind of market is that searches are taking longer. We're telling people sometimes it can take a year, sometimes 18 months, according to how stringent and how tight your job description is, and what type of person you're looking at and what you're paying and your location and all of that. But the longer your search goes, it's gonna slowly drain the team energy. And that's what we're talking about today. We don't want you to settle. We never want our churches to settle. We don't want churches that aren't using us to settle. But at the same time, sometimes you use such tight criteria that we call it Jesus with a guitar. Jesus with a guitar walk through the door. You might not hire you might not hire Jesus either. The longer a search goes, the more that it's going to slowly drain your energy. And we get that, and you understand that. Interim coverage sounds doable at first, but over time it wears people down. Volunteers start to burn out, and other staff kind of step in and get stretched really thin. And everybody begins to adapt to the new normal, but everybody knows that it's not sustainable. And worst of all, people stop believing that a solution is coming. And this kind of slow fade kind of kills morality, roads trust and leadership, even if no one says it out loud. So you might think that the delay is about getting the right person. And sometimes it is. You need to be patient and you need to find the right person. But you also need to consider what's happening internally. There's some momentum loss, there's some vision drift, there's some increased turnover possibly, maybe some declining trust and leadership, that you're really actually searching for somebody. A staff search isn't just about a task, it's a signal to your church about your priorities and your clarity and your sense of urgency. And if it feels like no one is in a hurry, then your team starts to wonder do we even care about this role anymore? That's what no one ever says, right? It's underneath the surface. But here's the key you need to figure out how you can keep momentum, even if you haven't hired yet, even if you haven't found the right person. Because honestly, keeping momentum is the key. It how long your search is taking is a side note. As long as you can keep that momentum going. And the longer that you go, yeah, obviously, it's going to be hard to keep that momentum going. And if you're in a long search, don't just wait. You might be in a position where you do have to wait, but don't just wait. You need to lead through it as well. Okay? And you say, Todd, we've been eight months into our search, and we have not found the right person, and volunteers are about ready to mutiny, and our board is getting upset. We hired a search firm and they're not finding anybody either, and it's just taken so much longer than we thought it was going to take. What do we do? There's part of it that you do need to just persevere, keep going, and lead. Because I'm telling you, a year down the road, when you're having your staff member, if you did a your search properly, you're going to look back and say that the fog of that interim when you didn't have that person there is going to slowly fade away. So this is momentary. You have to remember that. You might be in a period of waiting, that's okay, but you don't just wait. You don't just wait and not ever tell anybody what's going on in the background. You need to lead through it. Okay? You need to lead through it. And here's how you need to set some internal deadlines for each phase of the search, right? And communicate regularly with your staff about where things stand. That's one of the big things is if your staff never hears an update and you're six or eight or ten months into a search, they think nothing's happening. Even though things are probably happening, you're doing interviews and you're interviewing candidates and you're still collecting resumes, and you're turning people down, maybe that they don't see any of that. So you need to clearly communicate regularly, and you need to start with your staff or your team or your board. And when you communicate, you need to be transparent about why this is taking so long. I just wrote a book on it. I don't have a copy of it here. Believe it or not, it's called Silent Alarm, but it talks about why it's taking so much longer to find really good qualified staff members. So you need to communicate regularly with your staff. You need to be transparent about the why behind why the timeline is taking longer than what you'd like it to. And here's a secret it always takes longer than we want it to. It used to be, and this is the premise of the book, you can go to chemistry staffing.com slash silent alarm. Get a copy of the book. But it used to be that you could just post the job and you get a hundred resumes and you pick the best one, and a month later you had your hire. It's not that way anymore. So you gotta be transparent about why there is a delay. And maybe you need to assign some intern leadership with authority, not just responsibility, so that that momentum can continue. Believe it or not, your team, if you're if you shoot straight with them, if you tell them, hey, we're making some progress, here's be transparent about maybe why it's taking a little bit longer than what you'd like to. Guess what? Your team, nine times out of ten, is going to be right there with you. And they're gonna be your cheerleader and they're gonna support you. If you do not talk to your team about it, and same goes with your staff, same goes for especially for high-level hires with your congregation. If you're hiring a senior pastor and you're six months into it, and the last time you gave an update to your congregation was six months ago when you launched the search, people are gonna start jumping ship because you're not communicating regularly and you're not being transparent. And uh maybe you need to celebrate progress, even if it's not the final decision, and uh share little tidbits of hey, we were this close. We had somebody and they just decided they didn't want to move at the last minute, or we've got somebody that we're bringing on site in a couple weeks. Those kind of again, communication, celebrating that progress is really key. The longer the search goes, the more you need to be able to do that. Okay? Your goal is to keep your team engaged and hopeful, even when the search takes longer than you win. All right, here's the bottom line for today it's not the delay that breaks your team during a staff search, it's the silence and the drift and the lack of what they see as visible movement. So you just need to communicate and you need to be transparent. What's one thing your church could do to bring the energy back during a long search? I'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to me anytime, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. And if maybe you're in the middle of a long search and you just feel like, Todd, I could use a little bit of help here. That's what we do at Chemistry Staffing. We can't guarantee that we're going to have you somebody in 90 days either, but we do have a lot of resources that we can bring to the table in a partnership. So if you'd like to have any information or just a conversation with me or somebody on our team about the possibility of helping you find that staff member, you can reach out to me anytime, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today. Thanks for joining me on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast today. Hope you'll join me again tomorrow, where we will tackle another topic that hopefully you as a church staff member will be joining. Thanks. Have a great day.
