Recruiting Rules of Engagement

I love recruiting…

…but it’s also one of the trickiest things I’ve encountered in ministry.  As your church grows the experienced pool of candidates shrinks.  And so the recruiting sharks tend to swim in the same pool of a handful of hot, influential churches.

For many years we were the unknown church and we pretty much stayed off of everyone’s radar when it came to recruitment.

We’ve made some ignorant rookie mistakes in how we’ve gone about recruiting.  We’ve had to apologize to other churches for a misstep here and there.  And usually it was because we didn’t know the rules of engagement in regard to recruiting.

Different churches and leaders have different expectations in this area, however at the end of the day it comes down to respect (cue Aretha). 

How would I like to be treated if someone is recruiting someone from my team?

With that in mind, here are my rules of engagement for recruiting:

• If I have an eye on one of your staff, I will reach out to you (pastor or exec pastor) for permission to talk to your employee.

• If I have posted a job and your employee responds to it (without my prompting), I will interview them.  If they are a fit and I want to offer the job to them, I will then reach out to you to share my intention to offer them the job.

At the end of the day, I want my team serving where God has called them.  If one of my staff is called to your church, as much as I might not like it, I can’t argue with that or control it.

How do you handle recruitment?  What are your recruiting rules of engagement?