Hiring for Christian Organizations By Rev. Peter Corney and Dr. Ken Byrne

Learn How Christian Organizations Manage Hidden Obstacles

All Christian organizations embedded in their culture wish to extend God’s grace in Word and Deed because it is a deeply held value of the Gospel.

To succeed in spreading this message requires overcoming numerous obstacles. Most prominent among these is attracting, selecting, and retaining the right people.

This is difficult for every employer. Here, we examine seven characteristics of Christian organizations that complicate hiring. Here are the unique obstacles you must learn to overcome.

Christian Values Meet Leadership Obligations

Christian organizations have a bedrock of commitment to social justice and a desire to extend grace to others. Our “core business” is offering a helping hand. This commitment can lead to a conflict between Christian values and leadership obligations. The success of leaders is often determined by their ability to balance the tension between those two.

We may meet someone who isn’t “quite right” for a job. The need for “helping” can override our more pragmatic judgment about organizational needs and the protection of existing staff.

Avoiding Conflict

While seeing how directly Jesus spoke, that part of his message seems to have been lost in the sands of time. We have found that Christians often confuse rigor with impoliteness.

Skilled interviewing requires asking legal, but at times challenging, questions. Avoiding conflict can lead to an emphasis on “soft” or even leading questions. This will dramatically increase the risk of a hiring mistake.

When The Job is More Than a Job

For many applicants, the job is much more than a job. It is an outworking of the applicant’s faith. The hope is that there will be a close match between the applicant’s faith and the employer’s faith. Employing someone with a very different faith position from the organization’s presents obvious problems.

Prayer Versus Planning

The importance of prayer can become a substitute for careful planning. While it is always wise to ask for God’s inspiration and guidance, this cannot be a substitute for the other work necessary for wise hiring decisions.

Relational Influence

Relationships are important in every workplace, though they play a particular role in Christian organizations. Each employee is, knowingly or not, an advertisement for God. Christians, those of other faiths, and those of no faith will quietly judge the employer’s values by the subtle ways in which staff relate to them.

Understanding Performance Criteria

One of the unspoken performance criteria will be “Is this person a good advertisement for a gracious and loving God?” The groundskeeper who keeps an immaculate landscape but screams at a child who walks on the grass will fail this test.

Being a Witness

Virtually all Christian organizations have buried in their DNA the expectation of being a witness to Christ. How important this is will vary with the job. A Christian university hiring a language teacher can be more flexible than a church hiring a youth minister. In either case, this hope is unlikely to appear in a job description.

The hiring panel may want to know how this candidate’s daily interactions with others will reflect Christ’s message. Asking direct questions about this will be illegal in many jurisdictions. This can be done, though uncovering this information requires considerable skill.

Absence of An HR Expert

Most Christian organizations lack a skilled Human Resources practitioner. Instead, there is an expectation that staff can make hiring decisions without formal training. This often leads to an unstructured interview or even a casual chat over coffee. The decision is then made based on “likeability” rather than hard data.

Conclusion

Every hiring decision in a Christian organization is an exercise in risk assessment. Mistakes are expensive. Making the right decision requires specific training and careful preparation. Without understanding these obstacles, our most cherished values can inadvertently lead us astray unless they are carefully managed.

Note: This material is adapted with permission for Hire Right, First Time: A Practical Guide to Staffing Christian Organizations. The book includes a 200-page User Guide and is available on Amazon.

Rev. Peter Corney is an Anglican minister who has been actively involved in writing, teaching, and leadership development for the past sixty years.

Dr. Ken Byrne has been an independent organizational psychologist for over forty years. He has evaluated more than 3000 job applicants for both Christian and secular employers.