DAVID ADAMS finds ‘Hire Right, First Time’ a practical and useful guide to the hiring process…
Rev Peter Corney and Dr Ken Byrne
Hire Right, First Time: A Practical Guide for Staffing Christian Organisations
Arrow Leadership, Australia, 2023
ISBN-13: 978-0648675525
Hiring new staff can be a fraught process, not least for Christian organisations seeking someone to help carry our their God-given mission.
“Every organisation with more than two members of staff will have to hire someone,” write authors Rev Peter Corney and Dr Ken Byrne in the opening pages. “Getting someone to work for you is easy, but hiring the right person is much more difficult. It requires an awareness of the challenges you face and having well thought-out plans to overcome them.”
Hence this book. Rev Corney, an Australian Anglican minister who has worked as a leadership consultant, and Dr Byrne, a veteran corporate psychologist, have created a helpful, step-by-step guide through the process Christian leaders face as they look to hire.
“The mission of Christian organisations tends to add further challenges [to the hiring process],” they write, going on to note that this includes ensuring that the “desire to do good” doesn’t result in a short-sighted approach to “assessing the risk that goes with a poor hiring choice”.
The book is written in easily digestible pieces, including the liberal use of lists and bullet points which plot out the journey from first looking at what the job actually entails through to hiring the successful candidate.
The emphasis throughout is on the practical – there is, for example, a detailed guide to creating a “compelling” job advertisement and another section on “10 suggestions for improving reference checking”.
As a bonus, there’s also a chapter on how to retain staff with 10 suggestions for doing so. The book closes with a chapter which briefly looks at an issue which has string resonance in the church today – detecting candidates who may behave inappropriately towards children.
A helpful and comprehensive primer on the hiring process (which comes with a free, downloadable users’ guide), Hire Right, First Time is the sort of book that will prove useful to keep on the shelf for Christian organisations of all persuasions.
