Initial Contact

What we did after we received the resumes:


When we looked over the resumes, there were a few instances where we clearly knew that the person wouldn’t be a good fit at Lakeview. We set those resumes aside. In one case an individual was retired and in his seventies. His cover letter gave no rationale for why he was considering leaving retirement. In another case, a candidate shared a bit too much personal history (in spectacular detail) in his cover letter that led us to question his judgment. (TMI as Scooter would say).


In another instance, one of the committee members had very close knowledge of the candidate and, after sharing this knowledge with the committee, we rejected the candidate.


And we had a few letters that were clearly sent out to each and every church this individual found out about (one applicant sent the wrong church's name in the cover letter while another applied for a position we weren't search for: Director of Missions). But about 95% of the resumes we received we contacted.


Since we desired to standardize the process as much as possible, we made the decision that as Chairman of the Committee, I would contact each of the candidates for a brief phone interview. In the initial call, I would ask each candidate the following questions:

1. "Are you interested in our committee considering you for this position?" We asked this question (obviously) in order to gauge their interest. In several cases, where one of our church members had recommended them or where we received what turned out to be an older resume, their answer was a brief "Nope." In some cases they asked several questions about Lakeview before they answered. (We took a dim view of that response). But by and large, the answer was "Yes."

2. The second question I asked was "Tell me about yourself." (OK, technically not a question;)We had a couple of motives here. The first, and most obvious, was to learn a little bit more about the candidate. But we also left the question fairly open ended so that they could answer however they pleased. Most told their testimonies. Some answers were short, and some long. One thing we began to take note of was whether or not they mentioned their families. Some would answer for several minutes and shared a great deal of pride in their current location of ministry, but would only mention their family when prompted. Overall, our committee responded more favorably toward the candidate who clearly prioritized family over ministry.

3. Our third question was "Why do you feel that God may be moving you to another place of ministry at this time in your life?" This question was a (not so?) subtle way of trying to determine if there were any negative factors going on at their current place of ministry that might have been a factor in their decision to move on. We did have some negative things come up, but most of them were explained to our satisfaction by the candidate. It was always better for negative situations to be brought up by the candidate rather than for them to come up when we discussed the candidate with their references.

4. Our final question was "What does it mean to be Baptist?" Of our initial questions, this was the only one that touched on the issue of theology. We wanted to give them an opportunity to talk about what was important to them. In retrospect, this was probably the least helpful of the initial questions as almost every candidate gave some variation on the answers of Believer's Baptist and Inerrancy of the Bible.

Next: How we dealt with references...

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