Mealtime Interview

As a significant part of our process, the interview over a meal was a necessary evil. It’s natural I suppose, to get to know someone over a shared meal, but in most cases it was painfully formal. In fact, with every candidate except the one we selected, the meeting felt more like an interview than a meal. We would talk with the candidate about the recently observed service and then ask a variety of questions that would tell us about the candidate.

We decided against scripting out questions in advance. We felt that it would be too artificial to try to go through and select certain questions that each of us would ask. This meal was the first opportunity for anyone on the committee (outside of myself) to talk to the potential candidate.

A couple of thoughts:

• As I’ve mentioned before, we decided that every meal we would have a female member of the committee present. This decision invariably helped us afterwards when we discussed how the interview went.
  
• Candidates should always have questions for the committee. It indicates a lack of preparation at best, or a desire to accept any job opening that comes along at worse, when the candidate asks no questions. The candidate we eventually recommended to the church asked some very pointed and difficult questions, which was refreshing.
  
• One candidate had a detailed five step plan that God revealed to him that he was going to implement at Lakeview Baptist. I certainly endorse pastoral leadership and think that the pastor has the key leadership role in setting the vision for the church, but we were surprised that he had such a detailed view when he knew nothing about our church.
  
• We gained a lot of information simply by observing the candidate interact with his wife. We requested that (when possible) the pastor’s wife come to lunch with us. We weren’t so much interested in observing her (I am partial to the demands on the pastor’s wife) but we could more easily see how the candidate treated his wife. This was an area of critical importance to us. One candidate tensed up whenever his wife answered questions and he was clearly worried about what she might have to say. The candidate we eventually called was easy and relaxed as his wife asked us questions or answered questions of our own.
  
• We were also big fans of the waiter test. We watched closely to see how the candidate interacted with the wait staff at the restaurant. (Obviously, I have a soft spot for the wait staff!)
  
• The candidate we selected brought his kids (ages 5 and 2) to part of the meal. I would recommend against that, though in his case the kids were well behaved and didn’t detract from the atmosphere of the interview. But as a rule, I'd recommend getting a sitter (I know I did with MY kids).

Having his kids present certainly didn’t hurt his case when a random couple in the restaurant came up and complimented the candidate in front of us and said “What a fine family!” After the couple left we sat there in stunned silence. Then the candidate turned to us with a grin on his face and said “You have no idea how hard it was to plant that couple in this restaurant before we all got here…”

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