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Your Senior Pastor search committee spends 18-24 months whittling down a list of 100 resumes to a short list of candidates you pray over, interview, and bring to your church for a weekend before finally discerning which individual is the right fit. Once you make a decision, however, they back out, already took another position, or are no longer interested. Now what?

This is a familiar story. We work with search committee members almost daily who are exhausted from a search that yielded no results. They are looking back on what looks like wasted effort and are concerned they will either have to spend another year and a half searching again, or even worse, close the doors of their church.

If your church finds itself in a similar situation, step back and work through these three steps.

An organization has just asked you for a list of your references. This is great news if you already have a carefully constructed, up-to-date reference list ready to be sent. If you don’t, then there's no need to panic. While it's always best to have a reference list prepared before you begin your job search, here are four steps to take to help you get your reference list together.

Congratulations, you just got hired or promoted into a new leadership position! That’s the good news. The not-so-good news: you are now being asked to lead a team someone else built.

In our work as Search Consultants, we always look for culture fit to complement competency, character, and chemistry. Inevitably, these new leaders will be tasked with taking over an organization built by someone else with a team someone else hired. Few leaders will have the freedom to build their teams from scratch. You will likely have to start with the team you’ve inherited rather than the one you would have built yourself.

Here are six common mistakes leaders make when taking over someone else’s team.

Unless you are like me, human resources is probably not something that excites you. It may not even be something you give much thought to, but it's a critical part of any well-functioning organization. Ideally, an HR professional acts as a liaison between an employer and the employees, advocating for both the best interest of the company and the employee.

Because of this unique combination, HR should be a vital part of any organization. In the early stages of an organization, having someone on your staff whose sole job is HR does not usually make much sense. However, as you grow, the need for an HR professional becomes greater. It may be difficult to decide when the right time is to create that position. A good time to start looking into creating an HR role is when you begin to realize your organization needs help in the following four areas:

On today’s Vandercast, William Vanderbloemen talks with Rick Garrett, Executive Pastor at Grace Church in Orlando, FL. 

Rick and William discuss hiring best practices for growing and multisite churches and strategies for balancing ministry and personal life.

Sometimes we avoid receiving feedback because it can feel like inviting conflict. Conflict is a natural part of any church or organization; if you manage feedback well, then you can leave your organization in a healthier and stronger place. It can be easy for a church staff to become disconnected from the congregation, so it is crucial to always have a finger on the pulse of the church body.

Here are five suggestions on how to manage feedback well in your church.

The process of interviewing and vetting candidates is always challenging. It can be difficult to understand and interpret a resume to get an accurate sense of an individual's employment history and skillset; it can be even harder to get a candidate to transparently discuss his or her ministry path and past experiences.

One of the more frustrating situations organizations encounter during the interviewing process is having a top candidate receive a negative reference from a former employer after checking all of the boxes throughout the interview process.

Here are four things to keep in mind if a candidate receives a negative reference:

I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review about how Private Equity Firms hire CEOs for companies that quickly need to be turned around. It got me thinking about churches in decline and in need of a new pastor to help lead them into a new season of growth.

Here are six lessons churches can learn from businesses and other organizations about finding a new leader to navigate a season of transition.

We have written in the past about how churches might structure their retirement plans for church staff employees. We’ve discussed the pros and cons to percentage-of-salary contribution plans vs. set-dollar contribution plans, as well as contributions regardless of participation vs. only contributing when an individual contributes. There are numerous options available for churches; but what if these options are still too steep of a financial burden for a church to offer its employees?