Thanks for joining us for this month’s Office Hours podcast episode. Today Rich is answering your questions about attracting young families and getting help with hiring your next team member.

• Know your neighborhood. // The ESRI Know Your Neighborhood Tool provides mapping information regarding neighborhood styles at a granular level, which drives deeper into social behavior in your area. Have your leadership team talk about the ESRI neighborhoods in your area and how you are connecting, or not, with each of these groups of people.
• Five things to try to connect with young families. // 1) Host a parenting series targeted directly to young families. 2) Audit your kids ministry by getting someone to look at the quantitative and qualitative results of your ministry pre-COVID and post-COVID. Bring in a strategic outsider to help you find where you could be doing a better job with things. 3) Think life milestones for your church. Listen to this podcast with Kurt Brodbeck from Northview Church for life milestone examples. 4) Ask a focus group of five families how you can make it easier for them and their friends to connect with your ministry. And then ask how you could help them right now. 5) Find the things that the families with young kids in your area care about and get outside your walls to get involved in those things. How can you serve and love and care for the schools, kids, and young families in your community?

• Internal versus external. // Look at internal and external church hires from two different perspectives. What are you trying to accomplish? You hire someone internally for an area when you want to maintain the good things that are working and incrementally improve. But you hire externally when there’s an area in your church that’s broken and you want to find a way to accelerate and fix it moving forward.
• Cultivate your relationship internally. // If you’re thinking about hiring internally, create some fishing ponds where you can better get to know potential leaders in your church, and then hire from there. Determine if any of your top 50 donors might be able to move into a leadership role. These people are already bought into your mission. Or put together a list of key leaders and host a book club. Get together, read a book and talk about. This allows you to get to know people better and identify potential future hires.
• Network outside the church. // In networking outside of the church for an external hire, create a spreadsheet with three columns. In the first column write the name of 10-20 people who have some sort of existing network. Rate their influence from one to ten in the second column, one meaning they have a huge social network and ten being not that influential. Then in the third column rate the likeliness of them getting your jobs out to people on their networks. Sort the names by the influence rating and then by the possibility of the networking influence column. Start with the top of the list and work your way down to ask them if they’ll help you share about your open roles.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Leadership Pathway

If you are trying to find, develop and keep young leaders on your team look no further than Leadership Pathway. They have worked with hundreds of churches, and have interviewed thousands of candidates over the past several years. They are offering a new ebook about five of the core competencies that are at the heart of the leadership development process with every church that they partner with…just go to leadershippathway.org/unseminary to pick up this free resource.