5 Ways A Bad Hire Affects Your Church Staff

In our work here at Vanderbloemen, we've had churches approach us for help after they unknowingly made a bad hire. We've seen how a new hire can either have a positive or negative impact on the team, the church, and the path toward which the church is headed.

Any new addition to your church staff is a huge decision and shouldn’t be made lightly. A bad hire can lead to a load of struggle that will take a lot of time to repair. Here are 5 ways a hiring mistake could affect your church staff and congregation.

1. It can demotivate highly motivated people.

The phrase “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch” can be very accurate when it comes to adding a single bad hire to a team. You don’t realize how detrimental it can be until it’s already done. A bad hire can negatively affect staff morale and staff culture. When you add a bad hire to the team, it also can add more work to other people’s plates that would in turn make it hard for them to work toward their own goals. That drive that your staff has to come into work every morning would be diminished if they had to do someone else's job as well.

2. It can cost a lot of money.

When you hire someone who is not a right fit for the job, it costs way more money than you realize. The cost to find them, hire them, relocate them, and train them adds up very quickly. This is not stewarding the churches finances well and is not what you want your church budget to go toward. If you want to find out how much a hiring mistake could cost your church, try out our bad hire calculator.

3. It wastes time.

The time you take to hire and train any hire is valuable. Time truly is money, and that time you and your staff spent on a new hire took you away from other important aspects of your job. If you hire someone who you took months to train and then doesn't work out, you wasted valuable time that could’ve been spent to hire the right fit or spent working toward your goals. Sometimes roles need to be filled fast, but never at the expense of quality.

4. It forms distrust between the leadership & their team.

If you hire someone who is not a good fit, this will cause your team to lose confidence in your ability to lead. It only takes one person or one mistake to tear down the trust that you built over the time you have been in ministry. Bad hires can add work to your team and create a negative culture in the office, and you do not want to bring that in. If you lose the confidence that your team has in you, it will take a lot of time to build that back up again.

5. It can cause tension in the church.

Just as distrust can form between you and your staff, a bad hire can lead to tension between you and your volunteers or the members of your church. If you bring in someone who doesn’t lead volunteers well or acts as an outsider without welcoming anyone into what they are doing, it can create division and conflict, and in turn people may leave your church. Bad hires can burn bridges, and your church community is worth more than that.

How else can a bad hire affect your church staff or congregation?