Here’s a quick bit about my youth ministry background. I have worked at four churches. My first church I was a part-time intern and ended up being the interim high school pastor but wasn’t qualified for the youth pastor position because they wanted someone with a seminary degree. My second church I was at for 6 years and it is where I really grew up and learned how to lead. I only left that church because we decided we wanted to raise our kids outside of Los Angeles. My third church was a great place but a bad fit for me at the beach in San Diego. I was there two years before we parted ways. I have been at my current church two years and don’t anticipate moving anytime soon. I’ve learned a lot going through 4 job searches at these churches. I’ve also learned a ton because each of these churches was considered a “mega-church” and had huge staffs and I’ve had the luck of heading up many search committees to hire youth staff, college staff, young adult staff, pastors, interns and other directors.
I have been the head of search processes where I have had almost 200 resumes come in for a particular job. I’ve also applied for jobs where they had that many applicants. Currently I have a youth staff of 16 people and am in the process of restaffing a couple of positions. Today I had a phone interview and a lunch interview. I also read through multiple resumes, answered a number of e-mails and even responded to some facebook messages about jobs.
Here’s some tips that I have learned, seen, used, tried, heard about and thought about. I’m going to list them in number order. The numbers don’t represent anything except a system of keeping things in order. There are probably a number of posts like this you could google but this is going to be specific to youth ministry.
1. Resume: Your resume needs to be neat, clean, organized, simple and specific to youth ministry. You should have all of your experience listed and tailor the resume to the job you are applying for. If it is a youth director position the readers of your resume want to see that you have experience in youth ministry. We don’t want to read a padded resume that lists every job you’ve ever had, we probably don’t need to know you were on a sports team in college, we don’t really care about your GPA (props though to those of you who post your gpa on your resume when it is low that shows us humility on your part). I would recommend proofing your resume and having someone else proof it. Chances are your resume will get read by many people so typos and weird structure will be seen. You should also make sure that if your resume has a “goal” section listed on it that it is specific to youth ministry. I received a resume this week that said “I’m looking for a job in education as an administrator at a private Christian school” um hello we’re a church. Take the effort to tailor your resume for us. Another thing I like to see on resumes is a little section that tells me more about you than jobs, education and references. Tell me a little bit about what you are into, what you enjoy doing and who you are as a person.
2. Cover Letter: Don’t underestimate this as the first thing we ever read about you. It’s your chance to let us know about your resume. It gives you the opportunity to minimize some of the things I see when I read your resume. If I see in your resume that you haven’t ever worked “full time” in a church you should let me know in the cover letter why you are ready for full-time work. If you resume shows a pattern of changing jobs every two years you should probably be prepared to reference that in your cover letter. Acceptable answers to why you’ve moved jobs would be “I finished college and moved back to my parents house so I had to leave that position.” Cover letters should tell us why you are interested in youth ministry, what drives you as a person and what you are passionate about. It could be your only chance to get a foot in the door so you want to take some time to make sure you do it right.
3. Mail it in: Here’s a pet peeve of mine that you can read with a grain of salt. Not everyone thinks about htis the way I do but it is something that you can do to give yourself a better chance of having your resume read. When I do searches I typically receive a ton of e-mailed resumes. Here’s what I think about e-mails. It takes almost no time to e-mail in a resume. You know it and I know it. It takes you very little commitment to e-mail your resume to me. It’s like the old adage that if you ask enough girls to kiss you one of them finally will. I usually have our first cut in any interview process be us requiring candidates to send us a hard copy of their resume, cover letter and a teaching cd/dvd. It takes much more time (and a little money) to send one in. If you aren’t willing to do it we aren’t willing to waste a lot of time on you. One thing you want to do when you mail it in is send it flat. Do not fold anything you are mailing to us. If you fold it we can’t just open it up, hole punch it and put it in a binder. You’ve now made us have to photo copy your resume before we can punch it and put it in the binder. That extra step is not good for you.
4. Know who to contact: This might be a little sneaky but I advocate it anyways. Sometimes it’s tough to know who to send your resume too. I’ve gotten resumes this week addressed to “To whom it may concern”, “Mr. or Mrs. Rood”, “The search committe at HPPC”, “Dear sir” and a number of other more random salutations. It’s pretty simple to find out who to send your resume to. Call the church and ask to speak to the youth minsitry assistant or if they don’t have one just ask the main operator who to send it to. On the sneaky side you might even introduce yourself to the asssitant and tell them you are sending in a resume and ask them to look for it. I’ve even found that assistants can be a great source of information about the job, church or the person leading the search committee. If you have them on the phone ask them some questions. More often then not they will have good answers for you and be willing to share them. There is a good chance they are a part of the search process when it comes to opening resumes, making copies of them, keeping them in a binder, sending out letters and setting up interviews. I even have a little deal going with my amazing assistant where she reads through all the resumes and gives everyone a nickname and her writes her first impression on a sticky that she posts on the resume when she puts it in a binder.
5. Follow up Call or E-mail: I always appreciate it when someone leaves me a message or sends me an e-mail and lets me know they have sent in their resume. This is an “extra step” that might get your resume noticed or pulled out of a pile. With 100′s of resumes coming in you want to do whatever you can to stand out.
6. Pictures: This might be a little controversial (and perhaps illegal) but I’ll say it anyways. I am a huge fan of you sending in a picture of yourself that we can see who we are reading about. We need to make a connection to your resume and having a picture of you on it or with it just gives us a better idea of who you are.
7. E-mail Address: Ok this is maybe overlooked by most people but I want to stress that this is important. I’ve gotten several resumes lately that have e-mails listed on them from very strange e-mail addresses. You should think through what your e-mail says about you. larsrood@gmail.com is a simple e-mail and is just my name. If I see an e-mail like that I tend to not think twice about it. But if your e-mail is “Darkvampirelover@hotmail.com” there is a chance I’m going to wonder something about you. Additionally if you are using an e-mail from an old company like AOL or from your cable provider I might wonder how net savvy your really are.
8. Cd/DVD: We almost always ask for a cd/dvd that has a teaching on it. We use that to just find out what your teaching style is, how engaging you are and to see if you have a teaching gift. We’ve also asked sometimes send us a dvd introduction. That gives us a chance to get to know you and find out who you are. I want to stress the importance of this part of the process. If you want to impress us and stand out here you will do it in this piece. I can’t tell you the number of horrible cd/dvd’s I’ve had to listen to in the last bunch of years. If you send me a cd that is of poor quality, doesn’t work well or skips, isn’t edited well or isn’t a good message we will probably pass it on pretty quickly. I recommend doing a couple of things to get read. 1. Worry about the production quality of your message. If it doesn’t sound good we won’t listen to it. Take the time to learn how to record properly. If your message isn’t of good quality then rerecord it. Better to send in a message that you gave to your dog that sounds good then to send us a cd of you teaching to your group that sounds bad. 2. Make it look good. We file all of the cd/dvd’s we get in sleeves in a binder. If you have simply taken a sharpy and written your name on it then it won’t stand out as much as if you printed a picture on it or even more simple if it was just printed with your name, the talk title and the date. 3. Include an extra and surprise us. This is a great thing to do because it will make your cd/dvd stand out. If you have the opportunity to include a special note, video message or videos from your current ministry or anthing else that we don’t expect it’ll go a long ways. I hired a great junior high leader once who made a whole video for us telling us why he loved youth ministry. He put a lot of work into shooting and editing it and we were impressed and kept showing it to more people because it was great.
9. Links to Blogs, online media and other stuff about you: Please know that we will google you. We will find out everything about you that is online. Better for you to tell us about your blog or anything else you do online. Even better do some stuff for us. We’d love to see some of your videos, your writings, more of your teachings or a website you’ve designed.
10. Do your research: It is really important for us to know that you have done some research learning about our community and our church. Referencing things you heard in our online messages is a great way to show us you are serious. Doing research about the community where the church is shows us that you are actually thinking this could be a place you might want to move. Asking questions about recent youth ministry activities, retreats or church wide events or services is a great way to show us you took the extra effort to find out about us.
That’s just a few tips. There are probably a bunch of other things that could be said and I’m hoping that some of it will end up in the comment section.
Series: Finding a job and negotiating with a church.
Part 2: Approaching the church. Tips to get your resume read.
Part 3: Tips for Interviewing. What interviews to be prepared for.
Part 4: Negotiation 101. All the things you should consider.
