Increasing Your Effective ness in Hiring Camp Staff . . .
How to Hire the Best and Avoid the Rest!

by Carl L. Harshman, Ph.D., and Tom Etzkorn, M.B.A.

While the people who sold you the land for your camp may have preached "location, location, location" as the secret to your success, once you are settled in and running your camp, we would argue that the real secret to your success is "your staff, your staff, your staff." Actually, we agree that location, program, management, and staff all contribute to the vitality and reputation of your camp. At the same time, we would argue that the best location and best program in the country will not survive very long with poor to mediocre staff.

Jim Collins, the author of the best-selling book Good to Great, argued that "getting the right people on the bus" in terms of staffing was the essential first step in the journey to greatness.  

Understandably, not one of us sets out to hire mediocre people. We're all looking for superstars. The questions are (a) how to find them; (b) how to get them to accept our offer; and (c) how to keep them or better yet, keep them coming back year after year, if they are seasonal staff.

The Challenges of Hiring
If hiring people were that easy, we'd all be able to do it well all of the time. We'd all have staffs that were fully engaged, highly productive, and working together as a well-oiled, cohesive team; we'd have very low turnover; and there would be no performance issues or discipline problems.

That rosy picture of hiring is a little like the family image communicated by the Cleavers in the late 1950s, early 1960s television show Leave It to Beaver. It's ideal . . . but just not reality. Hiring, especially in our competitive market, is extremely hard work on our best days. It becomes more difficult on our worst ones.

So how do we get better at hiring in an industry not known for its glamour, fancy surroundings, or high pay? If we can find the answer to that question, life and business would get better for all of us.

Ten Tips for More Effective Hiring

Because there is no magic pill for hiring and miracles are few and far between, we have chosen to look among the experts and organizations that have discovered some of the secrets to achieving better results from hiring and for reducing the downside of potential hiring mistakes:

1. Know what competencies are central to the role you are filling. Be very specific and have a way to measure the competencies in the screening-for-hire process. For example, a counselor requires excellent communication skills with youth—it's important to ask interview questions that provide feedback on an applicant's competency in this area. Use this information to target and source your potential new hire candidates to improve your chance of recruiting success. It may be obvious, but you need to know what skills and competencies you are looking for before deciding "who" is best to do it. Do thoughtful research, have a plan . . . stack the deck in your favor up front.
   
   
2. Understand what contributes to successful job performance in your camp. Do you believe that past performance is the best predictor of future performance? If so, there are a number of circumstances in which how someone performed in a previous job may be totally unrelated to how they will perform in the one you are trying to fill. For example, excellent performance as a counselor doesn't necessarily translate into excellent performance as a supervisor—successfully supervising former peers can be a difficult challenge. Don't just assume that the past predicts the future—sometimes it does, but it often doesn't—you have too much at stake and not enough time "in the heat of the season" to deal with the problems of having hired the "wrong person."
   
   
3. Create a screening and hiring process that has multiple stages and multiple measures along the way. A one-shot, gut-feeling hire based on a single interview of a person recommended by a friend (or a friend of a friend) is often the recipe for a personnel problem. Do your homework; make hiring a thoughtful "team" effort to improve your success rate.  
   
   
4. Be cautious of hiring someone "just like you." Many of us have that tendency—why not, after all, we know best. The more successful we've become and the more we like who we are, the more we may be vulnerable to the "cloning" approach—that is, a tendency to look for someone who fits our view of success and who thinks and acts just like we do. In many cases, hiring someone like you is a serious limitation to improving your product. In order to be successful, a direct report may require different perspectives, needs, and attitudes than the team leader or supervisor. In all probability, your camp will function more successfully if different experiences and points of view are represented in your camp's organization. Admittedly, managing someone different from you can at times be a challenging task, but it is often one that can pay large dividends in the end.
   
   
5. Be certain that the system and processes you are using to recruit, screen, and hire are consistent with legal and ethical requirements. For a variety of reasons, the law has become a major force in defining the requirements for hiring people. Have good counsel in this area, and follow it. At the same time, don't let the legalities manage the hiring process. Follow the guidelines, but manage the hiring process yourself. Finally, be sure everyone in the hiring process knows the rules up front as well as the tips of how to gather and use the information you need . . . legally. 
   
   
6. In addition to assessing competency, build in a phase of the screening process that gives you an evaluation of the individual's attitude and motivation. Research on these little-known dimensions indicates that they can account for 40-60 percent (or more!) of job performance. In reality, your staff's attitude and motivation are the hidden key to your camp's success . . . and . . . you can't see it on a resume, you won't uncover it in a reference check, and unless you know the exact questions to ask, you won't hear about it in an interview. With such powerful factors impacting results, why not assess for it as part of your screening and staffing process?
   
   
7. Check references! The legal context of hiring has become so risky that many employers are hesitant to provide extensive or complete descriptions of a poor-performing former employee based on the "who-needs-the-risk-because-they're-already-gone" assumption. That is not a reason for failing to check references. Rather, it is a reason to do two things:
• In the reference check, ask open-ended, behavior-based questions such as "What did he/she do when . . .?" "How did he/she respond to…?" "Give me some examples of…"
• Listen for what is not said or how it is said. The person to whom you are speaking is an employer, and they do not want to purposely mislead you. Sometimes, in an effort to avoid legal hassles while not misleading you, they will "code" information or purposely leave something unsaid that may give you an indication that there could be a problem. Their tone of voice often tells you more than what is said. If you are referencing a winning candidate, you'll quickly know it.
  
  Also, be cautious on the "giving end." For the same reasons as above, be sure your team knows what to say if/when they get a request to provide a reference on a former staff member. Don't unintentionally put your camp in jeopardy by responding inappropriately to outside reference requests. Develop a policy, orient the staff, designate a "gatekeeper," and follow the rules. Remember, in the case of reference checks, it's always better to receive than give.
  
  
8. Keep accurate records of the screening process for each applicant who enters the process. When doing structured interviews, for example, have a template for recording answers and other information. When checking references, have a standard set of questions you ask and ways to record the answers in a consistent way. This assures that you will: (a) be consistent in your policy and practice; (b) have consistent information when comparing candidates; and (c) construct a historical database for post-hiring evaluation of the reasons for good or poor performance (and one you can use in improving your process from year to year).
   
   
9. When possible, use a prescreening assessment to "thin the herd" of applicants. Many organizations expend a tremendous amount of resources (time = money) screening candidates who are not among the best. One camp screened over two hundred applicants for about forty-five positions. The screening involved administrative time handling all the paper, traveling and scheduling, individual interviews by at least four staff members, and follow-up reference checks. The process was a good one; the pool was too large. The camp could have made much better use of its limited resources if they had invested their screening resources in the one hundred best candidates out of the original pool of two hundred plus. Don't spin your wheels chasing warm bodies . . . use proven tools to help identify, recruit, and land your next superstars.
   
   
10. Build on your experience. Use this year's hiring experience and outcomes to improve next year's process. For most of us, the journey to excellence takes place one step . . . one person . . . at a time. Putting together the best team for your camp is as much an art as it is science, and requires patience, perseverance, and an unrelenting commitment on your part to offer your campers the best—place, program, and staff.

We began with the statement that there is no magic pill for hiring. Believe us, if somebody had it, you would know about it by now. We believe that you build an excellent staff one year at a time based on studying best practices, understanding your camp—its mission, culture, and standards of success—and learning from your past experience. There's no doubt about it: hiring the best team for your camp is hard work. But, it's always worth the effort. After all, at the end of the season, the campers may talk about where they went and what they did. . . but they always remember "who" made it happen while there.  We wish you the best in finding the best "who" available for your team!

Carl L. Harshman, Ph.D., founder and CEO of The Institute, is a former executive, professor, academic dean, a published author, and speaker. For twenty-five years, he has consulted to major corporations on change, leadership, and culture.  

Tom Etzkorn, M.B.A., director, Strategic Initiatives for Wyman, a teen development agency located near St. Louis, Missouri, has a long history of developing youth through camping and multifaceted leadership initiatives.

Originally published in the 2007 March/April issue of Camping Magazine.