In the last of this 3 part series I want to share the main tool we used to actually conduct our live interviews. If you missed it, I previously shared in Part 1 about the critical online collaboration tools our team needed to stay organized in our communications and resume evaluations. In Part 2 I shared the tools we used to efficiently find times to conduct interviews.

We would use these methods to review and filter down to a handful of candidates that seemed to be a possible match and we where interested in talking with. Once we had our meeting time, we would ask the candidates to use a web cam, so that we could conduct our initial interviews online with video.  We used TokBox as our tool for the video interview.

TokBox was very easy and FREE to use!  We found that being able to conduct initial interviews this way to be so much more helpful as we had visual non-verbal communication which goes so much further than a regular phone interview.  So often you get a better feel for someone when you can see them, not just hear them.  Being able to do so online for free also saved us much travel expense that would have been required without this technology.

We choose ToxBox over others like Skype because there was nothing to install – it is completely web-based and the ability to have a group discussion was so easy to set up.

So this is how we used technology at Fellowship to help us stay organized and efficient in our pastor search and to ultimately find the man God had for us – Eric Koehler.  I am looking forward to 2010 and how God will use him and his leadership at FC.

Has anyone else found a practical use for technology in a project or team activity? I would love to hear about it!

In Part 1 on this topic, I discussed two of the tools that our Search Team used to stay organized and to administratively deal with the 400 resumes we received for job posting for the position of Lead Pastor.  In this post, I will describe the tools we used to set-up and conduct interviews and the benefits I saw from each.  Unless otherwise noted, all of these tools were FREE to use.

The first was TimeBridge. One of the most difficult things about trying to set-up and interview is trying to figure out when everyone is available to meet, or at least to pick the time that is best for the most people. With six people on the search team plus the candidate himself the logistics of just finding the meeting time could have been almost a full-time job. To avoid the never-ending back and forth that email communication would result in, I could use TimeBridge to propose up to 5 meeting times and simply have it send an email to each person which included a link that they could follow and then specify the times that were best for them within the TimeBridge database.

In addition, you could we were able to set up each member with a free account on TimeBridge so that you could share your calendar availability ahead of time which even made scheduling meeting times even more efficient.  There are many more features as well to TimeBridge and I would highly recommend it as a way to spend less time arranging meetings and more time being productive.

The next tool in the kit was from FreeConference.com. While you could get a dial-in meeting number to use from TimeBridge, one feature they didn’t have was the ability to record or save that audio file.  This was an important feature for us as despite best efforts to find the best meeting time, there would always be 1 or more persons who might not be able to make it. Having the recorded audio file available allowed team members to listen to the interviews afterwards and still be able to contribute to the post meeting discussion.  Note: There was a nominal fee to have the ability to do the audio recording ($9 per month), but we found it well worth the price.

I will save the last tool for my next post, which will go into the details of the interview itself.

As we approach the end of this year and get ready to welcome our new Lead Pastor, Eric Koehler to Fellowship, I thought this would be a good time to reflect back on how we were able to leverage technology to help us with the search effort.  Before I go any further, don’t get me wrong – prayer (individually, as a team, and as a church) is and was the most important thing we did through out the process!  The tech were simply tools to help us stay organized as a team and to better communicate with each other.

We officially kicked off our search team effort in June and by the end of October, God had made clear who His man was for us.  The effort and time that is needed to conduct a search is quite large and I’m not sure how we would have done it without the right tools to keep us organized and focused.

Since we had 6 individuals on the Search Team, I knew group communication and collaboration was going to be a top priority and email alone was not the right tool.

Enter MemberHub.com.  MemberHub is a great place to enable private group collaboration including discussions, group calendar, whiteboards, announcements and file uploads.  The best part is that it is still tied to and integrated with your email, so that new activity on the Hub will still notify you via email.

The next tool that was essential to us being effective was a way to track resumes. Gone are the days where we’d request paper copies be sent to the church office and someone would make copies for the team look at when we’d come together in person for a meeting.  There is no way we could have reviewed 400 resumes in that manner!

This is where Highrise by 37Signals came in. We would have been dead in the water with out it. Highrise is an online CRM tool that lets you track contacts (candidates in our case) that also integrates with your email.  Our requirement was that all candidates had to submit resumes and cover letters via email to a unique account that was set up just for our search.  Emails to that account were then forwarded to our Highrise dropbox account which is where the real beauty of the system comes in — Emails sent via the dropbox will create the contact in Highrise for you and attach the body of the mail and any attachments as part of the contacts diary / history.  The search team would then review new entries in the Highrise and record our comments individually in the contacts history as well.  We would also give each one a ranking of 1 to 5 stars via tags that were attached to the candidate.  This allowed the search team to be able to work remotely in our homes or offices and dramatically limit the number of physical meetings we had to schedule. The tagging system allowed us to easily filter and sift through the candidates and determine which ones where viable and should be considered for interviews.

In the next post I’ll describe the tools that were used to making the interviewing process be more effective.