Tech Tools Help with Pastor Search – Part 2

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.