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Increasing your effectiveness in hiring camp staff ... how to hire the best and avoid the rest!

Article Excerpt
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...

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