Putting Together an All-Star Staff, My Staff is Better Than Yours

Greetings from hot and sunny Orlando, Florida.  My name is Jim Wilkening and humbly serve as the Executive Director for Recreation and Wellness at the University of Central Florida.  As a veteran in the field, about to start my 25th year at UCF, I have been fortunate to experience my personal growth at one University, UCF.  Although I strongly encourage others to experience their growth at different institutions I have been fortunate that UCF is a different school just happens to have the same name.  UCF had 22,000 students when I started in 1992 and now is the second largest school in the country at over 63,000 students.

As we are all preparing for the beginning of a fall semester I wanted to touch a little bit on hiring student staffs.  Regardless if we work in housing, student activities, recreation, etc., student staffs and the energy they bring are very much the cornerstone to our success.  The keys, in my opinion to putting together an all star staff, is to recruit, train, manage, and evaluate employees.  In a presentation I have done called, “My Staff is Better than Yours” I highlight these four areas.  I begin however with a question and that is which one do you think is the most important?  When I ask this question most people say manage, but I will argue it’s the recruitment piece.  You should be recruiting for now and the future as the reality is you suddenly have a student position open due to a termination or resignation and if you are not prepared you will be left scrambling.  And scrambling will lead you to more management issues which leads to more terminations which leads to more emergency hiring’s.  Do you see how this vicious cycle starts?

So let’s focus on the recruitment process and what I call the recruitment package.  My single biggest factor into selecting somebody to join our team is somebody that really wants to be a part of it.  My quest is to try to figure out who REALLY wants it.  Some important aspects of the package consists of:

1. Asking students to apply – I find sometimes the best candidates to hire are the ones you just ask to apply.  If you are looking to hire an RA, how about that leader in the Interhall Council?  Or if you are looking at a sports referee, find somebody who plays a lot and seems well versed on the game?  Sometimes it just seems like a little thing to ask somebody but that might be just the push they need to apply.
2. Don’t get stuck on a skill set, look at the big picture.  Sometimes we look so hard at who has more certifications or who has done something before that we miss out on a good person who is hungry and passionate to be a member of the team.  Choose attitude over ability every time and you won’t be disappointed.
3. Diversity of the staff to resemble the student body.  Does your staff look like the student body?  Are you making an effort to connect with different student populations? 
4. Do they fit into our culture and our expectations?  Are the important aspects that are found in your mission and goals important to the students you are hiring?  Does a facility operation student within a student union have some aspirations personally at a job in the field?  This is where you might begin to match some employees with future goals and aspirations. 
5. Interview – of course you are doing interviews but be careful not to be fooled with either a good or bad interview.  To me they are almost more of a check mark item as opposed to a key hiring aspect.  I am looking again for passion during these sessions.
6. Reference Checks -find out what others, especially folks and peers that have worked with them are important to get the true testament to what type of team player they are.
7. Social Media Check – a quick glance to make sure they don’t misrepresent what we are about in anyway.  Again, this is not a final decision piece but a piece of the puzzle to make a connection on what is important to an individual and see if there is a connection for us.
8. The Drawer – so you may have heard the old expression that nobody is bigger than the organization.  Well I subscribe to this and always have a current list of potential candidates in my drawer that I might like to work with someday.  I have each position listed out and who might make good replacements someday.

At the conclusion of the recruitment and interview piece I hope to have more applicants to hire than I have spots for.  I require our teams to interview at least 3 to 5 for each opening to help us get a deep pool.  So when you select one and two and suddenly have an opening on October 1 you can go back to your pool and just add a member to your team.  Additionally, always meet folks, recruit, and encourage folks to apply to the team.  Keeping that pool of potential candidates deep helps us to establish future successful hires in the future.

Good luck with the start of the fall semester and look forward to catching you on the next go around.

Do you have thoughts on this blog post? Share them with us on Facebook @NPGSKC, on Twitter @npgs_kc, or on Instagram @npgs_kc!