If you’re looking to hire staff, writing church plant staff job descriptions is one of your first steps in the process. But you’ll use them for more than just recruiting.
Why You Need Church Plant Staff Job Descriptions
Having solid church plant staff job descriptions helps in several ways:
- As a primary tool for recruiting
- Supporting payroll classifications and compensation structure
- Becomes the basis for performance reviews
- Defending against discrimination lawsuits
Create a Template
At some point you’ll be writing more than one job description, so you want to have a standardized template to be sure and include similar items in the description for each job. Kevin Stone suggests a great backbone in his article on Writing Job Descriptions:
- General description
- Essential job functions
- Education and experience
- Position structure and level
Research Legal Requirements
I’m no lawyer, but in my research on this topic I started finding hints about things that need to be included for legal compliance. This article on writing an ADA compliant job descriptions suggests including a 5th section to your template: physical and mental demands.
Once again, my own great state of California has layered on another level of complexity: the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), so if you’re a California employer there are some other things you need to watch out for. Be sure to find out if your state has similar requirements.
I’m not sure it’s a legal requirement, but in today’s political climate you should consider including some version of ’employee agrees with the church’s statement of beliefs’.
One great resource for researching the legal requirements would be your church insurance provider. And while you’re chatting with them, make sure that you have an Employment Practices Rider included in your policy.
Beg, Borrow & Steal
Of course don’t actually steal or plagiarize, but you could learn a lot from studying other church plant staff job descriptions:
- Top 10 Job Descriptions [ExecutivePastorOnline.com]
- Employment Sample Forms [GuideOne.com]
- 45+ Free Church Job Descriptions [SmartChurchManagement.com]
- Church Job Descriptions [FreeChurchForms.com]
I hope all of this church plant staff job descriptions help gets you there faster and better!
This is part 1 of a 7-part series on Church HR Forms & Systems