Zippy Promotion Forums Webmaster Chat The General Webmaster Zone How Do You Hire Staff For Your Websites?

I'm curious to see how everyone hires staff for their websites. We all have different approaches, so it'll be nice to get some insight from a few different webmasters. I usually wait a little bit before I hire staff, but I hire people I can trust. I had a bad experience once when I used to have a gaming forum hosted on Proboards. I made the mistake of hiring a random person, who ended up deleting the theme I had installed and she ended up installing themes that didn't even fit with the niche of the forum. Thankfully it didn't take too long to get the old theme back, I immediately banned her from the forum. Usually I'll have a form that members can fill out and send to me in a private message if they're interested in being staff.

I've been flying solo for years due to some trust issues and mainly just the fact that no one takes much interest in being a staff member of my forum. I would hand-pick people or set up applications for users to become staff and if they have great etiquette, are active/contributive, and seem to have experience with the type of forum I am running, then they very well may find a spot on the team.

For Christianity Haven, we don't need a lot of staff since we don't have a lot of reports to work, so there's the owner (not me), Admin (me) and another staffer that both the owner and I have known from another Christian forum for well over a decade now. We trust him and his judgment and he's been on staff for years.

If we had to hire again, I'd go with someone I know from other forums and trust. I wouldn't hire someone fresh out of the gate because they can really do a lot of damage that could go unnoticed for a long time if you aren't checking.

I would go with someone I know from another forum that is interested in being a staff member on my forum. Or I'd hire someone who is already a member on my forum that has been pretty active already.

You're taking a chance when hiring some random person....

I hire from within. I look for people who share my laid-back persona and those who are active and contributing members. I'll ask them in DM if they want to be a moderator.

I typically don't seek out a moderator until it's too overwhelming for me to run the community by myself and be active.

After I add one moderator, I won't add another until we're both overwhelmed, and repeat.