Tech Forum

The job market right now is tight, competitive, and hard to find good technical candidates. Recruiting at the church adds another difficult element to the recruiting process. One has to be a member of the Church in good standing. (Temple Worthy) With all of these requirements, we would really like to network with all of the members of the church in order to find the unique technical skills we are searching. We have come up with many good ideas how to do this, but I would like to ask the community their opinion. I would like to open this up for discussion.


How can the Church best locate and hire the technical personnel that we need to move the work forward?


Travis Lawrence

It seems to me that there might be a lot of opportunities lost due the length of time it takes to get through the system. For instance, I applied for a couple of positions back at the beginning of July, almost 2 months ago. No news, is good news, I suppose. However, most people who are out of a job do not have the luxury of waiting around a couple months to see if they are in the running. $.02

-Steve

Well one is to find where the students are going to be graduating in the fields that you are looking for and that are LDS and in large enough quantities to offset the cost of flying a recuiting team out there.

BYU (P,H,I), U of U, UVSC (or UVU) all have high numbers of LDS student body in tech fields. But I think you already recuit at all those schools.

thedqs wrote:Well one is to find where the students are going to be graduating in the fields that you are looking for and that are LDS and in large enough quantities to offset the cost of flying a recuiting team out there.

BYU (P,H,I), U of U, UVSC (or UVU) all have high numbers of LDS student body in tech fields. But I think you already recuit at all those schools.

I would think it would be just as important to find those that have been out in the field a while too. They can bring experience beyond just the textbook experience.

Here's an idea...

If any of you haven't tried LinkedIn yet, I would highly suggest it. It is a terrific networking tool for finding job opportunities and keeping in touch.

My point in bringing that up is I wonder if the Church could somehow leverage a site like that, or even something like Facebook. I imagine somewhere we as LDS tech members could store our professional profiles and at any given time indicate whether we are looking for a job from the Church or would be happy to receive an invitation for an opportunity. The Church would then have this searchable database where they could find potential candidates based on their criteria, and notify those that have indicated any interest at all of the opportunity.

How feasible do think this is?

I do know that facebook allows you to put your past job experience onto your profile and also you religious standing. So maybe that isn't so bad of an idea.

What is the Church's policy on remote workers? You might have better luck if you widen the net to allow people to work for the Church from outside of Utah.

thedqs wrote:I do know that facebook allows you to put your past job experience onto your profile and also you religious standing. So maybe that isn't so bad of an idea.

A Facebook group could be created called something like LDS Church Employment Pool...

Of course, it might be easier to just create a simple homegrown solution, allowing it to be customized however you want.

mkmurray wrote:I would think it would be just as important to find those that have been out in the field a while too. They can bring experience beyond just the textbook experience.

In my opinion, mkmurray is absolutely right. Recruiting straight out of college is great for entry-level positions, but you're typically not going to get people familiar with how things work in the real-world. Nothing against college students..... I am just remembering how I was straight out of college.

mkmurray wrote:Here's an idea...

If any of you haven't tried LinkedIn yet, I would highly suggest it. It is a terrific networking tool for finding job opportunities and keeping in touch.

Check out the article we just published on the this home page.

New LDS Connected Pilot Program

Tom

We do have some remote workers at the Church. I have heard discussion on the matter and know that it is being considered as a possibility.

I posted this in another thread, but some recruiters and hiring managers will be at the Tech Fair at BYU on September 20. It is targeted at students, but feel free to suggest friends and relatives to stop by and talk to us there as well.