“It is critical that the person fits the church’s culture and their personality works well with the worship, production, and creative teams. We also look at whether the person is teachable.”
Caleb Loeppky has worked church live event production for 10+ years and is currently production director for a seven-campus multisite church in the Chicagoland area. He loves watching his peers thrive in their positions.
As a First In Last Out (FILO) core team member, he coordinates church tech conference education sessions and launched the FILO Staffing Division, partnering with Slingshot Group ministry coaching and staffing.
CPM: How did the idea for FILO Staffing surface?
Loeppky: I was sitting in the back of the room during FILO 2019 in Chicago, looking at the thousands of technical artists, thinking many of these people are looking for jobs and don’t have a great way to find them. I also felt like many of the churches represented wanted to hire great production people and needed a good avenue to find them. Now a little over a year later, FILO Staffing has grown exponentially.
CPM: How is the church technical staffing issue different from other aspects of church hires?
Loeppky: I think the biggest difference is the technical skills needed. It’s also extremely important that they have a pastor’s heart. Imagine having an amazing production person on staff, who also has a pastoral heart for developing and pouring into volunteers.
CPM: What criteria is used to make a match for a church’s position or find the right job for a tech who’s ready to move?
Loeppky: It is critical that the person fits the church’s culture and their personality works well with the worship, production, and creative teams. We also look at whether the person is teachable. Every individual church does things differently and we want the person to adapt well to change.
CPM: What do you do to verify the applicant’s qualifications?
Loeppky: For the candidates, we have a robust vetting process that starts with an intake questionnaire and eventually leads to a digital portfolio for each candidate. The digital portfolio has dozens of questions to answer about ministry, professional experience, skillsets, education history as well as references they provide during the interview process. We then take those digital portfolios to churches in the hiring process.
CPM: What can people expect the process of using FILO Staffing to look like?
Loeppky: If you are a church looking to hire, the process starts with an initial conversation to learn more about the hiring need. After we begin the search, our goal is to provide three to five candidates within the first 30 days. We will then continue to present candidates that have been vetted from a technical, cultural, and personality standpoint until we find the perfect candidate for that church. From the candidate side, we start with an initial intake questionnaire, then the candidate fills out detailed information for the digital portfolio. We then use that information to help find a church that would be a great fit for them. When we find a job possibility, we set up calls with the candidate to tell them more about the role, and allow them to pray and think about if the church could be a good fit for them. https://filo.org/staffing
