Developing Kingdom Leaders – Tom Yeakley

Character Counts

Some time ago I found myself in a conversation with a man who was the chief head hunter for a Fortune 100 company.  He and his team hire 2000 new graduates each year.  I thought this was a great opportunity to gain some insights into university students from a new perspective, so I began to ask him some questions.

“What are you finding when you recruit these graduates?” I asked.

“Tom, we can hire those with top GPAs, work experience and internships, and resumes’ that are outstanding.  We offer them top salaries and benefits and place them in stimulating, cutting edge job situations.”

“Well, sounds interesting.  How’s that working for you?” I inquired.

“It’s a disaster!” he replied.  “All they want to know is when is the next holiday or how much vacation they get.  They don’t put in a day’s work for a day’s pay.  They have conflicts with their co-workers and supervisors.  They steal from the company.  They take the great salaries we give them and spend it on addictive behaviors, then we end up paying for counselors for them.

“That sounds pretty depressing.  What are you doing about this?” I said.

“Well, I will tell you what I tell my recruiting team.  We can’t put it in writing for we would be charged with hiring bias or discrimination.  But here’s what I tell the team.  When interviewing on campus, look for students who are leaders in The Navigators and other campus ministries.”

“Really?  Why?”  I said.

“We hire these people because they have character.  As we’ve looked at our successful hires, those who do well had this common background.  We can train new hires to do any job that we want them to do in this company.  But we can’t train them in character.  They either have it or they don’t.  Leaders in these campus ministries have what we want, so we look to hire qualified people who were leaders in these campus ministries.  They have character!”

This chief head hunter was not a believer!  But he and his team had figured out that character counts, especially when hiring leaders.  And they had identified a pool of potential leadership hires who had the essential character qualities that they were looking for.

Are you intentionally pursuing your Christlike character development?