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Staffing
Your Camp In The Aftermath Of September 11
By Andrew Ackerman
(Reprinted in The Two River Times, March 8, 2002; et. al.)
It is
fair to say that concerns about security at camp are going
to play a larger role than ever this summer but what may not
be immediately obvious is the impact they are having right
now. At least nine of the 19 hijackers implicated in the September
11th terrorist attacks entered the US legally on visas – many
of them student visas. Though the six-month moratorium Senator
Dianne Feinstein (Dem-CA) called for on student visas has
not (yet?) become law, it will be clearly be more difficult
- if not impossible - to hire non-American camp staff for
summer 2002. Camps need to start preparing for this possibility
now.
According
to a study underway by camp expert Bob Ditter and Bill Harwood
(president of CCUSA), about 60,000 international staff came
into the US summer 2001 to work, up from 40,000 the summer
before. CCUSA and Camp America alone bring in about 6,000
and 5,000 camp staff people respectively. It is a rare camp
that has no foreign employees on its staff and some camps
rely on them for 40% of their camp staff needs! Even with
this pool of potential employees, finding enough qualified,
caring staff is a challenge. Without it, you may find staff
shortages significantly limiting the programs you are able
to offer.
This year
you are going to have to start recruiting camp staff sooner
than ever before. How soon? How about right now. Your competition
is already recruiting camp staff for summer 2002. You cannot
afford to be left behind.
But this
year’s staff search is going to have to be qualitatively different.
You are going to have to search in more places than ever before.
Job fairs, ads in college newspapers – the usual standbys
are just not going to cut it anymore. The good news is that
the internet offers you more tools than ever… if you know
how to take advantage of them.
“Help
Wanted”
If you have a camp website – and you really should have a
website by now – you should, at the very least, have a “help
wanted” page that lists the jobs you have available.
Each job
description should include:
- Job
name
- Job
Description
- Start
and end dates
- Requirements
(e.g., driver’s license, Red Cross certification)
- Salary
*
*
If you are uncomfortable posting an exact number, post a range
(e.g., $1000-$1200) and be certain to specify if room & board
are included and whether the salary is weekly, monthly, or
for the entire summer.
This page
should also include instructions how to apply for a camp job.
Many camps put application forms on their sites for staff
to download and print, others include webforms that staff
can fill out online. Either way, the ‘call to action’ should
clear to the potential staffer. Lastly, don’t make these forms
too long. Websurfers have a notorious low pain threshold when
it comes to long forms. It is far better to get the basic
information from 100 interested staff people than to get full
information from 10 people while the other 90 give up halfway.
How to
get to this page should be clearly visible from your camp’s
home page. You want to make “Help wanted” (or “Camp Jobs”,
“Job Openings”, etc.) part of your website’s main navigation
area (this area is typically a row of links across the top
or down the left side of all the pages on your website) and/or
place a big, bright button “Want to work at Camp Sunshine?
Click here” prominently on your home page. Prospective staff
won’t bother to dig for this information; if they don’t see
this information front and center, they’ll just move on to
the next camp.
Don’t
wait for them to come to you
Most staff people you find don’t come to your door. You need
to find them. It’s no different online. The first step is
to post you jobs on websites that cater to would-be camp staff.
Some of these sites let you post camp jobs for free, others
charge a fee (see below for a few examples). Each site provides
a slightly different set of services so read closely to be
certain what you are getting for your money.
If you
are having trouble staffing your camp, you may want to consider
posting your camp jobs on a few of these sites.
The two
most important things to consider when evaluating a job posting
site are traffic and how easy it is for a job seeker to search
through the camp jobs. Traffic is simple (the more potential
staff people who visit the site, the more people who see your
ads) but ease of use is just as important. If users can’t
easily search for jobs that are relevant to them (i.e., the
right type of job, the right location, day vs. residential),
they won’t go out of their way to find you ad.
In many
sites, prospective camp staff have the options of simply fill
out a resume and waiting to be contacted rather than actively
search for a camp job. All the sites listed above also give
camp directors the option of searching through their staff
databases for just these people. Search through those resumes
often!
Know
who you hire
Even in the best of times, parents are jittery about sending
their children away for the summer. One way you can reassure
them (and protect yourself!) is to run background checks on
all employees. These can run from $10 and up depending on
how much detail you want and which state the employee is from.
A complete description of what these entail is beyond the
scope of this article but there are a few companies with particular
experience working with summer camps worth looking into.
Andrew
Ackerman is the Chief Operations Officer of Bunk1.com. Bunk1.com
provides password protected Community features, full websites,
staffing services to summer camps and maintains a widely used
camp search engine. For more information regarding this article
or Bunk1.com, please contact owners@Bunk1.com
or call 1-888-465-CAMP.
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