ALL NEW BGCA Resource! Hiring and Onboarding Staff

With the launch of Great Futures 2025 this year, BGCA is laser-focused on improving the Club Experience for our members. To support Clubs in doing this work, we have been working on a TON of resources, including the YD Toolbox app, trainings like the Club Directors Academy and Youth Development Institutes, and this blog. We’ve got our eyes on you, Club Experience.

One area we spent a TON of time on last year and how it can improve the Club Experience is management practice. (I can personally attest to the TON part because I was a part of the research team!) We know that Club Directors and all of those who manage Youth Development Professionals are a key part of setting the environment of the Club, and we’ve learned that there are some specific things they can do that can have a huge effect on the Club Experience. We split them into two buckets:

SET UP YOUR TEAM FOR SUCCESS

1. Hire the right person for the job
2. Facilitate regular, effective staff meetings/promote effective team communication
3. Provide ongoing individual coaching and supervision
4. Engage in professional development planning

CREATE A HIGH-QUALITY CLUB ENVIRONMENT

1. Foster a supportive Club climate
2. Support program planning and delivery
3. Promote and model youth development principles and practices
4. Engage in a quality improvement cycle (assess, plan, improve)

Over the next few months, BGCA will be releasing a bulletin series that dive deep into these areas called Promising Practices for Managing Club Staff. They are based on research from youth development organizations, academia, and the business world as well as on scores of interviews with managers from top-performing Clubs all over the country.

These bulletins are INCREDIBLE. They include practical tips, Club profiles, ways to learn more, and tools that you can use right away in your Club. The first has just been released, and covers Hiring and Onboarding Staff. Inside, you’ll find an interview question bank as well as ideas for how to structure an interview, a spotlight on Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, D.C., and a new hire onboarding checklist from our blog bestie Brandy Harris over at Glue Sticks and Management Tricks. I am thrilled to bring you this brand new resource FIRST on the Club Experience Blog! You can download the bulletin by clicking the photo above or this link: Promising Practices for Staff Management Issue 1: Hiring and Onboarding Staff.

If you are a Boys & Girls Club staff, you can also find the bulletin on BGCA.net, along with some other great stuff, including the What Works for Building a Great Club Experience report, a webinar series on Club Experience Promising Practices, as well as our Data Use Series. Find it all on the Effective Data Use page under the Operations tab.

Never fear, as each bulletin is released, you’ll find them right here, as well as all of the other resources we are creating. To be sure you don’t miss a single post, subscribe to the ClubX Blog with your email at the bottom of this page.

How do you hire and onboard staff at your Club? Do you have any highly-effective management practices? Leave a comment below or email me at ClubXBlog@bgca.org and YOU may be featured in a future post on the Club Experience Blog!