Hi,

Welcome to this new chronicle entirely dedicated to recruiting, more specifically the attraction of new assistants, as well as questions related to human resources at the community level.

It’s a participative chronicle, developed with, by and for the communities from the needs, limits and challenges faced by each of them.

We will start each reflection by publishing the results of a minisurvey done with people working in human resources. We invite everybody in the country or elsewhere to participate by reading, giving your comments and completing the information given in each publication.

Of course, we will tackle all the questions related to recruiting as well as the approaches and communication tools. During the development process of this chronicle, it seemed also important to us to think about all the daily issues of human resources management

What’s clear already is that the communities and L’Arche in general won’t have the choice to reconsider their human resources management approaches.

Looking for a rare specimen

The assistant

It seems the ideal assistant type is getting more rare, at least in North America. A more and more individualistic lifestyle and the increasing mobility of human resources don’t allow for the same assistant recruiting and hiring procedures as before. We therefore need to develop new human resources attraction and support strategies to meet the needs of the communities, even before we can consider developing a related communication strategy.

The concrete and practical experience of the communities is essential to the development of these new strategies.

Many communities already started diversifying the roles beyond the traditional model, reconsidering the identification of target groups and multiplying the recruiting approaches to answer the new human resources challenges. It’s not always an easy task when we already need to increase our efforts to manage the lack of resources in daily life! As a consequence we will try to be particularly thoughtful of the needs of community leaders and coordinators.

Don’t hesitate to write to us to suggest improvements to this chronicle!

Danielle and Jean-Emmanuel

Overview of 
Local Recruiting Initiatives

We propose, as an opening to this chronicle, as small table grouping together, according to their efficiency, the recruiting approaches used by the communities.

Question: do the results shown in this table correspond to what you experience in your own community? Do you have comments or precisions to make?

You can answer directly in the chronicle or write an email to 
dthibeault@larche.ca or marketing@larche.ca