Jonathan Bellamy spoke with christianjobs.co.uk managing partner, James Everall.



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If you are looking for sales roles, or marketing, or communications, or media, just hit the tag and it is shows you everything related to that.

Jonathan: Say I'm a business, but I don't think of myself as a 'Christian business'. I've got a café, or something like that, but I would like to be open to receiving somebody who is a Christian to come and work in my business. Would they be able to advertise on your site?

James: Yes, absolutely. In fact, that has happened. We had a business that sells photocopying machines and printer equipment and a variety of other office hardware products to a number of industries. One of the industries they've seen a lot of success and growth in has been the Church community. They came to us to say they were looking to hire a Christian, because they felt the best person to represent their organisation in that particular stream would be a Christian. They said we don't have any Christians in our sales team, but we'd like to have one. If you're trying to sell to the food and beverage industry, a chef might be a really good person to do that. They have that mentality. We posted it on our site and were glad to serve them.

Jonathan: You've been going a few months now, what's been the response?

James: Christianjobs.co.uk was launched on November 1st. Since that time we have been able to serve over 175 organisations; 175 organisations have trusted our site with their job opportunities. We've had over 280 advertisements nationwide and we've had some international ones as well. We are getting about 5,200 unique clicks per week. It's been an incredible response.

Jonathan: But I know you're not resting on your laurels; you're also diversifying. I know you want to connect very strongly with university students, Christians who are graduating. Tell me about your vision there.

James: We're passionate about serving people. As Christians that's what we're called to do. One of the ways we want to do that is by getting people to think a little bit more, to think intentionally, and strategically about what it is they might choose to do as a vocation, and where they might want to do it and how they approach that.

Personally I'm passionate about connecting with the younger generation, the students across the UK. How can we get them to think strategically and intentionally?

Yes, we have an advertising platform on the website, but we are running student career fairs. We're fortunate to be partnered with Nazarene Theological College in South Manchester who have kindly opened up one of their facilities. We are going to be bringing 30 to 50 Christian organisations together to network and to be exposed to 150 to 200 students who can be considering, during their studies, volunteer opportunities, but also maybe finding out about opportunities they didn't know existed, in organisations they didn't know existed.

We want to try and fuel that stimulus, and try to get people thinking.

We do the careers market place and we also do training and resourcing events. We're looking to bring 20 organisations together to look at things like mental health in the workplace. How can we approach that as people? How can we approach that as organisations? How can we best serve and love the people in our organisation?

We also want to look at the #MeToo movement and how we can start to address that. There are lots of ways we are trying to serve these organisations.

Jonathan: As a growing organisation in need of employees yourself, it's pretty good that you've got such a site to be able to attract people to come and join you too, I guess?

James: Absolutely. Via our site we just secured a communications and digital marketing executive. We posted that as christianjobs on the christianjobs website. We got a fantastic response. The person started last week so it's been great to bring them on board. CR

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Cross Rhythms. Any expressed views were accurate at the time of publishing but may or may not reflect the views of the individuals concerned at a later date.