Every staffing company says their people are Christians. We published how we check.
Claiming it costs nothing. So here is the standard, in order, with the parts that disqualify people.
- 1
Application screen
Four written answers, graded before anyone talks to the candidate. Written English, real work history, a working home office with backup internet and backup power, and the name of the church they attend. Most applicants stop here.
- 2
Skills assessment
Timed, one sitting. They rewrite a rough note into an email a congregation could receive. They draft a reply to an angry volunteer coordinator who is threatening to quit. They sequence a Thursday morning with eight competing demands and a print deadline, and buried in the list is a benevolence request. Anyone who answers it themselves instead of routing it to a pastor is done that day.
- 3
Live interview
Camera on, forty-five minutes, at normal American speaking speed. We do not slow down for candidates, because you will not either.
- 4
Faith and character, conducted by people in ministry
Not an HR checkbox. A real conversation about testimony, local church involvement, and how someone handles a situation where doing the right thing costs them something. Then we call their pastor. A candidate who cannot produce a pastor who knows them does not get placed.
It is conducted by people who are personally in ministry. That is the part other companies cannot copy. Recruiters can screen for skills. Screening for character in a ministry context requires someone who has sat in the room where character failed and watched what it did to a congregation.
- 5
Paid work simulation
Real tasks from real church and business workflows. An inbox with twenty-five messages and three things seeded in it that must be escalated, not answered. A member database with problems planted in it. A design task with one detail deliberately missing, where the right answer is to ask. We pay for this work, because asking someone to work for free as a test would contradict everything on the pay section of our homepage.
- 6
Background check
Philippine NBI clearance, verified, plus employment references we call. Required before any access to financial records, giving data, or member personal information. Not optional, not waivable, not something we skip because a placement is urgent.
These rules do not bend, including at your request.
Your church database holds home addresses, phone numbers, giving history, prayer requests, and in some cases things people told you in confidence. A staffing decision that treats that lightly is a shepherding failure, not an operations one.
- No banking credentials, ever, at any tier. No payments initiated, no transfers, no exceptions. Bookkeeping specialists get read-only bank feeds.
- Least privilege by default. Access is granted per task, not per person. If the work does not require it, the access is not issued.
- Named accounts only. No shared logins. Credentials are issued by your own administrator through a password manager, never sent by email or chat.
- Never the sole administrator on any account you own. If we vanished tomorrow, you would still control every system.
- Background check before any access to financial records, giving data, or member personal information.
- Confidentiality covers everything seen inside your systems, and it survives the end of the engagement.
- Access is revoked within one business day of any change in placement.
If you ever ask us to break one of these, we will decline, and we will put the decline in writing.
A co-laborer is not a pastor, and we will never let one act like it.
Benevolence requests. Counseling inquiries. Member conflict. Marriage trouble. Anything confessional. Anything that arrives in your church inbox at 11pm from someone who has been holding it in for a week.
All of it routes to a named member of your staff. Immediately. The co-laborer does not answer it, does not summarize it, does not triage it into a category, and does not keep a record of it.
Administrative work has a boundary, and we drew it on the pastoral side rather than the convenient side. Your co-laborer handles the volume so your pastors have room for the weight. Not the other way around.
Why I started CoLabor
I have sat in both chairs.
I pastor. I also run a company. Which means I have spent years watching the same thing happen from two directions: good people, called to real work, spending their best hours on tasks that anybody could have done, because there was nobody else to do them.
I know what 9pm in a church office looks like. Bulletin not built. Volunteer schedule half full. Eleven emails still sitting there, and three of them are from people who needed an answer on Tuesday. You go home, and the sermon you meant to work on is still a page of notes.
That is not a time management problem. Nobody fixes it with a better calendar app. There is more work than there are people, and the work that gets dropped is always the same work: the guest nobody followed up with, the thank-you letter nobody sent, the person who quietly stopped coming and nobody noticed for six weeks.
I also had a second conviction, and it is the reason we publish what we pay. Hiring overseas has a bad reputation for a reason. Plenty of companies price their service on the fact that somebody far away has fewer options. I was not willing to build that. So we pay more than double the national average where our people live, we pay 13th month, and everyone gets a raise every year, whether anyone is watching or not.
We are called co-laborers because that is what the arrangement is. Two people doing the work of the Kingdom, in different places, on the same job.
Thomas Costello
Founder, CoLabor Staffing
Ask us the hard version of any question on this page.
We will answer it on the call. In writing, if you want it in writing.
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