Do your moderators have to fit along with the niche of your forum? For instance, I run a Christian forum and we prefer to have Christians for staff because they understand certain rules such as blasphemy.
If you have a gaming forum, do you expect your staff to be gamers?
A good question! I can only answer from a hypothetical point of view as I'm still the only Staff on my forum. Since mine is holistic & secular, it'd be great if I had Staff that were as well but it's not a deal-breaker. I'd mostly look for people who could help with the technical side. But I would definitely want those who would be active & does a great job moderating.
I do expect other staff to at least be somewhat familiar with video games but it's not necessarily a requirement. As long as they don't abuse their power, and know how the moderator control panel works then they're qualified.
That is an interesting question. I do have server admins on some of my forums and I doubt they need or want to have any interest in the nature of the content.
As far as moderators go, I only ever invite long standing, active members on to the staff roster so you would assume they have an interest in the niche and I think they generally do.
That said, I always tell my staff, when they acting as staff to leave their opinions at the forum door.
I agree with many of the comments here, being a server admin myself and a site owner of a few very slow sites at the moment I have found having too many staff sometimes can be your enemy.
My thoughts on staff for a regular average site.
A couple of admins that know what they are doing, this way if one is away the other can do all admin-related duties including server maintenance.
A couple of mods basically oversee everything happening on the site on a daily basis.
A few Jr mods can help the mods with posting and engaging members.
No. At least not every single moderator would need to be anyway. If someone is active in the community and can be trusted to deal with any moderation needs and contribute in their own ways, that would be enough for me.
For example, the ZetaBoards Support Forum did not have a staff team that were all familiar with providing support for IF/ZB. The Support Team was for staff whose focus was on providing support, while the Community Team was focused on dealing with the community on the support forum and organising events, creating discussions, and so forth. Anyone was welcome to branch into the activities that were the focus of their opposing staff team so no one was locked into their roles, but people were placed in the role that was best suited to what they were doing on the support forums prior to being promoted. There was CT members who didn't have much knowledge of the software to give any support for it, but they focused on fostering the community outside of the support areas which was still important.
