How do you go about picking administrators for your sites? Do you hire from your team leaders, pick loyal staff or allow direct applicants?
I like the idea of having team leaders who then get promoted to admin. If you have this system which team leader would you pick and why? For example your Mod Team Leader or Blog Team Leader- and is this based on their personality or job?
They would have to be someone that we already know and trust. I am 100% against giving admin access to someone that I don't know already. All of the admin staff that we have at the moment, we've known each other for 10 years. XD. Each of us was a supermoderator and for many years and then administrator on our previous site.
Mods on the other hand, well, they are picked on their behaviour on the forum. We don't do applications. We look out for people, if we like what we see, we ask them directly if they'd like to join the team. This method has worked for us for years. ^^
We've never done the team leader thing, but I am liking the idea for some future projects that we are planning.
I normally like to pick team leaders. If you don't pick a team leader, you'll probably piss your whole leadership staff off. 😛 If I were to start a new forum, I'd probably just hire a friend as an admin. I don't like applications, because if I have to get you to apply, I probably don't know you well enough to trust you to make decisions that admins have to make sometimes.
I haven't had the need to hire for an administrator as my co-partner is the other admin, but I would definitely promote from within and a team leader who has shown an exceptional combination of personality, reliability, and work with that. I don't think a role as "high" as administrator should be chosen through an outside application or opened up to the community even. That would definitely lead to trouble most often.
As far as team leaders I would choose a current staff member who I thought was most suited for the role.
I've never seen a forum use the whole "Team Leader" thing except for at this forum. I suppose it adds some unnecessary hierarchy, but you might need that on a large forum.
I suppose with having team leaders is that it directs all issues within a single staff team to one person so it lowers the number of people who would need to directly contact administration. Without team leaders, you would have an entire staff team needing to direct issues towards administration which could causes issues due to the number of staff members and the number of issues that might arise. I can see why they have it here as it definitely feels like it belongs in place as they have enough people on staff to justify the need for it.
As for me, I never really felt I needed a second official admin as the boards I ran back in the day were relatively small so there was no need for it.
When possible and needed, I like to promote current staff to admin positions. In many cases these people are loyal and dedicated to the forum which is important. You also can trust them when on the other hand you can't always trust a new person.
