Jireh grew from more than a decade of working alongside CEOs and business owners, where I saw the same challenge follow growth again and again: the business needed more people, but the wrong people only created more work.
The real challenge wasn't simply finding someone with the right experience. It was finding someone you could trust with a part of the business you've worked so hard to build.
"Will they take ownership? Can they be trusted to follow through? Do they care about the work? Will they grow with the business rather than simply work for it?"
I've also lived on the other side of that story. Remote work opened doors for me to build a career with businesses around the world and, through those opportunities, help put my five younger siblings through school. In many ways, Jireh had already manifested in my life long before it became a business.
Jireh means “God will provide.” It's the name of my church and a promise I've stood on throughout my life. Looking back, that provision often came through people who trusted me with an opportunity — opportunities that didn't just provide for me, but allowed me to provide for the people who depended on me. That shaped the way I see hiring today.
I've seen what the right person can mean to a business, and I've lived what the right opportunity can mean to a person and the people behind them.
We look beyond the resume for people with the capability, character, values, and ownership to become someone a visionary can grow with while opening the door for talented people ready to prove themselves.
Because sometimes, provision begins with someone choosing to give the right person a chance.
What I Saw..
Cris describes the founder who can't find anyone to trust. I was that founder.
I had a company that needed people and a history of hiring the wrong ones. I'd learned the expensive way that a resume tells you what someone has done and almost nothing about who they are.
So when I interviewed Cris, I didn't ask her to walk me through her experience. I asked her to tell me about herself as a person — her goals, her ambition — and to answer in the five W's. Who, what, when, where, why. It's the format the military taught me for reporting an incident, when a commander needs the truth fast and nothing decorative in it. I pointed it at a person instead.
Most of the candidates I spoke with looked more qualified on paper.
Cris told me she wanted to grow, and to lead something of her own, and that this was work she had always wanted to do.
She never once told me why she was capable of it.
That was the answer that got her the job, and everything since has proved it right. I hired her for who she was and planned to teach the rest — because I believe that if you understand a person and know what they're trying to accomplish with their life, you can build the role around them instead of pressing them into one you designed before you met them. I learned that from the late Dr. Myles Munroe.
Jireh was Cris's idea. She brought it to me and trusted me to help her build it, which is the same thing this company asks founders to do, in reverse.
She says provision begins with someone choosing to give the right person a chance.