Recruiting and Hiring the RIGHT Summer Camp Staff

March 13th, 2019

Recruiting and Hiring the BEST STAFF FOR SUMMER CAMP

How does CCB recruit and hire their staff? It’s a question we get asked almost daily as families shop for the right summer camp for their son. We believe our staff are what makes CCB special and are incredibly proud of our recruitment, hiring and onboarding procedures to ensure only the top applicants make it on to the team. In this blog we will be discussing the recruitment, hiring and onboarding procedures BEFORE a staff member arrives at CCB for their on site training (which will be a whole seperate blog!). 

The first stage of the recruitment process is reviewing the application. Our staff complete a lengthy online application with all the basic info we need to know plus several essay based questions.The essay questions start to dig a little deeper into the applicants views and values in regards to general life as well as working with children to ensure they line up with CCB's philosophy and goals for oru campers. We consistently look back into our returning staff and already hired applicants on our position list to ensure we have a diverse range of ages, personality types, skills, teaching styles etc to cater and connect with all campers. After reviewing the application, if they look like a good fit, we contact the applicant for an interview (either in person or via Skype).

We conduct two interviews with two different, experienced, year round directors. The interviews focus not only on the hard skills of the applicant but also get to know more about their values, philosophy in regards to youth development, goals for themselves and their campers and their personality type. We have very strict requirements for prior experience and qualifications for our activity staff. All activities require the staff member to be competent participants in the activity and also have experience teaching and mentoring experience with children already. Only staff that are truly focussed on youth development and applying to work at camp for camper focussed reasons are succesful in moving forward to the next stage. We usually interview 4+ applicants for every 1 that we hire.

If successful in the interview we then personally call and speak to all 3 references the staff member has provided. This is a time consuming process that we feel is invaluable for getting a well rounded and accurate picture of the staff member to see if they will be a good fit for CCB. 

Once hired the staff member receives two lengthy onboarding documents to prepare themselves to work at Camp Carolina. These cover our philosophy, counselor expectations, the required documentation and time committment, packing lists, arriving at CCB etc. The staff sign internet and social media policies, review and agree to policies regarding professionalism and safety at CCB, provide us with full immunization and doctors certificates, if they are going to drive they obtain 5 year driving history checks and federal background checks from their home countries. We also search every staff member, volunteer and year round employee on the National Sex Offender list.

Our CCB staff also begin their training BEFORE they arrive at CCB. New staff take part in ten hours of online training through Expert Online Training https://www.expertonlinetraining.com/ We assign staff to study topics such as homesickness, safe touch safe talk, bullying, communicating effectively with youth, professionalism in summer camp and conflict management.  Return staff study topics on leadership and supervising others as well as higher level skills on camper behavior and management. We can then cater or on site training to build on these already obtained skills and advance the staffs knowledge and skills to a higher level for our campers.


Applying to work at CCB is a lengthy and detailed process. Only the most dedicated, professional and prepared staff will be successful throughout the recruitment and onboarding procedures ensuring we have the best of the best working with our campers each summer. We have begun hiring for summer 2020. More questions about hiring staff at CCB or want to apply? Email our Associate Director Kylie at kylie@campcarolina.com

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