Insider Hire SOP: Staff Your Service From Inside the Building You Already Serve

This is a Small Business SOP, a free, do-this-today standard operating procedure pulled from a real operator on the Unscripted podcast network. This one comes from Melyssa Jaskiewicz, Executive Director of Leveling the Fields, a Charleston, South Carolina organization that runs girls’ sports programming inside elementary schools.

Her staffing problem is your staffing problem wearing different clothes. She has to put qualified, cleared adults in front of eight- to eleven-year-olds, on somebody else’s campus, on a calendar she does not control. The obvious move is to recruit outside volunteers and train them up. She does not do that. She hires the school’s own teachers and puts them on payroll — and it solved three problems with one decision. Run this one this week.

Leveling the Fields hires the school's own teachers as its paid coaches instead of using outside volunteers

The Play in One Line

When you deliver a service inside somebody else’s environment, recruit your delivery staff from the people already in that environment — and pay them.

Why hiring from inside your client’s building works

“The one thing that we really pride ourselves on is we actually hire teachers from that school to be the coaches in our program.”

— Melyssa Jaskiewicz

Look at what one hire buys her. Money goes back into a teacher’s pocket, which is a real outcome for the community she is already claiming to serve. Authority arrives pre-installed, because as she puts it, “they’re already seen as teachers that are respected… the kids automatically know the hierarchy. They know who’s in charge.” And the hardest skill in the job — managing a room full of nine-year-olds who have just been let outside — transfers for free.

That last one is the part you should steal. You are not paying to build a competency; you are renting one that is already fully formed and already calibrated to this exact room. In her words: “In hiring teachers, they automatically know how to handle that, because that’s what they’re doing all day, every day. And so that’s really been a saving grace.”

An outside volunteer costs you less on paper and more everywhere else. You pay in onboarding, in the weeks it takes them to earn authority with people who have never met them, in the no-shows you cannot schedule around, and in the churn when the novelty wears off. The insider walks in on day one already knowing the names, the room, the rules and the exits.

Where the insider hire transfers outside a nonprofit

Any time your work happens on ground somebody else owns, there is an insider hire sitting in front of you:

Property services. Hire from the building’s existing maintenance crew for your after-hours or turnover work. They already have the keys, the layout and the tenants’ trust.
Agencies. Hire a client’s former employee as the account lead. They know the internal politics you would otherwise spend two quarters discovering.
Catering and events. Staff from the venue’s own banquet team rather than importing a crew that has never found that kitchen’s ice machine.
Managed IT. Hire the person who has quietly been the office’s unofficial tech support for six years. They already know which machine is cursed.
Home services. Hire the subcontractor a builder already uses on the sites you are entering, instead of teaching a new crew that builder’s standards from scratch.

The test is simple. If a stranger would need three weeks to learn the environment, and somebody already in it would need three days, the person already in it is the higher-leverage hire even at a higher rate.

The 6 steps

Name the environment you are already inside

Open a blank doc and list every place you deliver work that belongs to somebody else — a campus, a client office, a property, a venue, a job site. Beside each one, write down who is already in that room doing adjacent work: teachers, front-desk staff, maintenance, banquet crew, shift leads. That list is your candidate pool, and you have never treated it as one.

Ask the host before you ask the person

Take it to the principal, the property manager, the GM or the owner first, and frame it as what it is: money into their people’s pockets and a smoother program on their turf. Recruiting off a partner’s floor without permission is how your best account becomes your angriest one. Get the blessing, then let the role circulate internally through their channels, not yours.

Write it as a paid job with a defined season

Hours, dates, rate, who they report to, what ends it — in writing, before anyone says yes. Melyssa is blunt about the difference: “We have paid hired structured programming. Like, this is our — we pay our coaches.” Paying converts a favor you cannot schedule into a shift you can hold someone to. It also lets you fire someone, which a volunteer arrangement quietly does not.

Run the background check your jurisdiction requires

Leveling the Fields runs a SLED check on every coach — that is South Carolina’s state police record check, because the work happens on an elementary school campus. Yours will be named something else: Live Scan, a DBS check, a state repository search, an MVR pull, a license and insurance verification. Find out which one your work actually triggers and run it yourself, even on an insider the host has already cleared. Your insurer wants your file, not theirs, and “they work at the school” is not a document you can produce in a claim.

Melyssa’s line on this is the one to keep: “We can’t just take somebody off the street… we have to get them SLED checked. There’s just so many hoops to jump through when you are going on campus to an elementary school, and we have all that down.” Having it down is the point. Build the checklist once, then it costs you an afternoon per hire instead of a panic.

Train them on your program, not on their job

Leveling the Fields puts every coach through a four-hour training before the season starts. Keep that boundary clean when you write yours. The insider already brings the room management, the local knowledge and the relationships. What they do not bring is your curriculum, your safety protocol, your incident reporting, your brand standards and your escalation path. Train only the delta, and your onboarding stays short enough that people actually finish it.

Say out loud what the role is not

Once the good roles are paid and internal, outsiders will still ask to help — and you owe them a straight answer instead of a slow one. Melyssa sets expectations before anyone applies: “We’re not your typical show up, pack a bag and then leave… we expect a lot from our volunteers.” Publish what the paid role requires, then give everyone else a real door: a one-off event, a summer camp, a committee seat, the mailing list, a donation. Clarity up front costs you nothing. Vagueness costs you a reputation.

The second play: answer your non-revenue inbox in hours, not weeks

Speed-to-lead is a sales idea, and you have probably already applied it to your quote requests. Melyssa applies it to the inflow that never shows up on an invoice. She interviewed a candidate who had reached out to a local shelter to volunteer and did not hear back for almost a year. That person never went back.

Answer faster

Her fix was structural, not motivational: she staffed a volunteer manager whose job is to guarantee the clock. Her organization now replies “within a couple of hours.”

Do the same audit on your own non-revenue inboxes, because they are almost certainly unowned. Job applicants. Partnership enquiries. Referral sources. Vendors pitching something you might actually need. Community groups. Every one of those is somebody deciding, in the silence, whether you are a serious operation. Give each inbox a named owner and a published response window, then measure it — the same way you would measure a lead.

The numbers behind the episode

24%

of C-suite executives are women

94%

of those women played sports — the statistic that started the whole organization

Twice

as many boys as girls play high school sports in South Carolina, which Melyssa reads as a supply problem, not an interest problem: there is no youth pipeline feeding the high school teams

Four

hours of coach training, plus a SLED check, before a single session runs

A couple

of hours is her target response time on a volunteer enquiry. The shelter that lost a good one took nearly a year

Take the whole SOP with you

Two printable pages: the play, the six steps, a fill-in worksheet and a run-the-play checklist. No email required, no gate, no form.

📥 Download the Insider Hire SOP (PDF)

Listen to the full episode

This SOP is distilled from Melyssa Jaskiewicz’s conversation with Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted podcast network:

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