The problem with looking for staff online on a site like PMC has many angles. First of all, the owners themselves are typically not well suited to server ownership, and probably shouldn't be owning a server at all in many cases. But lets assume people do meet my rather extreme standards in that area. You lead into the problem of asking random people to help you make things and be mature about it. If you're looking for a band of people who kinda want to help without any tangible experience or means of proper vetting, PMC is perfect. If you're looking for mature, dedicated staff, your actual bet is to look in your own community.

My theory these days is that you don't want staff. You want advertisers. You want networkers. You want people who have the skill to actually put a community together, and then you want the people who are properly able to keep the community in line. To look for moderators first without expecting them to be an advertising force is to put the cart before the horse.

And then, yes, your own presentation does matter. You want to think about your application, what you want to know about people. You want to eliminate the questions that are extremely easy to BS, while asking about legitimately useful things for the server. But that's not all. Give an idea of what the server is. Expecting people to be dedicated to a server they only just saw and that you provide little to no information for is silly. Give people an idea of what they're going to work with; prove that you are professional, and worthy of competent staff. Once you do that, the issue becomes one of vetting, and if you keep the above in mind, I suspect you'd have a better time sifting through the 5 minute powermongers and the people who actually feel like doing things.

And that's my blurt of nitwit for the day.

I must say that I believe you shouldn't advertise for staff, advertise for the server! Once people continue joining, maybe ask some people if they would like to help out on the server, but make sure to carefully watch these players movement! You don't want to be upgrading a hacker or griefer to "Moderator". I don't think I can count how many servers have been ruined by poor staff control, so make sure to recognise who you are promoting and what you are promoting to.

From my advice, only give these ranks to people you know in real life: Co-Owner, Admin, (Anything with high enough permission levels to ban, temp-ban, things like that). I also highly suggest using the following plugins on every bukkit server no matter what theme it is: One, Core-Protect, a very useful plugin which allows you to return any radius of blocks to the condition they were in a specified time ago, VERY useful for grief reversal, and two, PermissionsEX, an extremely useful plugin which allows you to control the exact permissions groups have, and assign players to those groups, PermissionsEX requires a detailed knowledge of permissions nodes and PEX format.

My final notes to first-time server owners are that you need a good knowledge of the general setup and workings of a server, and also to know how to work a server from a host. The final note I have: DON'T USE YOUR OWN IP FOR A SERVER! Get a server host or don't have a server at all, because the ip used to connect you your server if it has no host is also the ip hackers need to get into your computer and spy on all of your social and personal information.

So yeah, stay safe, and good luck!