Squee I’m important! People think I know what I’m talking about.
I’m sure all of you following along at home have your own answers to these questions and I’d love to hear them!
1. How do you decline applications?
I haven’t had to decline too many people. Unless they have a really terribad application, I’ll let them in for their trial period. Usually the kind that fail their recruitment trial period REALLY fail, to the point where it’s an angry /gkick /ignore. I’ve tried to give a specific concern, like “you seem to be looking for a more hard-core environment than we have, and the officers were afraid you’d feel held back by the guild.” It’s hard because sometimes honesty can be really mean, so try to give the most honest answer you can without going into the “mean” reasons.
2. What resources do you use to recruit people?
I have had really good luck simply posting a recruitment post on my realm forum on the official forums. The LFG cross-realm forum moves too quickly and generally didn’t produce any decent candidates. The “secret” to a compelling recruitment post is to give “updates” rather than simple /bump. Like “last night we took 2 groups into ICC and pwned the place!” or “We’re now starting a fun-run Saturday evenings, to help gear up new 80′s.” Of course, update with guild firsts, and get your guildies involved writing silly things on the thread. If a thread is 3 pages long, the posts are entertaining, and every post has substance (not just “still looking for people”) it makes your guild look awesome. Now, almost every applicant we get says “I saw your post on the realm forums and it seems like the guild would be a good fit.” And for most people it has been!
3. Do you recruit for the number of players the guild needs?
Basically, I just leave the recruiting post on the realm forums open, and bump it when it seems like we’re scrambling for subs. Being in a casual guild, we don’t really have “spots”. It’s impossible to know how many people we have for raids based on our roster. Every week, we have a good number busy or on vacation, etc. So… I never turn anyone away because we’re “full”, but I am not aggressive about it unless we’re having to cancel raids due to lack of sign ups.
1) Flat out in the application. Currently we're full on most classes however we'll consider any really exceptional application. Our criteria are pretty strict so unless we're gasping for a particular spec or class we tend to be able to pick and choose.
If an app is terrible I'll leave it open sometimes and let people chime in and help the applicant. This occasionally means they think they've got a foot in the door but mostly they seem appreciative.
A good line from our recruitment page in the forums regarding how we deal with asshats is this:
"If your application has been denied, take it easy. The other officers and myself will try as much as possible to be civilized in our answers but if you cannot behave yourself and act maturely we might reconsider our way to answer, just for you."
2) Occasional Realm Forum posts, Wowprogress, EJ. Whilst we try to give a good idea of what we're about we generally only get a wave of server transfer apps whenever we kill anything big.
3) This is a tricky one. During the Autumn months when a lot of people are coming back to the game its better to be lean with a bit of overlap. Going into summer you want to be a bit bigger purely because people will piss off to go see some sunshine. Most hardcore raiding guilds are a lot smaller because a small pool of players means faster gearing and better progression. We're slightly bigger so we tend to run anything from 3/4 in any class/spec.
Hi there – just came across your blog and I have to say I love it.
For 3 I have a solution I am currently running. We have two 10 man groups (10 man being our raiding focus) assigned to specific teams for consistency. I keep a raid attendance spreadsheet that does a nifty bit of maths.
If you have had 10 raids (keeping the numbers simple here) then 10 people with 100% attendance is 1000%. If you add up all the attendance of the people in that team and it comes to say, 800%. Well then you miss 200% or 2 people in your team. This keeps running until you (ideally) reach 1000% from your team.
This is a bit of a new idea, and it will never lead to 100% raid success (theres always the day when both your tanks get stuck at work or something like that), but it gives us a ball park figure from which to work. It also lets me see how the groups differ – one has higher attendance than the other and so needs less people.
Plus when anyone says 'don't we have too many people now' I can just go back to the spreadsheet and say 'mate you have 40% attendance – what do you think people should do the 60% of the time you don't show up?' Bit grumpy I know, but its always the 40% attendance people who complain and my sympathy is a bit limited then!
I am far too lazy to do the maths, so I use the world of logs attendance spreadsheet that is automatically generated from uploads. But that is an awesome way of keeping tabs and knowing exactly how many people you need for your teams.