I've been thinking about recruitment for a while, and I'd like to throw out some ideas on it. If you guys have any comments/opinions on any of this, pleaseplease respond and tell me what you think. This is about a fairly important aspect of our RO guild.
WoE requires a lot of active people for a guild to have a chance of success. At the rate we're currently recruiting, it's going to be several months before we'll have the numbers for it, not to mention the time it will take to gather the experience and equipment needed for it. For this reason, I'm considering advertising our guild in the Clownphobia forums.
Our website in not exactly safe for work, nor is it really appropriate for small kids. For that reason, I think it's a bad idea to link to it from Clownphobia. Fortunately most of the recruitment posts in Clownphobia don't link to a website at all; rather they request that applicants contact the guild leader in-game. I could request that anyone who wants to join whisper me, Hyperguy, and anyone else interested in handling recruitment. The downside is that whenever we're online we might get harassment from people who want to join or just bug us every now and then.
The ad itself will be fairly straightforward, along the lines of "Small guild looking to grow and eventually take part in WoE. Level is not important but you must be active and fun to hang out with online. Appreciation of anime fanservice a plus. Whisper Regdren or Hyperguy in-game for details.
There's also the issue of character classes. Our guild currently needs a support priest more than anything else, IMO. It's not right that we have to rely on people outside the guild any time we want to take on one of the tougher dungeons. I guess I could write something along the lines of "Support priest needed but other classes welcome as well."
The actual process of handling applicants would be a little more tricky. I think a trial period of 1 week where we get to know the recruits would be a good idea. That should be long enough to chat with him for a while, bring him with us in a group monster-hunt or two, introduce him to our website, and generally get an idea of what sort of person he is, Maybe Hyperguy could use the newbie title in our guild for this purpose so he can participate in Guild Chat during the trial. The final trick is how to decide on whether the new people are accepted into the guild. We could let Hyperguy have the final word, we could put it to a vote, or we could simply say "If you're not kicked out by the end of the week, you're in." It might be good to put together some specific criteria for what we're looking for in a new guildmate. For example, someone who can't show up during WoE hours is going to be at a disadvantage, not to mention someone who doesn't really show up during the trial week at all.
Hyperguy, I hate to say it but if we do this and start recruiting people we might not be able to have custom titles for everyone. Also, we should consider whether or not we should restrict the ability to recruit to certain people, and who these people would be. Since this is your guild, I especially want to hear what you think about all of this.
