Recruitment - Seperating the wheat from the chaff

Background:

As this is my first blog on EJ I thought some background might be a good idea to frame my blogs, please feel free to skip this section if you would like to get to the meat and bones of this posting!

My main character is Protection Warrior named Verily, and I successfully lead a Guild called "Nevermore" on the EU-Silvermoon realm. I formed the Guild at the beginning of The Burning Crusade, and wrapped things up at the beginning of Cataclysm.

In terms of ranking, I'd say we were usually in the top ~50 Guilds in Europe fairly consistently throughout our time on a 4-evening per week raid schedule, so while not on the bleeding edge of hardcore progression, we were certainly "up there" in the hardcore raiding scene, getting to see most encounters before the strategies were widely known and well before the rebalancing for the masses which invariably takes place later on.

Preamble:

In the 3 years we ran as a hardcore raiding Guild, we only had three players leave Nevermore (aside from the usual "real-life crisis" drop outs), and of those three, two of them left "with my blessing" for want of a better phrase to join 7-day a week top-tier Guilds such as Ensidia.

The level of turnover (or lack of it) we had seems to be pretty unusual in the community, and I attribute it in part to how we recruited and selected our players.

I wanted to share my experiences about how myself and the other Officer's in Nevermore went about recruitment as I feel this played a key role in managing our group of players effectively.

Interview Process:

First off, formalising a structured interview process is very important in making sure you are asking the right questions to see if the player is a fit for your Guild.
To facilitate this, we just kept an up-to-date forum post on an Officer forum which listed which questions we found to be valuable in terms of selecting our candidates.

This may seem obvious, but often you'll find that the type(s) of players you want to recruit will often answer certain questions in a similar manner.

Secondly, it's important to impart a realistic view of the expectations the Guild will have on the person.
We structured the interview with each of the three Officers taking a specific role:

Ittemard (Recruitment Officer/Shadow Priest): aka "the Good Cop" Itte's primary role was selling the Guild and all the positive aspects of raiding with us.

Verily (Guild Master/Raid Leader): aka "the Bad Cop" My primary role was setting expectations, focusing on the professional view we took of raiding.

Tyrion (Raid Leader): aka "the Observer" Tyr's role was probably the most important - listening to both sides of the conversation and picking out the most salient points to ask questions about, and then using that to structure the discussion once the interview was over.

Thirdly, it's important to give the candidate an opportunity to ask questions and clarify points, it's always interesting to see what sort of questions come up as that in itself tells you a lot about the person in question.

Finally, we would hold a wash-up meeting after the interview to go over the questions and our impressions. We'd decide if we wanted to take it further or invite the person for a second, less formal interview and a trial or reject the application.

Interview Questions:

We went through a bit of trial and error to try and work out which questions were the best ones to ask, in some cases with humourous results.
Obvious ones are experience, player history etc... so I'll leave those out.

Here's some of the better ones:

• With the exception of the Wrathgate, which questline in WoW was your favourite questline and why?
  
  The idea here was a bit of misdirection, by getting the person to think of the Wrathgate quest series and then asking them to choose anything else.
  
  Almost all of the poor candidates simply couldn't answer the question, or would comment that the Wrathgate was in fact, a really good questline.
  
  
• Imagine you are an encounter designer on the Blizzard raid team. Your task is to come up with a raid encounter for 25 man content only (so you don't need to consider 10 man content) which would be challenging to hardcore raiding Guilds. Please can you talk me through what encounter you would come up with, what boss or bosses would feature in it, and what mechanics the encounter would use?
  
  
  This question was the mother-lode, and I'd encourage anyone interviewing a prospective player to ask it as it was amazingly revealing.
  
  Great players would come up with encounters which placed emphasis on personal responsibility and raid awareness - movement, dealing with adds in a novel fashion, coordination etc.. think C'Thun or M'uru.
  
  Terrible players would come up with Patchwerk.
  We once interviewed a Mage who came with an amazing pedigree, and his answer to this question was described later on as:
  
  "It would be a Patchwerk style encounter with some kind of aura for the melee to deal with which completely fucked over all of the melee DPS, while (he) got to sit back, perform his personal rotation without any onus on him to do anything except sit back, and ejactulate all over his keyboard at the amazing crits he'd be generating".
  
  
• What quality do you think is best in a raider, and why? How do you feel perform in relation to that quality?
• What are the top qualities you look for in your fellow raidiers / guildmates?
• What are the things that most frustrates you about other wow players?
  
  
  These are great questions in that people would often focus on the worst quality in somone which really annoyed them - which is kind of revealing if you want to avoid someone who's going to go bat-shit insane when something goes wrong.
  
  
• What do you think is your greatest weakness?
  
• How many of your first kills in game were also your (former) guilds first kills?
  
  
  Is the person a star player, or bench fodder?
  
  
• Outside of mandatory raiding what do think you can bring to Nevermore?
• Have you visited the Nevermore logs page?
• Why did you pick Nevermore over another Guild?
  
  
  Has the player researched your Guild? Do they really want to join you in the medium to long term or are they just sticking around for now or using you as a stepping stone?

Thoughts:

I'd encourage anyone who's only dealt with "paper" applications to try interviewing candidates, it really seperates the better players out especially if you have a lot of applicants to choose from.

I humbly hope that my musings have been helpful to anyone who interviews applicants or just wonders about one method of going about doing it.

If anyone in the community has any views on this I'd be interested in discussing them.