3 Sorts of guild, 3 sorts of basic recruiting strategies.


Disclaimer: This does not apply as rigidly to casual guilds. If you are a RPing guild DIAF (well actually RP Dieinf IAF). If you want to cry that this doesn’t work or that you did something different and better, find someone else. This is meant to help people. If you want to contact me, mail Questions on the Jubei’Thos server with your vent details and a contact point/server and your activity times. I am happy to chat.

Small guilds / Low gear distribution level: Regular core of 20 raiders with 20 casual members

A small guild typically can clear ZG/AQ20 and has had some success in MC and possibly early BWL. However they cannot field a proper raid of 40 regular people and are suffering progression wise because of this.

Medium guilds / Medium gear distribution level: Regular core of 40 raiders with 15-25 casual raiders

A medium guild can field a full raid all the time with core members and maybe 1-5 casuals. These guilds have typically progressed through MC and BWL and are either working on AQ or starting Naxx. These guilds have a high attendance rate with their core members but also suffer from burnout.

Large guilds / High gear distribution level: Regular core of 55 raiders with redundancy and 10-15 casual raiders

A large guild can field a full raid every raid. They are often pushing the progression barrier and competing to achieve world/server firsts. These guilds have the advantage of size and ability, people do not burn out because they can always take time off. These guilds also tend to have solid gear distribution.


Now some of you may say ‘But Sate my guild doesn’t fit into your blatant sort form recruiting discussion what do I do?’ Well while this is a valid question, cry less or use your brain, you fit in there somewhere, and while its not precise it should be general enough to fit in 75% of guilds.


Recruiting strategies:

Small: Short term high intake less emphasis on quality more emphasis on getting to the medium size and having some achievements behind them. Emphasis on increasing gear level to enable progression.

Medium: Emphasis on recruiting to reduce pressure without causing high levels of gear diffusion. Emphasis on gear, skill and personality.

Large: Large guilds are different, many of them do not recruit often and only take the best or people with other skills. These guilds often recruit people that can video edit, or web program. They look for people with high knowledge of ‘theorycraft’ and high ability to problem solve for new content. They want people who bring something new or make a difference.

The most common type of recruiting done now days is using applications, where people apply or are told they should think about applying to a guild. Or through word of mouth / friends and family recruitment. While this is a very effective way of recruiting for young and middle types of guild, it does not adequately meet the needs of a large/established guild.

Ok that has covered enough about basic recruiting, now to lay out some ideas and strategies for people to recruit and some ideas on what to look for and efficient trial methods. After that I will deal with new and old inducement methods.


Recruitment strategy:

A normal recruitment strategy for a company is as follows (please note yes this is not theory and is practical, if you want/need more info feel free to ask):
Imagine a flow chart covering this, I’m to lazy to so I just stepped it out.

-Organization vision/mission/strategy
Your group has a goal, what is it?

-Role analysis / HR planning
Who do you need or what might you need long term?

-Recruitment
Well duh Bruce, better find em.

-Selection
Crab battle- We have like 50 million apps WTF do we do now? How do we fit all these guys in purples together to find someone that isn’t a monkey?

-Formalized agreement
Ok we found someone, well lets tell them exactly what we expect from them AND what they can expect from us.

-Placement
Hrm so they said yes, and now they are part of our group, better put them in the rite place and let them see standards that they need to measure up to, and introduce them to the person that will be able to tell them what they need to do and help them if they need it.

-Orientation
So yeah lets take this person and actually introduce them to people. This step is often overlooked. How the hell is person number Y going to know if they have a valuable skill if they don’t know what everyone can do.

-Induction
Often called a trial. This is for a defined period and often gets a person used to multiple roles if their class has one to see how they perform in that role.

Grats if that looks familiar. It should, you see it all the damned time and often don’t quite know the formalities that it follows. If it didn’t don’t worry it will by the end of this.


So how does this apply to our guild models?


Small guilds: As a small guild you do not have much to offer, often you are forced to take what you can get and work with it. You do not have progression or server firsts as inducements. You may have to train people in what is expected in their roles. Out of this you will come up with trash and skilled people. This is good. Keep one and let the other go. If people do not learn then you are not obliged to keep them.

Recruitment plan:

A lot of small guild recruitment is done through Word of Mouth (WOM). This basically means that you are selling yourself to anyone you can grab. Often WOM gets newer players or friends and family. But with this comes the risks that you will be forced to keep bad players due to associations, small guilds must remember to ensure there are quality measures kept. The other efficient method is to post to the realm forums. This does not guarantee you success but does help spread WOM so that people hear of you. Do have a webpage setup failure at this is failure at life.


-Organization vision/mission/strategy
Your goal is to increase guild membership with quality people. You want to be able to progress. You want to prove yourselves.

-Role analysis / HR planning
Who do you need or what might you need long term? Which class’s are higher priority? Are you taking non 60’s?

-Recruitment
Post on your realm forums. Talk about what is good about your guild and encourage in game contact of your members. Do: Have a website. Link it. Focus on positive. Provide contact details. Don’t: Badmouth. Put others down. Be elitist.
Encourage your members to spread the word to anyone they see that they think might be interested. Do: Be positive. Be approachable. Don’t: Be passive aggressive. A cock.

-Selection
You want to take 90% of your apps but don’t just take everyone. Get rid of malcontents, jerks and anyone that DOES NOT ADD VALUE.

-Formalized agreement
Let people know what you are offering. Let them know that if they don’t meet the mark they can’t stay. Tell them what you can do to help. Tell them what you can offer them and what they can reasonably expect.

-Placement
Show them their class leader, get them to explain in depth what is required and handle questions. Tell them what they can offer to help.

-Orientation
Show them who has skills that are useful. Tell them what the guild needs. Trial them in various roles. Expect initial failure, but do not tolerate and inability to learn.

At the end of this process there should be a review, you should measure them and assess them and find out if they met your standards, do they add to the guild. If they didn’t offer them a chance to improve and work them along in steps. If they are chaff get rid of them, if they are gold tell them that and tell other people. Remember to reward people and praise them. People work a lot better with praise.



Medium Guilds:

As a medium guild, you have something to offer, you have initial progression and are wanting people to move forward rather then to start to move. You also have higher requirements. You cannot accept the bad as readily. You do need specific things from your recruits and you can just say NO.

-Organization vision/mission/strategy
Progression. Everything you do is aimed at taking you further. You want to move towards the leading edge of where you can be.

-Role analysis / HR planning
What specific roles need filling out, and what roles do you need a redundancy for. Who is in the position to feel the most burnout and is it practical for them to need a backup.

-Recruitment
Do we need to find them or will they find us. At this level WOM recruiting is not as needed. Because you have progression people will come to you, it is more a matter if finding the people you need from them or deciding if you do want to recruit.
Relevant methods are as follows: WOM, application forums, realm forums, poaching.
Most of them are easy to use the only new one is poaching. Poaching (no not the technical term, cry me a river imo) is where you target someone good from another guild and give them incentive to belong to you. This does have repercussions and people do not like this, and well do you really want someone who can be poached? But you can gain high quality, skill and geared players……up to you really.

-Selection
Only take what you need at first, make recruitment continual until you hit your target.

-Formalized agreement
Ok we found someone, well lets tell them exactly what we expect from them AND what they can expect from us. Simple, specific and measurable. Follow SS&M and you won’t be far off what you need to be. Have defined goals. Have targets. Think about your options.

-Placement
Show them their class leader, get them to explain in depth what is required and handle questions. Tell them what they can offer to help.

-Orientation
Show them who has skills that are useful. Tell them what the guild needs. Trial them in the role you recruited them for. They can expand out to something else later if successful. Do not expect failure, you are picking people based on skills. Make sure they have them.

-Induction
Often called a trial. This is for a defined period and often gets a person used to multiple roles if their class has one to see how they perform in that role. This should be short, if you take a high skilled person and bring them to you, do not put them in the shit heap, it will not make them stay.

At the end of this process there should be a review, you should measure them and assess them and find out if they met your standards, do they add to the guild. If they didn’t they go. If they are chaff get rid of them. If they are gold tell them that and tell other people. Remember to reward people and praise them. People work a lot better with praise. Do not make them feel like lesser members and maybe even give them something new that is unexpected (ie gratz you helped out and are a good guy have a purple you wanted that isn’t priority)


Large Guilds:

Large guilds fit in in a very different manner. They have the people and progression, often gear is not an issue (zomg shock horror) because of their gear distribution people can be geared up quickly. Large guilds need something specific or something exceptional. They want web developers, theorycrafters, people with good admin skills they want problem solvers or people that can edit videos. The only time someone not in these categories or with a non unique / useful skill will be considered is if they are exceptional. A recruit isn’t really a recruit, they come in and need to perform straight off. They gain member rights quickly and are expected to be a team member.

-Organization vision/mission/strategy
Goals at this level differ, most often it is to add new and useful things, to progress and to add value to peoples gaming experience.

-Role analysis / HR planning
Who do you need or what might you need long term? Look out both outside and inside the game here. Large guilds have more of a luxury in this respect.

-Recruitment
For the specialist roles you need to look a lot harder, you don’t really want / need to go via WOM. With transfers available finding someone from somewhere else and bring them into the fold is more viable.

-Selection
Well in this case applicant pool is limited so selection should be lengthy process and decisions does not need to be rushed.

-Formalized agreement
Ok we found someone, well lets tell them exactly what we expect from them AND what they can expect from us. In this case you need to be particularly clear, because it matters a lot more and you can afford to take time.

-Placement
Often you are recruiting someone for a unique role this step is not as relevant because they may be the only specialist.

-Orientation
Spend more time on this, let people know everything about them and what they do and why they are here. And show them available recourses.

-Induction
In this case induction is more practical in nature, the person is often expected to perform an out of game role which is measurable.

You don’t really need a review with this sort of applicant because its readily clear if they are or aren’t doing their job. Sucks to be them if they aren’t.

As far as things that are often overlooked goes, there is the option of offering your guild members rewards for a successful recruit that they refer. While this seems to be an odd way of doing things, it will keep your applicant pool topped up at most times.

Ok so that’s about as much as I can write on this subject in 2 sittings. I will update this later with more if I decide on a reread in a day or two that its required.

You might be interested in this recent thread.

TLDR:

WTB Priests.

If you needed more time, all you had to do was ask. How's a week sound?

Ouch.

On a serious note, pretty informative, however I would add that there are certainly many more exceptions to this.

Low/Medium/Large Guild / Low/MediumHigh Gear Distrub, and any combination of these is possible, it all depends on loot rules and how things are run.

I would consider our guild a Medium Guild with High Gear distrubution, simply because we dont have the 40-45 core as you put it. We sometimes have to call raids because we dont have enough people on. However we are currently on the 4 Horsemen (12 naxx kills) have had exceptionally large problems with recruitment. I suppose it really is server/faction specific, but "poaching" is not an option, so we resorted to Realm Recruit Forums, and the quality of applications we get is... I won't even go there.

On a reflective note, I would add to your "recruitment" sections, Videos, you don't just get your name out there.
We certainly arent an DnT, or VM. I'm sure none of you have heard of us. For a recruitment standpoint, getting your "name" out there is certainly a lot harder then just having progression.

TL, but Did R. :p

I think a significant portion of the 25% of guilds you estimated the guide does not specifically address might be characterized as the ones needing the most help with recruiting: those that haven't quite made it to clearing 20-man content yet. In general, I suppose an even more inclusive version of the Accept First/Purge Later philosophy applies to these guilds. They don't just need more bodies to continue progression, they need more bodies to start progressing period.

I quit a reasonably successful guild around the time AQ came out (we were farming BWL at that point) and re-rolled on a different server with the intention of challenging myself to become either GM or an officer of a guild where I would have the opportunity to help build it up from the ground floor. I eventually caught on with a nascent guild whose GM and most active officer had similar experience and goals and was swiftly promoted to an officer position. We'd all done considerable 40-man raiding, but we'd never been in charge of anything except showing up to fill out the ranks and collect loot. We wanted to challenge ourselves to learn how to lead raids, manage DKP, etc. even if the content was going to be essentially old hat for us. So far, so good.

I think the thorniest specific challenge we've faced is the exodus of players from the guild as they approach the level cap. The other officer and I have both been 60 for several weeks, but the bulk of our membership, including the GM, is still in the 50s. Our progression goals and personnel needs are fairly modest -- we want to clear ZG and AQ20 by the time TBC is released -- but we've had trouble hanging on to a few players who depart for the greener (or purpler?) pastures of more established guilds that are into MC or maybe beyond. We know that a large part of the problem is a lack of raiding success and epic loot flow, but, in Catch-22 fashion, our start date for ZG/AQ20 entry keeps getting pushed back on account of the attrition.

I've been maintaining the posture that if people are more committed to gearing themselves up by riding someone else's gravy train than to building a fun and successful guild on their own, so be it; we won't miss them. In the last couple weeks, though, we've had 3-4 pretty decent players leave, which has been enough for even what I consider our most reliable core players to get a little discouraged at times.

Has anyone else experienced similar difficulties? Successful guilds have to start somewhere; they can't all have been around since release or simply have sprung forth fully-formed from the morass. Beyond preaching patience and hoping people buy into your philosophy, is there anything else you can do to improve retention while waiting for enough key players to hit 60 so you can finally start raiding?

Well, define successful I suppose. It is nearly 2 years since release now. Most of the top progression guilds have been around since launch (or at least since the first wave of 60's). If you haven't established some sort of raiding game by now, its going to be really hard to do before launch.

You are in a really bad spot now. Your recruiting pool is limited to pre-60's. Don't think of it as them leaving to 'ride somebodies else's gravy train'. They are leaving because they want to raid. Really, there are large number of guilds who are barely able to fill 20 mans, you best bet would be to find one and merge.

I think that I was vague yet specific enough, most people can put their guild into one of the niches or can look at two of them and mix and match a little. The problem with getting more specific is that I would basically end up writing recruitment plans for individual or limited numbers of guilds. That isn't really the plan seeing as i like my life with some spare time in it. In saying that if people need help i'm free to contact and I can talk you through ideas in my funny New Zealand accent.

I didn't say it would be high quality, but it does depend on your benchmarks. If you set them high for skill and low for gear you open the pool up a lot. I'll tye and write something more in depth about what who and how to look a bit later on, but firstly I wanted to cover the basics. No point leaping ahead to advanced stuff and leaving behind the people that actually find this useful.

Yes I completely forgot someone with video editing/fraps skills. It was actually in my mind originally but well I wrote too much and it was hurting my brain some.

Im not a nice person, I class these guilds as casual, and IMO they were not worth writing about in this because I wanted to deal with existing guilds. I will try and write something about guild formation before BC comes out and that will deal more with this. I think it will be highly relevant round then.

Hrm basically your situation is odd but not uncommon. To be fully honest you need to start doing something, players have to WANT to stay. My suggestion would be find another guild in a similar situation and sit down to work something out for join runs somewhere like ZG. That way your players have something measurable and challenging they can do upon hitting 60. Once again though I will write about retention later, as it is proberbly one of the most difficult topics to cover properly in a WOW context.

EDIT: Main post now includes fraps and <3 Kaubel

The post is too general IMO.
You cant lump a guild that just beat Nef in with a guild farming C'thun and 4/5 bossess down in Naxx as all being "medium". Its a case of "Shades of grey" rather than Black and White.

Generalizations are doomed to failure because recruiting varies from sxerver to server. What you say about a low population RP server is not going to be the same as a world leading guild on a server with 10 guilds of each faction farming C'thun.