My WOW guild is recruiting. We need a bunch of bodies to fill the roster for when new content arrives, and it is going to be tricky to make that happen. Primarily this is a problem because we stopped raiding, and getting new applicants when you aren't raiding is .... rough.
But this won't be a problem because the guild tapped me to help out with recruiting. Surely I can beat the odds, right?
This seems to be the way it goes. Every guild I get into lets me into raids to do damage because they need a body, they realize I am good and I become a regular, and then eventually I end up being a main tank because some other tank quits and there I am, ready to step in.
Once I become a main tank I eventually end up being asked to be an officer. The guild / raider relationship escalator seems inescapable for me.
The first thing I noticed when I started doing work on the recruitment problem is how recruiting for a WOW guild is just like a dating website and people all make exactly the same mistakes in both situations. Awhile ago I wrote a blog post about how people's dating profiles were garbage because they tried to be too generic and inoffensive. Sure, you can get a lot of first dates by being nice and friendly and asking for a partner who is kind and smart and funny, but those first dates are going to be trash because you haven't weeded out all the people you hate. You have to put in tons of dealbreakers like religion, politics, and bad habits. This will make sure that when you do end up on first dates you have a much better chance to actually like your date.
WOW guilds are the same. They all talk about their friendly atmosphere, how they want everyone to feel at home, and request people who are knowledgeable and prompt.
Useless. Nobody recruits by saying "We won't make you feel at home, we are a bunch of assholes, and we want to recruit idiots who never show up." If nobody would ever say the opposite of what you are saying, then what you are saying is pointless. It is exactly the same as "I like travel and good food." on a dating profile in that it rules nobody out and accomplishes nothing in terms of telling people what you actually want.
The raiders are no better. They are all hardworking, efficient, easygoing people, according to their advertisements. BOOOOORRRRRRIIIIINGGG.
The one thing the two groups can use to sort each other is raid times. It works out exactly like dating sites use location - you have to match that, or nothing happens. If you are in Hong Kong it doesn't matter how great you are, we aren't dating. If you raid while I am asleep, we aren't a raiding team.
I want to make our advertisement actually good. We are on a huge server with hundreds of raiding guilds, so there is no shortage of applicants. The trick is figuring out how to stand out from the crowd, and you don't do that by putting down a bunch of generically 'nice' statements and raid times and hoping. However, at this point my guild leader made it clear that she doesn't want me going off and being aggressive in our guild advertisements. I am sure that I could get great people doing it my way, but I am not the one in charge, so for the moment I have to do it her way.
The trick, I think, is that I need to be good at recruiting, make it clear I can get the job done, and then push to get let off the leash. When you first get handed responsibility you often have to put in that time to make it clear you can follow instructions and do it the normal way so that you can earn the trust to do something more imaginative. For now I will write a mostly normal recruiting post, but in the back of my head I will be creating the real one, the one I want to use when I finally get to do it my way.
Also, if you happen to want to raid mythic in WOW, hit me up!
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