Starting A Guild Part 2: Recruiting

This is part two of a multi-article post, part one can be found here.

I start off this post again by stating I am by no means an expert with this topic.  I’ve had plenty of trial and error though, and I can tell you what’s worked for me and what hasn’t, and what I believe you need to do to succeed in recruiting efforts.  Again I’m assuming you are starting off from scratch, or with at most a very small handful of people.

If you take only one thing away from this post, remember this above all else when recruiting:  If you do not assign value to being a member of your guild, you will attract people that also consider being a member of your guild meaningless and they will treat it that way. This is your guild, you have goals for it, you care about making it work, and you want members with similar goals to want to be there.

For those reasons, you need to be selective with who you recruit.  I know it’s very very tempting to take anyone that is even slightly interested, but you will be doing yourself a disservice down the road by taking anyone without screening them at all.  I’m jumping ahead a bit, so lets start off with what you can do to get the right kinds of people responding to you in the first place.

I’ll start with the most obvious one, which is networking.  Hopefully you already know some people.  They may or may not be interested in your guild, but you can at least get the word out that you’re looking for people.  Odds are good that they also have friends that might be looking for a guild.  Make sure and pass along exactly what your guild will be (as we defined in the first article).

I should bring up something that I consider HIGHLY frowned upon, which is what I call “sniping members”.  This is when someone comes recruiting people that are already guilded elsewhere, and I try to be very careful not to do this.  If you are spreading the word about your guild and that you’re starting one, that’s fine.  If you are actively seeking out individuals already guilded and trying convince them to leave their current guild for yours, that’s not fine.  As a matter of fact I like to point that out to anyone that comes and talks to me about joining my guild.  I like people to let their current guild leader know that they are leaving, or I may even offer to talk to their current guild leader just so there isn’t any misunderstanding.  Which guild a person is in is entirely their business, but how they get there can make major waves with guild leaders if you aren’t very careful about how you handle it.

Back to finding people.

The second option open to you are the official forums.  I’m not one to really browse them much, because I generally don’t like what I see there.   In this case though, you want to cast a wide net and hit every option available to you.  Post a thread about your guild in your realm forums.  Be as clear as humanly possible exactly what your guild is, and more importantly IS NOT.  If you don’t take people under a certain age, say so.  If you plan to raid, make sure you tell people that you are just starting out so they don’t expect to raid immediately, and also what times you are proposing to raid.  Spell out everything that defines your guild.  Make sure to include everything, anything that would offer someone looking for a guild a niche in your guild that other guilds may lack.  If you have people already, make sure to mention specifically what you need, gear requirements if any, experience wanted, everything.

Also, check the realm forums often for people that post that they are looking for a guild.  Again, make sure that they would be a good fit for you before replying to them or talking to them in game.  Proactively looking for people posting was something I hadn’t been doing, and someone else pointed it out to me and it has actually found my guild several people when we needed them.  People, even good ones, can be a little lazy, and you’re willingness to go find them where others aren’t can be the difference between filling a guild and quitting.

Option three is the dirty option of in-game recruiting.  I don’t know anyone that enjoys doing this, but it works.

You want to come up with a clever way to get people’s attention via a macro in-game, and hopefully get the right people’s attention.  I’ve tried this multiple ways, with varying degrees of success.  Again, you want to cast a wide net so I suggest multiple options.  You are limited in space with whatever message you want to convey, and I highly suggest avoiding more than one macro worth of text.

The first way to go is to state your raid times, what you’re looking for, and whatever other useful pertinent information you can squeeze into the space you have.  Informative, to the point, and dry.  It does work, and people looking for something specific will already be pre-screened before they contact you (they know that the raid times would work for them, or that you said you’re looking for a Warlock and they are a Warlock).

The second way to go is to add more flavor and less substance, and ask that people interested contact you.  So for example (fill in the blanks) “Are you tired of ____ and looking for a guild with ____?  So am I!  So I’m starting a guild that ____.”  Whisper me for more info.”  Sometimes the funnier the better, it will draw more attention, but though you may draw more interest you’ll probably end up screening out more people since they don’t have as much information before contacting you.

A third option is to not macro at all, and actually type something very conversational and in the moment.  If you do this, actually type something and use it just that once and re-type something new for the next time.  People can get really “tuned out” to spam and sometimes a conversational approach will be something someone actually reads instead of just skipping right past what may look like “spam” to them.

So now you’ve got what you want to say ready, so where do you say it?

First you have the “Guild Recruitment Channel”.  This is a channel much like the trade channel, but it’s strictly for guild recruitment and spamming your guild’s recruitment.  It’s only active in major cities (if I recall correctly unless it’s been changed), and if you’re in a guild it’s off by default.  This is where you are SUPPOSED to be spamming your guild’s recruitment stuff.  Don’t go nuts, but feel free to hit your macro in this channel every so often.  Give it a few minutes at least between hitting it, or at least make sure your text has scrolled WAY off before hitting it again.  People will definitely get turned off by over-spamming, and anyone else will let you know.  Don’t be a jerk and spam right after other guilds.  The idea is to MAKE friends, not make enemies.

The big downside to the Guild Recruitment Channel is….no one is in it.  There are those nice few that are actually in there looking for a guild, but they are few and far between.  They ARE there, I’ve gotten people from there, but not a huge amount.  A lot of people don’t like to be guildess so they never see the channel, or forget they can join it and never do, or for whatever reason just never go in there.

That leads us to the dirtiest of dirty things:  The Trade Channel.  Let’s get one thing straight, you technically are NOT supposed to be using this channel for guild recruitment, and people will remind you of that fact.  I personally don’t like people spamming in it, or recruiting in it, but the fact of the matter here is that it can get results.  Though I may not like how the results are gotten, I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it doesn’t work.  I have literally spammed the recruitment channel for an hour with no bites, then hit trade channel once and ended up with 5 people wanting to talk to me.

IF you decide to mess with doing this in Trade, and I’m not going to publicly suggest that you do, there are a few things to keep in mind.  Do NOT spam trade over and over.  At MOST hit it once every so often.  I can’t tell you how often, but even once an hour or 30 minutes is probably PLENTY.  It’s an annoyance to people, and overdoing it at all can easily have a negative effect instead of a positive one.

Looking for people in the above in-game ways works, and you will get out of it what you put into it.  Hopefully you have a TV or something else near you, because you can definitely spend some time doing this, and if you are determined to get a guild running you might need to go at this a while.  If you are chatty talk up other people in town and spread the word while you do this.  Plan on giving up time to do this, but if you are persistent and flexible to change to what works, you WILL get results.

SO…on to screening people.

The first thing I do is VERY briefly talk to people just to get the basics to double check if they are even aware of what the guild is about at a basic level.  If so I then send them to a guild application on my guild’s website.

You can set up a guild website with your own application for free at many sites these days.  On that application I have questions that I am looking for answers for that are more than “yes” or “no”.  The questions are all important and should be ones that you already know what kind of answers you’re looking for.  For example:  “Are you currently in a guild? If so why are you leaving?”  and “Have you had any suspensions or bans of your account(s), and if so why?” and “What do you want and hope to gain by being a member of the guild?”.  I also ask if they use the in-game mods we expect them to use, and other things.

Those questions are screening ones yes, but also I’m interested in how they answer them.  Can they follow instructions?  Are they willing to put in effort?  If the answers are no, then they are probably a “no” to the guild.  By putting effort into their application, and by having someone fill out an application in the first place, you are assigning a value to being in your guild.  If you want to be in the guild, I need you to do X, Y and Z.  If you don’t want to do those things then I don’t want you here, because this guild is a good one, for people willing to do those things.

Yes it’s just a game, for fun.  If you’re going to spend a lot of time playing though you want to surround yourself with people who want the same things out of the game as you do.

After an application (assuming all goes well), right before an invite, I chat to the person applying.  Talk to them!  Talk to them (whisper in game) for 10 minutes at least if you can.  If it’s not someone you want to talk to for that long odds are good you don’t want them in your guild talking in /g every night.  Again make sure that they know what the guild rules are and what is expected, so there isn’t ANY chance of “but I didn’t know x y or z”.

You’ll find the better you are with all of this process, the less work it becomes.  The better you screen people, the less you will lose them for being unhappy.  The less you lose people, the less you will need to recruit.  The less you need to recruit, the better your “veteran” players will get.  The better they get, the better your guild gets.  The better your guild gets, the more people will know it.  The more people know your guild, the more they will know your reputaion and want to be a part of your guild…and the less you will need to recruit.

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