Let’s face it, recruiting sucks.  But it’s a job that someone must do. I’ve met few people that enjoyed the actual bit of recruiting,  but the ones that did, were phenomenal recruitment officers. Recruiting is one of the most time consuming jobs in any leadership position, but it is also one of the most vital. A good recruitment officer can make or break a guild.

Recruitment can be broken down into two sections:

Passive and Active Recruitment

Passive recruitment has a large amount of time invested up front, but is fairly effective long-term.  This involves having a template of of your guild’s information.

Think of your recruitment post or your template as your guild’s resumé.  It is your opportunity to sell your guild to a prospective applicant.  Your template should include relevant information including your current progression (please don’t BS your guild’s progression).  Include your raid days, information about your guild, what classes you are recruiting.  Sell your guild,  show those potential applicants what makes your guild stand out, what makes it awesome.

Here is an example recruitment post by our guild.

We emphasize that we’re one of the oldest raiding guild in Warcraft. People look for longevity,  stability and we provide that.  We share our progression rankings for this expansion,  or so far if we were still progressing.  We list our raid days,  raid times, our expectations of raiders, and what they may expect from us.

Many players will not read giant walls of text, so really sell yourselves in your title,  and in your post. If you’re not sure what to put on your own guild’s post,  look at what other guilds are doing and use parts of their posts and apply it to your guild.  It is completely fine to do so!

Use both the Official Recruitment Forums as well as your Realm Forums when posting these recruitment templates. Bookmark your forum threads and at this point all you need to do is make sure you bump your posts.  Blizzard sometimes doesn’t like this and will occasionally suspend your FORUM accounts for a few hours if you spam bumps. But every guild is doing it, multiple people from each guild bump those posts, as do people that are looking for guilds.  Once every few hours for the Recruitment Forums and once a day for your realm forums is plenty.  You need to make sure your guild is noticed.

The other website you definitely want to keep updated is: WoWprogress. 

This Wowprogress listing only has to be updated once a month and is a fantastic source for recruits. We’ll cover how to use it next week when I show people how to apply to guilds. Make sure you are using this tool!

Active Recruitment is another beast entirely. The more effort you put into recruitment, the more time, the more energy – the more successful you will be finding long term guild members.

The easiest method is searching those Recruitment Threads for a class that you are looking for.  Players will post their class, ilvl and what they are looking for. It is up to you to read each of those potential threads and see if that person is worth the time to ctrl-v your post into.

See our example above:  It’s a much smaller post, sells the potential applicant as to why they should come to you, and includes all relevant contact information.

WoWprogress again,  has a tool to help you find potential recruits for players that have  opted to be searching for a new guild.

Proraiders is also another website for potential high end heroic raiders, but is not used as often.

Trade chat is also a very common recruitment tool that many newer guilds use. I’ve never used it in my guild’s history as I’ve always found you will find a certain type of player in trade chat.

And finally one of the most effective and time consuming ways to have people apply to and join your guild is to go out and find them.

To start off I look for guild that is lower ranked than my own:

I pick a guild that raids similar times to mine and I’ll take a look at their logs:

I go through those logs,  determine who their best players are based off some log sleuthing and if they are a class I’m looking for, I turn on the charm.

Here is a chat transcript with a potential Discipline Priest Applicant.

I tried not to be overly pushy but really click with this person.  I empathized with her situation, didn’t initially push joining Death Jesters.  But if it didn’t, my plan was to plant those seeds… those seeds of making her think that in the future if she is not happy,  or her guild starts to fall apart…,  she’ll know a guild to apply to. I used my guild’s strength’s to fill in the places she was unhappy. I didn’t BS her, was completely honest and maybe one day this person will apply.

Tailor your recruiting pitch to each applicant.  It’ll take practice but you’ll be able to sense what needs to be said without being overbearing.

What did I do back in the day when we didn’t have these tools? I did random dungeons with players on the server. I chatted them up if they didn’t have a dumb name like xxLegolasxx or Babelicious and if I thought they were a good fit for the guild, I had them apply.

There are other resources to use as well, Elitist Jerks had paid for recruitment posts which I found ineffective. You can use Twitter, Facebook Groups,  and Twitch Streams to help promote your guild.

And finally think of recruiting as a numbers game. The more threads you paste your post into,  the more people you try to recruit;  the higher chance that someone will apply to your guild. The larger your potential applicant pool,  the greater the chance that you will recruit a long term, core-raider.