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Sturgeon's Revelation states that "90% of everything is crap." and I find that this is generally true.
If the information I need about you isn't easily obtainable I won't go digging for it because you're probably crap anyway. I have to sort through a huge amount of clans already. I don't have time to sign up for 50 forums and send 50 sets of questions to people in PMs when 45 of those are likely to be a waste of time. I decided to help myself by helping others and post a set of tips for recruiting.
First off, here's a list of things you should always do:
- Read the potential recruit's post thoroughly. I mentioned in my post that I'm not interested in a giant clan where I don't know who half the members are. The first thing I saw in my inbox today was a PM from a 100 member clan. It went straight to the recycle bin without me even looking at their site.
- Include practical information in an easy to locate section of your website. One of the clans I was looking at this morning didn't have much information available except for a .pdf the size of a dictionary about their unnecessarily complicated rules and ranking structure. This is not something anyone cares about when they're not yet a member and it intimidates new recruits when they feel like they need a real life legal degree to understand your system. I'll provide a list of the information you should present to people further down.
- Have a way for a potential recruit to quickly and easily contact you for any questions they may have without signing up for a forum. This can be as simple as a shout box or a public channel on your VoIP, but my favorite example so far was the clan who had a link on the front page of their site to join their Ventrilo with a single click. I spent last night playing with them because they're the clan who didn't make me jump through hoops.
- Act like you're making an effort. So many PMs I get are just a "hello" and a link to their site. The clan I mentioned in the last bullet point talked about their history and goals in their PM. The PM was well written and well formatted. I didn't feel like they were just trying to rush through as many spam invitations as possible. One PM yesterday was just something like "Hi, check out _____ at www._____.com". If I wasn't a member a long time ago in another game I would have instantly assumed these guys were crap and the PM would have gone straight to the recycle bin. Even good clans can lose potential members to lazy recruiting.
- The basics of the rules. This is mostly stuff like "no racism in VoIP", but also includes any minimum activity levels, mandatory practice sessions and stuff like that.
- What days and times you're most active. It's a waste of everyone's time to get half way through the recruitment process before finding out the clan practices while you're asleep and their scrims are an hour after you leave for work.
- Minimum requirements for membership. Do you require all members to be adults? That's information a 17 year old applicant would like to have before wasting time on a clan they have no chance of being accepted to.
- What's so special about you? What makes you stand out from the other guys trying to recruit me?
- What kind of people are your members? Are you super serious try-hards who have dreams of becoming a professional team some day? Do you spend more time chatting than calling targets? Something in between? Do your members trash talk and cuss like sailors or do you have a family friendly environment? Do you roleplay or do you think that's silly?
- How is your clan run? If your hierarchy is more complicated than the real military just give a basic summary with a link to the full, extra tedious version. This section shouldn't take longer than 5 to 10 minutes to read and understand.
- How big are you? Are you a small, close knit group of friends or a massive 500 member zerg?
I'll add to this if needed so feel free to make suggestions.
Edited by Digital Ninja, 30 October 2012 - 11:32 AM.
