Recruitment Part 2: Eve-O forum as a recruitment tool

In this part of the guide I will cover how to effectively use the Eve-O recruitment forum as a recruitment tool.

Part 1. Writing your ad
Part 2. Looking after your thread
Part 3. Proactive Searching
Part 4. Your new members


1. Writing your advert
Keep it simple, clear and to the point. Paragraphs, punctuation and spellchecking are essential. A big fat rambling blob of misspelt text will not encourage people to keep reading. If spelling and grammar are not your strong points then have someone else check the ad for you or write the advert into a word processor first, where you can use a spellchecker.

Ideas for what to include;

- Short paragraph on your corporation history and what you do in Eve.
- Your corp. goals/plans for the future.
- What you offer as a corp. and what people joining can expect from you.
- What sort of pilots you require, this could be anything from skills/experience to personality and playstyle preferences
- What you specifically don't want from your pilots.

Focus on what is most important. Too much text turns a lot of people off. Your ad just needs to grab potential member interest quickly and entice them to get in touch. The finer details can be filled in later on. So when writing your advert always keep in mind that less is more.

Make your advert positive. By this I mean focus on your strengths rather than weaknesses. Too many people fill their adverts with “we don’t have this yet… we can’t do this at the moment...”. No one wants to join something that sounds crap...

Some things can also be re-worded to sound positive, for example we currently have no EU presence could be changed to say we are very keen to create an EU presence and pilots in this time zone will receive priority consideration.

As an optional extra include an image with your advert. It could be something to compliment your playstyle, set the tone of your advert or simply just add some colour to your page with your corp. logo. However ensure all essential information goes into the ad text and not on the image alone as forum users may have their images turned off. Make sure you follow the image posting guidelines as outlined >>here<<

In order to get the appropriate people clicking on your link ensure your thread title says what your corp. does. Just writing “So&So is recruiting!” Is not the best way to guarantee accurate interest unless you already have a good reputation or are well known by your target capsuleers.


2. Looking after your thread
As you may well have noticed the Eve-O recruitment forum moves very quickly. It simply isn't enough to post your advert and then forget all about it.

You must ensure your post is bumped up to page one at least once a day. Because you will only be on page 1 for a short time you may wish to give some consideration to the time of day you do this.

Be aware that posting "bump" or similar bumping comments more than once a day will result in your thread being locked. However, if other people ask questions or add their own comments to your thread this constitutes content rather than spam and appears to be a "safer" way of bumping a thread more frequently without the risk of being locked.

Encourage your current corp. members to take turns posting in your recruitment thread with what they like about the corp. ,You could also consider making your "bump" posts more informative too by perhaps writing about what your pilots got up to last night or adding other small tid-bits of information on your corp. (perhaps add some of those finer details that didn't need to go into your main advert).

Most importantly - Don't rely on bumping alone to generate traffic to your thread because it simply isn't enough. The more proactive you are with promoting it yourself the more effective your advert will be.

If you do a lot of posting on other parts of the forums (or even other community forums elsewhere) consider linking your recruitment thread in your signature and perhaps asking your directors/officers to do the same thing.

Keep the url to your recruitment post handy in game. It can be posted into appropriate channels, eve-mailed to potential recruits and put into your corp. description.


3. Proactive Searching
As well as daily bumping and promotion of your own thread it is also very important to make a daily trip through the first few pages of the recruitment forum to look for potential recruits. Many people prefer to make their own thread when searching for a new corp. rather than trawling through the forums.

Contacting people directly puts you right in front of them and can be a very successful way of gaining appropriate interest.

When you respond to someone’s thread I would suggest sticking to the less is more approach, simply refer them to your own recruitment thread and suggest they contact you in game for a chat. If you can personalise your response in any way all the better - for example Hi MaryJane, I see you are interesting in learning about wormholes, well we do a fair bit of wormhole activity as a side venture, why not check out our full details here...

Most importantly, don't bombard the thread with a wall of text. Remember you want to grab interest, not send people to sleep. Personally I would also recommend steering away from “copy pasting” the same response into lots of threads. It will be noticed and puts a lot of people off.


And finally...
Recruiting brand new unknown pilots can often become a numbers game. Depending on what you are looking for and your corp play-style you could find yourself going through a lot of people before you find theo pilots who really "stick" and become valuable members.

Don't be afraid to boot those who are not working out (or at least raise your issues with them in an effort to resolve it, they may be having difficulties settling in that you are not aware of).

Consider setting a trial period and reviewing your new members at the end of this time. Remember it’s both a trial for you as well as them.

If you have reliable and trustworthy people in your corp. encourage them to help and assist with recruitment. A bit of delegation can help something like this to be done well but without becoming a second job.

Good luck o/


>> Introduction <<
>> Part 1 : Methods of recruiting<<
>> Part 3 : Useful links<<