Recruitment headaches

R-NAT is recruiting.

It's a bloody hassle. How you conduct recruitment for WH-corps is a whole skill in its own right. You need to have a system; you don't want to spend too much time on each recruit because your recruiters only have so much time. On the other hand you don't want get all the scum in.

You know.. Thieves, inactive alts, folks only interested in making ISK, spies, etc..

It don't exactly help that our alliance are starting to get big either, now we also need to start filtering for spies... Sigh.

What I learnt from SPLU about recruits was that you could never really say in advance who was going to work out great and who would not. You needed to fly with them for a bit to really be able to answer the question if they where going to be part of the team or not.

Here's the question: Do you spend a lot of time per recruit doing extensive background checks, interviews etc, or do you get as many in as possible and set up a filtering system that works after they joined, making sure all the unwanted are kicked?

That is, should the funnel be wide at the entry (anyone can join) or at the exit (restrictive accepting applications, but low risk you 'fail' the trial period).

R-NAT is pretty well setup for the latter, to get tons of prospects into the corp, have a strict trial period and only keep the best. We have very little in terms of expensive ships, so there is almost nothing worth stealing. On top of this, you don't really get access to anything as a prospect anyhow.

We don't do recruitment like that though. We spend a lot of time on each recruit, doing API and background checks, talking, and letting them wait in pub, etc..

This might filter away some bad apples, but it also puts a lot of strain on the recruiters, and it's bound to also stop some pilots that would actually develop just fine if given a chance.

Pros and cons for switching to a "wide funnel entry" approach (pros first):

• You would get a lot more applicants, making the number of pilots listed rise quickly
• The time spent per prospect would be much lower, making initial recruitment more effective
• A wider range of pilots would be able to test us out, preconceived notions would not stop good recruits
• You could argue that trying to value someone before they got to show what they can do as a prospect in corp is a impossible task

There's a fair bit of cons too:

• There would have to be a very strict trial system, during which a prospect would be evaluated.
• There would be no problem putting a spy in the corp
• We would have to be ready to kick a lot of prospects that's inactive or just don't feel right.
• Thieves would be common thing, ships would be stolen from other recruits, making it hard to trust and promote anyone that was prospect when a theft occurs.

For a big funnel approach to work, I think you need to set up very clear rules about what's unacceptable from prospects. If the requirements to become a prospect are low, the trial must be hard. Hard and clear.

I'm not really responsible for recruitment in R-NAT, but since we are a small corp it affects everybody. Therefore, the way we do it is of concern to me indirectly.

In fact, recruitment for small corps that want to grow is a issue for every pilot in that corporation.