Recruiting Thoughts

[Carts60]

Hi Chaps,

I just wanted to voice a couple of questions/suggestions and thoughts surrounding recruitment of new players to see what every one else's thoughts are.

I think it would be a good idea to make the thread along the lines of the "How You Can Help With Recruitment" thread in which we have a selection of almost copy and paste posts that we can use to recruit new players.

My thoughts on this came about when I was browsing the War Thunder forums in the squadrons section. The majority of new players looking for squadrons/clans tend to get wordy messages from each clan which, in my opinion at least, is hardly an enticing invitation to join. Secondly, there are probably a core base of 10 -15 or so AOD members actively trying to recruit on the WT forums and I think a few simple changes in HOW we recruit could increase that number by making it a more simple process.

JSOC for instance tend to post the following when attempting to recruit:

JSOC is a great group that plays SB, RB, and AB. If you are interested in a well organized group who play together then this is perhaps worth your time to look to us as being the right fit for you. We are an 18+ group (we do allow 17 at times, depending on maturity). Many of us are prior military (not all--about 60%) and our group tends to follow that organization--the proper balance of fun and seriousness. If you are interested please, give us a look over by stopping by our teamspeak server, or the web site (perhaps both)....

I simply don't think that is good enough to make players want to consider joining that clan - or any other for that matter which uses a paragraph of waffle to try to attract new players. It is not only an effort for the new player to read but it is also an effort to type. In addition I think the thought of having to type something new every time to potential new recruits puts a lot of people off even trying in the first place.


I think that we should create something short, succinct and punchy which:
A) Gets to the point of who AOD are
B) Shows us to be an exciting clan to be part of
C) Is visual rather than textual
D) Requires minimal effort from AOD members to do

In our AOD thread on the WT forums, PapaPnut posts some cool photos of planes & pin-ups with some catchy slogans - we should use something like this which sums up AOD, with the links to AOD below.

That just has such a bigger impact than a load of waffle yet because they're only really posted in our own thread, the people seeing them are already probably 80%+ existing AOD members who post on the thread to keep us near the top of the page.

If we had a selection of lets say 10 different pictures, that would not only save us a lot of time having to potentially type out a message but it would also set us apart from the other clans who all do the same standard chat to prospective new members.


On a side point - I think we should have a similar selection of in-game copy and paste messages we can use to send at the start of matches.

Something along the lines of:

"If you're interested in joining an active, international and friendly community, AOD are always looking for new players. Drop me an in-game PM if you're interested"


Sorry for the long winded message here chaps. I just wanted to voice my thoughts on how I think we can both save time and effort, set ourselves apart from the competition and potentially get more of us helping on the recruiting front.

[penguin1737]

We do have a 'How you can help with Recruiting' thread, it's stickied in this forum. I don't think it would be a bad idea to add some templates in there for more messages. Talk to the people that use the WT forum about the non-waffle recruiting paragraph of pictures.

[SKY_SAMURAI]

Hi there Carts60, its a few days I have been working a little harder on the WT recruit page and I agree with you on the just copy and past ways. I have been trying to get a little more personal with the applicant, to show that I took the time to read there wants and even encourage them to join a clan in general. In brief almost all my responses have been different. This is my approach, let me know what you think..

SKY

[Carts60]

Yeah, I saw your responses Sky, which is kind of what prompted me to make the post.

You and a handful of others are going to a lot of effort to recruit (and hats off to you for the record) but it just struck me that if I was a potential applicant, I probably wouldn't read the responses of each clan if they were all a short paragraph of text - regardless of content.

I would probably look for the options which gave me clear links to their homepages/applications and had a bit of flair.

I totally appreciate the fact you're going to extra mile and actually writing something personal / specific to the OP's original post but I just have doubts as to whether the effort you're going to is paying dividends over and above a more visual alternative which is both more immediately 'impactful' and involves a lot less effort on the AOD member posting.

The long and short of it is that I think there is an alternative method to recruiting which will be less effort, more impact and hopefully this will in turn mean we can get a few more members chipping in on the recruitment front.

[SKY_SAMURAI]

I agree so for i haven't seen much pay back, but as long as I stay true to our humble clan maybe they will come. I want to add a quick link to the application forms with maybe Papa's beautiful posters. He has his with different links at the bottom with I would love to use.

[Aviation21]

There is no one way to recruit and I agree that canned responses to folks looking for a clan on the WT Forums is not very effective. The personal replies are the best. From my experience those that post on the WT Forums looking for a clan can be more challenging to recruit. Most of those folks have been in other clans and left or were removed and have some baggage.

Everyone is doing a good job and IMO we need to continue to recruit from many different angles.

Haven't checked Steam lately, there might be more potential recruits we are missing there.

[NavyAv8r]

How do you scroll pass this.

http://www.clanaod.net/forums/showthread.php?t=73275

[Carts60]

I know that thread exists but we should expand on it.

We should use the thread as a base for exemplar photos, messages, layouts etc for people to use.