Day six - Recruitment and what kind of members are good for a guild

One of any guilds major problems is recruitment. The thing is we found it to be kind of split into a few different problems. First off for any raiding guild is to get enough people in to your guild to have a solid raiding team. Secondly is how do you balance the different class's that you bring into the guild. Finally is how do you vet and decide who you want to keep as a member.
Well for us it took a while as an officer team to hit this problem, as we already had a good team of people raiding with us. However when we decided to expand to 25 man raiding we had to start to recruit new members. I would strongly recommend for anyone starting up a guild to set a 10 man team up first as you can (as we thankfully got left) as once you have that core of players in you can take your time to then build up to a 25 man team. This is an extremely delicate time for an expanding guild as you can well imagine as this is the point where raiders start to get rotated out and fewer raids while you build up to a 25 man run. However I digress.
For the second problem that comes with recruitment you need to know that you have enough people signing up to raid while at the same time being able to send in a balanced team. this means that you have to set a limit on how many of each class you have in the guild.
After much discussion we hit on the number of active tanks we have in the guild to be 7. taking into account rotation and days that people can and cant raid. for the same reasons we capped the amount of healers we have at between 8 and 10 healers. (NB: this also means that you should be able to take two ten man teams raiding a week as long as you have enough dps of course.) And for the dps class's we capped it at a maximum of between 3 to 5 of each class. this then more or less meant that the different class's balanced themselves out within a very short amount of time.
Finally we come to how we vet our new members and decide who to keep and who not to. Now if you run a Hardcore raiding guild this mainly boils down to how well you perform in raids and how much dps you put out and how well acquainted you are with your class. With ourselves we decided that while we want to keep steady progress we still wanted to keep a fun feel to the guild. We decided therefore that we wanted to see how new members interacted with the guild and also look at how well they fit into it as players. In order to see this we give each new member a 2 week probationary period where we don't just look at how they perform in a raid but also how they interact in guild chat, if they do random dungeons, if they are active on the website forums etc etc... At the same time so as to be able to keep guild progress moving we set a minimum gear level ( taken from the website wow-heros.com) for applicants that is a must. this enables us to take them into a raid and judge how well they are doing as we then know what numbers they should be turning out for that level of gear. However one of the most important things for us, is that they fit into the guild. There is no point in bringing in someone that is an absolutely amazing raider but has no social skills what so ever as this would only cause arguments and could end up splitting a guild apart.
At the same time I have to admit that we do prefer to have family and close friends to be within the guild as this binds people into the guild and gives more of a family social atmosphere to the guild. People show more respect to those they already know as opposed to complete strangers and we believe that this is one of the reasons we have a very high rate of keeping those we recruit into the guild.
Now the recruitment process we have devised is by no means perfect and we constantly have to keep tweaking it, but I feel that the fact wow is just months away from a new expansion and we are in the middle of summer, yet as a guild we still are able to field three 25 man runs a week with an alts run and at least one ten man run (that is generally two 10 man teams at once) within the same week, shows that we are close to the perfect recruitment policy.
As always thank you for reading and please feel free to comment and or ask any questions.