I have this thing for looking at recruitment posts, and this was especially relevant when I was looking for new guilds a few weeks ago. After a while you start to notice patterns and develop pet peeves. If you are in charge of the recruitment post for your guild, here are somethings you should or should not do (according to me).
Avoid saying you are recruiting all classes. To a potential recruit, this means “we are recruiting for the bench” or “this guild is falling apart and is desperate for warm bodies to cushion the inevitable collapse”. (A notable exception to the above is sites like WoWProgress, since people forget to update those regularly. I usually ignore the listed class needs if it was updated more than 2 weeks ago, and try to check the website instead.)
Make your recruitment forums on your own guild site public, or at least the post that says what specs you’re currently looking for. I don’t want to have to register on every forum for every guild I’m interested in just to see if you’re looking for a bear tank.
If you see yourself as a raiding guild, don’t brag about your server first level 25 guild or similar achievements. This means you have nothing better to brag about. It’s a pretty nice accomplishment that speaks to how many people you have playing on Fridays, and that’s about it.
List your progression and your immediate needs in the forum title. Information needs to be quickly scannable.
Similarly, when naming your recruitment thread, think about what your potential recruits are searching for. Most people will use CTRL+F, do a quick visual scan, or use the forum search tool. The things I look for are often:
- role, e.g. “tank”
- class, e.g. “druid”
- spec, e.g. “feral”
- common name, e.g “bear”
- progression, e.g. “8/13”
- whether or not the progression listed is heroic, e.g. “heroic” or “H”
Don’t brag about old achievements up front. Sure, bring up your progress in expansions of yesteryear in the body of your thread, but when I see “Light of Dawn” in your forum title I automatically assume “we think we’re awesome because we got 25 level 85s together and brute forced our way to Heroic Lich King”. It doesn’t sound as cool as you think.
List the most important information early. It’s surprising how few recruitment posts do this. Your guild history is cool and all, and I’ll read it eventually, but I don’t want to have to drudge through your story of a server first C’Thun before finding your raid times. The important information is:
- Current Progression
- Raid Times (with a real time zone, don’t say “7pm server time,” I have no clue what your server time is)
- Raid Size (10 or 25)
- Immediate Recruitment Needs
- Website or an easy way to apply
Avoid buzzwords. Whenever I see something like “progression” or “hardcore”, I’m immediately suspicious. Why would anyone put the word “progression” when they could use the much shorter “3/7 H”? My experience shows that most guilds who use buzzwords like this are trying to make themselves out to be something they’re not. I often see “hardcore” guilds that aren’t even doing heroic raids, for example. (Another interesting fact: many high end guilds label themselves as only “semi-hardcore” because they’re simply efficient and raid far fewer days than other guilds.)
This is just feral specific, but for the love of all that is holy please differentiate between feral bear/tank and feral cat/dps. Usually when someone is recruiting an unspecified feral, you can assume they’re looking for a cat. But it would be nice to know for sure.