Recruitment unpredictability

The five questions of recruitment chapter is draft ready, more or less. There are a few things I'd like to go over, but other than that it's done. Now I get to move on to this chapter on recruitment unpredictability.

Technically, I've been moved-on for a few days already. The previous version of this chapter (written years ago) was terrible, so I killed it and more or less started from scratch. But I still wasn't happy with this. At all. So just now I stepped backed and asked, "What am I trying to say here?" I found my answer and realized that the previous re-do was also garbage, so I killed that as well. So now I'll try a third time...

What is recruitment unpredictability? It's all those random and spontaneous factors that show up which can totally derail a recruitment effort: When other chapters play dirty. When a freshman suddenly has a change of heart. When parents become problems. This chapter discusses these, and then goes into ways we can try to mitigate their effects.

This may be more theoretical than the previous chapter. But it could be fun. We'll see.

Recruitment theories of Recruitment Theory

Up until now, Recruitment Theory has been very much like a manual--a description of very concrete things we can do to get new members. Chapter IV is a little different. Its origins lie in a set of essays I started writing in early 2006 called "Recruitment Theories", the first of which looked at recruiting people who are like you vs. those who aren't. The second was about the conflict between the house and the fraternity. These essays were more philosophical than instructional, and when Recruitment Theory was born I decided that they needed to go somewhere. Hence Chapter IV came to be.

I realized that those two essays sorta answered the "Who" and "What" of recruitment, so I decided to answer the other news questions too. Interesting stuff came out of it. Briefly, it looks like this:

WHO do you recruit? - Recruiting people who are like you vs. those who aren't.
For WHAT do you recruit? - Looks at the interesting conflict that arises when you have to decide between bidding someone because you need numbers, as opposed to because the candidate would be a perfect fit at your house.
WHEN do you recruit? - Obvious, but it's there anyway.
WHY do you recruit? - There's a little more to it than you think!
HOW (and WHERE) do you recruit? - Looks at a few apparent Rush paradoxes and resolves them.

I also like this chapter because it serves as a break before Part II on Rush.

And I think I'm pretty sure that "Recruitment Theory" will not be the final title of this whole thing.

Active Recruitment complete!

The chapter which includes such topics as spring recruitment, CPW, the summer, and an overview of Rush is draft ready. This is exciting, since it means the material that grew into Recruitment Theory is finally in such a shape that it fits into the whole. Phew!

Next comes some recruitment philosophy, with the "Who, What, Why, and Where/How of Recruitment".

A new spring dilemma

Revising this original section of RT has been interesting (and well needed), but writing and reading all of this stuff on Spring recruitment has led to a new question:

Is Spring recruitment necessary at MIT?

Most of this chapter is spent explaining why general year-round recruitment efforts don't work for us, and how modifying these isn't exactly the answer either. So doesn't that say something on its own? Maybe spring recruitment (what year-round becomes at MIT) just isn't worth it at the Institute after all. Hmm...

Passive Recruitment complete

Finally! The chapter I thought I finished years ago just finished its facelift and is officially draft ready. It finishes at a light 7-pages (single spaced; standard margins). Let me know if you're interested in proofreading. Unfortunately it will not be electronic draft, so you'll have to request a hard copy.

Now on to a much larger task: revising Active Recruitment. Remember that Recruitment Theory was born from its section on Spring Recruitment, so finally smoothing this out should be fun. And by fun I mean not. But you get the picture.

Passive recruitment (cont'd)

There's a lot more here than I initially thought. Originally the discussion was a little jumbled, mixing the general goal of passive recruitment (establishing a reputation, etc.) with the ideal goal (establishing a positive reputation). But I realized that not all houses may want to realize the ideal; i.e. maybe they don't want to epitomize the general fraternity values (brotherhood, leadership, scholarship, etc.) Nevertheless, such chapters should still be aware of all the passive recruitment concepts.

But that leads to something else. Fraternities don't exist in a vacuum, so what one of us does impacts everyone else. Surely that's a "global" form of passive recruitment, too?

Retention again

While rounding out Passive Recruitment I can't help but look (way) ahead to Part III on retention. When I wrote about this previously I was stumped as to what it would include. But now I think I have a better idea. Retention in this context comes in three forms:

• Retaining freshman excitement between pledging and the formal end of Rush
• Retaining freshman energy between the formal end of Rush to the formal start of pledge program
• Retaining freshman interest from the start of pledge program to its end

(Buzzwords subject to change. Maybe I can make some fun acronym out of them. No? Too corny?)

Part III will never be about the details of pledge period; from a recruitment perspective it's just a means to an end. So I don't plan on spending any time on outlining the ideal pledge period, although elements discussed could be included in one.

Another tricky thing will be generalizing this for those fraternities that don't pledge. Or maybe I'll just do a separate section on that.

I suppose what I mean by "retention" should be added to definitions, too...