Help again please

[Norik]

Well I finally have been promoted to an Officer rank in my guild. Unfortunately my main assignment is recruiting.
I have posted in the wow forums first thing, posted here and use the lemmings website to keep track of players looking for guilds all over.
Done the spam thing in general already even though this makes me feel dirty

What areas have you guys explored and had any success with?
And yes I am desperate here, I really want to do a great job for people I have come to call friends, and so far I feel like I'm letting them down.

[shez]

recruitment is really hard, unless your guild is top on the server.

most recruits we have are from trade spam, friends of exguildies of our current guild members, we don't poach, I know a lot of guilds do but i don't like it.

If you can keep your current members reasonably happy, they will bring friends to the guild.

[minrog]

My best advice is to start leading PUG naxx runs. Do a 10 man and a 25 man each week and fill 3 or 4 spots in the 10 man with people from /trade, 5-8 people in the 25. I went with PUG loot rules to make the time in the dungeon more attractive for people and did 2 hours / 2 nights unless we were moving very fast then I did 1 night.

In a 1 month period I had 8 people show interest in the guild with 2 of them eventually joining. Not super but we try not to bring in a whole bunch of guys at once and are filling specific spots.

One of the nights I had 5 people ask how to fill out an application. The rules we were using were Group Loot (for time reasons) with people not rolling Needs after they won an item and only rolling greed if you could equip the item. One Hunter kept Greed rolling on cloth and then rolled Need for a second item after winning the first. I kicked him from the raid and thanked him for coming along and pulled in another guy, around 25 seconds from second Need to replaced with someone else. It was within a minute of me doing this that people started asking how to join.

Try to make it as fun as possible when leading the PUGs. It's a chance to show how professional your guild is while also enjoying a few hours of killing. I told them upfront that "if you don't know the fights you will die, just die away from other people and work it out" and that I wanted high DPS from them. I did 1 tank / 2 healer / 23 DPS for most of the fights as well as all of the trash.

I never found much luck recruiting from /trade spam or the forums. Most of our members were people who have run raids or 5 mans with people in the guild and their friends/family.

[Gordiggan]

We've had alot of success by taking 6-8 guildies for 10 Ulduar and pugging the rest. We've gained about 6-7 well geared new guildies this way in the last 2 weeks.

Depending on what skill/gear level you're looking for, you can do the same with 10 naxx/os/vault and heroics.

Pugging as a recruiting method has the added benefit of being able to see the player in action

[GravityDK]

Yeah, pugging is a good technique.

[MasterDave]

I have a different experience than most, my guild can't pug for new members since we raid at odd hours and %90 of our recruits by nature have to be transfers.

So far our strategy which has worked out well enough is to have an informative post on the WoW Guild recruitment forum that's straight up and honest about what our guild is, what we're doing, who we're recruiting and all the stuff that actually matters.

Raid Times are important. How many tabs you have in the guild bank is not.

What raid slots you have open are are important. Telling people that you're a friendly casual but serious semi-hardcore guild is not.

Look at what everyone else's threads are saying, and just don't do it. Stay away from the nonsense most people try to brag about that EVERY SINGLE GUILD has. Stick to the things that people actually make their decisions about.

For me, that's always been basically focusing on if I can actually raid with them or not. Raid times, what level of gear they're looking for and what classes they're recruiting.

most recruit posts tend to fail at this sort of thing I think. I've had a decent amount of success (even though recruiting is neverending to say the least) this way by just not being yet another guild that says the same crap without saying much at all.

[Fayre]

MasterDave has very good advice there. Keep any recruitment post snappy and factual, and split it up into information people really need to know and any unique-selling-points - i.e. you raid late nights, you're working on hard-modes, you're family-friendly, or whatever. If you want to wax lyrical about the guild for a couple of pages, do that on your website and provide a link.

One more thing: never ever promise a recruit anything you can't deliver. It's the number one mistake a lot of guilds make.

[GravityDK]

I agree with Dave. In business, it's called differentiation, and it applies to WoW too. Answer "what's in it for me?" for the potential candidates.