Recruitment and New Members

Recruiting new members for the team is a very important part of leadership, you want to ensure that you have a good number of recruits that will be a good addition to the team. Here are a couple tips to help with achieving this goal:

• Firstly, make sure that you have a flyer that can be advertised which includes the general gist of what the team does, and general interest areas to grab peoples attention. Make sure to advertise this all over the teams social media
• What really helps to spread the word is by reaching out to individual schools to advertise the recruitment in the school newsletter or similar. Luckily, we have students from many schools, so they can approach their schools directly. In addition, for recruitment 2016-17, a mentor and parent contacted various schools and set up interviews with principals to talk to them about the team and get them onboard with advertising recruitment, this approach seemed to work very well.

On the actual day of recruitment, make sure you have a good plan so that prospective members can get the feel of what we do. For example, in previous years we have started with a presentation about the team structure, what happens in meetings and build season (check the drive archive to see the previous presentations if you are interested), followed by a robot demonstration and ACFR tour, you may want to do something similar or try something new! Tip: make sure when giving presentations not to use robot jargon as it can scare some people away! This was a major problem on the first day the new members joined and so it is VERY important to keep things simple!!! It is also good if team members mingle with the prospective students as they can get a one-on-one conversation with a member about their experience rather than just the general presentations, as well as answer any questions they may have.

Some general tips about new members:

• Whilst you may want to jump right in to a project, make sure that if you are starting out with something fun, interesting and easy (again, don't want to scare away beginners) to make these recruits want to come back! The first few meetings are crucial to make sure members stick around.
• Give members a fair go at each section before they make their decision as for many members it is entirely new.
• New members often do not regularly check slack and emails until build season - try to think of a fun way to get them regularly checking these so there is constant communication within the team.
• Whilst it is a robotics team, try and have a few fun team-bonding activities to merge the rookies with the veterans.