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[Misan]

I've been looking to start up recruiting now for a couple weeks (damn you RL!) and realized I hadn't actually considered the interview structure yet. My own personal experience as a recruiter had no IC elements to it at all, so the thinking this up is a little harder than I had thought.

First off, for anyone with experience here, do you find IC interviews to be useful? Are they enjoyable? How much (or what parts) of the interview process do you think can remain entirely IC? Common pitfalls to avoid when conducting the interviews? I'm also curious to hear opinions about the medium they are conducted over, in-person or over a comms channel of some form.

Do you follow a strict template of questions to ask the candidate or do you to prefer to improvise a bit? If there are template questions, what ones tend to get the most interesting and useful responses? How long does the typical interview take?

I'm sure there are more questions I could come up with. But I'll start with those.

My own initial theories about the structure for my own corp's recruiting are as follows:

• OOC information can be left to the text application text prior to the interview.
• Some basic 'template' style questions should be included, to keep the interview on track, but the interview should be mostly improvised based on the applicant's responses and the flow of conversation.
• Hopefully it shouldn't take more than an hour, though I suspect this is overly optimistic.
• For my own corp conducting an interview in a physical setting seems more appropriate.

I also suspect some of the policies governing recruitment procedures are heavily dependent on the size of the organization. As I'm doing this as an individual I may be able to more readily modify or adapt the process, while groups with organized teams of recruiters have a much more concrete set of processes and procedures which take time to officially change.

Anyway, looking forward to input on this topic, should turn out to be quite enlightening.

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

Misan doesn't put out, but you should still join her corp. 'Cause I said so.

[Ulphus]

I've run job interviews in the real world, and I've been a recruiter in a couple of Eve Corps.

First off, for anyone with experience here, do you find IC interviews to be useful? Are they enjoyable? How much (or what parts) of the interview process do you think can remain entirely IC? Common pitfalls to avoid when conducting the interviews? I'm also curious to hear opinions about the medium they are conducted over, in-person or over a comms channel of some form.

I do IC interviews, because ReAw is by default IC. I wouldn't hire someone IRL without talking to them, so I won't do that IC. I usually have two chat windows open, one for IC and one for OOC, since there are some questions you can't ask IC. (e.g. Do you have any alts in corps that are red to us?)

I think they're useful for telling whether this player can RP. Often they'll switch between IC and OOC in the same sentence, which is an indicator that they're not going to fit in ReAw. And they're useful for getting an idea of their background as my character would know it, and being able to refer to that in Corp chat later and point them in the right direction.

Occasionally, I do turn down people who might be perfectly fine corpies because their initial IC interview sucks so badly. Them's the breaks when you RP.

Do you follow a strict template of questions to ask the candidate or do you to prefer to improvise a bit? If there are template questions, what ones tend to get the most interesting and useful responses? How long does the typical interview take?

I have a note with a bunch of sample questions. I don't usually ask all of them.

Usually if I ask the "Give me an example of a time when you had a conflict with a superior, and what you did to try to resolve that" queston it means that I'm enjoying RPing with the character, and the interview is going well.

Some people have this deer-in-the-headlights reaction which suggests they've never encountered a job interview in the real world. I try to be nice to them.

Fundamentally, you can teach most people enough to be useful. The thing I'm looking for in an interview is whether this person will fit into the corp culture. Do they want compatible things? Are they a dick? How much hand-holding will they need?

Important questions:
What do they know about your corp already? - are they applying because they saw your name in local, but otherwise have no clue what your corp is about? Are they applying because they like what you're doing?

What do they want out of a Corp? Are they looking for someone to defend them while they do lowsec mining? Do they just want to have friends to hunt mission runners? Do they want someone to teach them the ropes of Eve and help them make isk. Do they want someone to talk to on Vent when they're bored?

What do they think they can contribute? Less important, but it shows they've been thinking about it if they give a good answer.

What kind of structure do they want in a corp? Do they want to be told when to undock and who to shoot and what missions to run? Or are they happy being left to their own devices all the time? Usually, it's somewhere in between, but different corps have different levels of organisation, and this is mostly to try to determine if their expectations and your corps are compatible.

Why do you want to fight for the Republic? this question mostly gives me an idea how well developed their character is, regarding motivations and internal philosophy and suchlike. Replace this with some question about your corps philosophy and direction. A crap answer can indicate a lack of depth to their RP, or perhaps that the character is not really suited to your corp, either of which is a bad sign.

You know we're in wars a lot? Are you happy with that? It's a bit mean taking total carebears and throwing them into that situation if they're not ready.


OOC questions include
You know we're an RP corp right? How much RP have you done before? Some people just fail at the RP, and if they're a nice person, it's much easier to turn them down than it is to boot them later.
What Timezone are you on? I like to know when they'll be around so I can point them at the right people later if they join.

Interviews usually take around an hour, but can take longer if they're slow typers, or ask complicated questions. I enjoy some of them a lot - usually characters we end up hiring, but others are a bit painful. In some ways, that level of pain is a good indicator as to whether they'll fit in.

I've been lucky in recruiting for established corps that didn't feel the need to hire anyone that applied, so I'm not sure if it's better to hire everyone for a small corp, or to be more choosy.

[Misan]

Thanks Ulph, appreciate the in-depth response. The issue of recruitment volume is something separate from this topic. But from what I've gathered from various people it seemed to always suggest volume of recruits was important at the beginning. Speaking for my own corp, I'm in a bit of a unique situation as I already have a alliance behind me for support, which makes numbers less necessary for achieving things in space. So I can probably be much more picky about my own recruits due to this, which considering I'm probably going to offer to do some intense one on one training and mentoring is probably a good thing anyway.

My general feeling on that though is that quality is better over quantity, but often times corporate goals need some critical mass to be achieved realistically. It depends a lot the goals or aims that the corp is looking at, which may be a good argument for smaller scale objectives first while you build up a member base.

With interviews I've found that even OOC ones have the same issues, some can be highly enjoyable while others are a slog to get to the end. The percentage that fall into the latter category are probably higher for IC in the end, but I'm hoping that will be worth it in the end.

Depending on the number of responses to the original question, it may be beneficial to turn this thread towards a discussion of corporate recruiting in general. In order to avoid spreading related information out between too many threads. Thoughts on that?

[Mizhara]

Misan doesn't put out, but you should still join her corp. 'Cause I said so.

Says who?

*tongue in cheek*