It may not be a surprise to you that I am a huge advocate of interviewing people during the decision process of whether or not to allow them to join your guild. In fact, if you’ve spent any time reading anything by me here at Sentry Totem, this is not even remotely a surprise.
The reason why I like interviewing people, even if they don’t have a microphone, is because it allows me to do three major things that I wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to do. Let’s dive in, shall we?
On Friday, I wrote a column about low-risk applicants and I completely forgot to talk about how we can currently use BattleTags and RealID to invite cross-server applicants into raids (or whatever your events are) in order to evaluate their performances.
The reason why I completely forgot this is quite simple — I absolutely do not recommend it.
At the end of an expansion, the recruitment pool is pretty much slim pickings. People aren’t applying. Those that are may be, and let’s be fair to them, woefully inexperienced or undergeared. Your guild events are suffering. Sometimes, you just need bodies to ensure that your events actually happen.
Enter the low-risk applicant.
No, this isn’t a new re-telling of the Rapunzel fairy tale. In today’s column, I’m going to focus on something that has always been a bit of a problem for me: being friends with the guildies in my guild.
It sounds a little silly, doesn’t it? A lot of people would wonder why someone is even in a guild if they’re not friends with the people in it.
Well, I was friends with my guildmates, but that was certainly one aspect of being a guild master that eluded me.
This new day-job thing I have has gotten me thinking a lot about priorities, both in general and in my own life. It seems as though I never, ever have enough time in the day for work and that I never, ever have enough time in the evening for other stuff. The other day, on my way home from work, I was trying to prioritize the things I had to do that evening and I realized that I had unconsciously “put on my guild master hat”. By that, I mean that I had slipped into my GM-mode, in which I get all business-like and want to tackle problems. I got home and had figured out what I wanted to do, in which order, and then I started in on those tasks.
One of a guild leader’s best tools is the ability to properly prioritize things, particularly in terms of end-of-expansion/start-of-expansion stuff. That’s what we’ll be looking at today.