trendpreneur

There are many lessons to be learnt from taking part in the running of online organisations, and MMO guilds are no exception. Having participated at leadership level in both a professional FPS clan and a world-ranked WoW guild, I’ve noticed a lot of parallels between the two and plenty of lessons that reflect real-world situations perfectly. In the ‘MMO Manager’ series I’ll be looking at some of these situations and what we can learn from these virtual teams.

Selling through Interviews (Managing Expectations)

From Saturday job to the Cambridge milk-round, I’ve attended more interviews than I can count. They’re a two-way process: not only are you trying to predict whether the candidate would suit the job, the candidate is also assessing you in return. What impression do you want to give the candidate? Do you want them to walk away thinking that you’re their perfect employer, offering the perfect job? Do you want them to be excited about joining you for your own sake, rather than motivated by salary or location?

When it comes to MMO guild recruitment, especially at higher levels, selecting players is very much akin to recruiting employees. You’re asking people to commit to a certain amount of time – usually fixed hours – in return for rewards, to perform a particular task that they have experience doing, and to maintain set standards. However, players tend to have freedom of choice to some extent. If a guild really likes a player, but hasn’t convinced the player that they would find their perfect home, the guild’s offer of a place may not be accepted. (In a way this reminds me of the university selection process!)

One tactic I’ve seen used to great extent in my current World of Warcraft guild is to sell the guild through interviews with potential recruits, especially through asking key questions that reveal the guild’s self-image and goals. What I find somewhat amusing is that these questions are sometimes misrepresentative: the guild’s image of itself doesn’t quite match up to the reality. Recruits buy into the glamour of being a top-ranked guild, and only realise that it’s more or less the same as their old one once they join and are trapped for a month — disturbingly similar to jobs’ notice periods.

People don’t react well to overt sales pitches, especially if they think you are trying to curry favour. However, by working ’sales’ points into interview questions, you get to see if your interviewee has ethics and goals in line with yours, as well as emphasising the positives about your workplace and the role on offer. An example may be to ask a programmer if she enjoys hobby projects, and what she would do if given 20% of her ‘work’ time to play around with cool stuff using the company’s resources. For a lot of hackers this aspect of a job would be very welcome, and a major selling point; by asking directly about it you get to find out what the candidate is excited about, and whether the company would gain from this employee’s ‘hobby’ efforts.