After having been overwhelmed with recruitment needs for a couple of weeks, I suddenly realized today that I was enjoying it. I have gotten to the point where I am familiar with every single recruitment post on the forums and websites, and instead of needing to scroll through hundreds, feeling confused and dazed, I all of a sudden see everything with such clarity.

And most importantly, I am not recruiting under dire pressure. Since I have been able to provide our guild with on average 2 possible recruits a day, and especially since it’s looking like we have decided to take a couple of them, the pressure has been much lessened. We haven’t reached our recruitment goal yet so I don’t plan to slow down, but the stress of it is gone.

This is completely different from when I recruited while being guild master and raid leader myself. Then, simply being guild master and raid leader was so much work I never had time to rest. I could not really afford to recruit on average 4 hours a day for weeks on end, getting to the point I am now where I am highly familiar with the tens of people, at any given moment, advertising that they’re looking for guilds. Therefore, in the past, I only recruited at times when there was a dire need for recruitment, and no one else would do the job. So the act of recruitment had always been coupled with enormous amounts of stress and the negative feelings associated with people leaving and forcing me to recruit to replace them (something I still can’t stand).

But now. We are not in such a dire situation that an already completely overwhelmed and burned out leader needs to further overextend themself to recruit for hours every day. On the contrary, we’re in a rather safe situation as far as our roster goes right now, and our recruitment will just make it very very safe, or make it stronger. Suddenly, I’m looking forward to the conversations I will have with potential recruits, because it’s not a big deal if they don’t pan out, and there’s always the hope they will be great. And I have a complete and detailed grasp of the situation across all the recruitment mediums we use.

As far as recruitment goes, I no longer feel like I’m drowning; I’m cruising. It feels good.