Recruitment is vital to your team's growth and sustainability.

To accomplish your vision and mission you need other passionate talented students like yourself.

A little planning goes a long ways in being able to understand what your team needs from recruitment.

Empower & Delegate Through Recruitment Planning

1) Engage team in brainstorming and define the needs of recruitment plan.

Recruitment planning will allow you to engage your team in brainstorming and ideation. It will also help your team understand what specifically you need from recruitment. Do you need more computer science students to help build that app? Do you need horticulturalists to help with your community garden project? Do you need more Freshmen and Sophomores because you're mostly Seniors and Juniors?

2) Define bite-sized projects and tasks your team can focus on now

Planning will help your team break down a large complex process into smaller pieces that will motivate your team into action in the short term.

3) An ongoing planning process empowers your team to take action and delegate responsibility

Most often, people want to take action but they remain on the sidelines because they don't know what to do. Having your teams needs and plans clearly defined will help provide the structure most need to get started. It will also allow other members to be more effective managers by delegating certain tasks to other members.

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Create a Recruitment Goal and Plan Backwards

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• Plan within a 3-4 week time frame to remain tactical and relevant. Trying to create detailed plans far off into the future isn't likely the best way to spend your time.
• Create a big overall goal and then plan backwards to understand what needs to be done to accomplish that goal.
• Make your goals SMART -- specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Remember to include the main outcome in your goal -- what are you really trying to accomplish? For instance, if your goal is to give a classroom pitch in 6 classes the underlying goal or purpose of those pitches are to recruit new members. So we'd say our goal is to have 6 classroom pitches so that we may get 20 new students to signup to join our org.
• In your planning, account for some level of failure. For instance, if we want to get into 6 classes we know that many professors will either ignore our emails or will say no, so we'll have to ask as many as 12 or 18 classes to reach 6.

Manage Your Recruitment Plan in Trello

• Using Excel to plan backwards is a good tool for working through the big picture.
• A tool like Trello will help you and your team manage the details associated with all the tasks required to accomplish the goal.
• Tools like Trello and Asana are very similar (so if you learn one you can understand the other)
• Large corporations and startups use tools like Trello so learning how to confidently use these tools now will help develop your career.