Some good thoughts here. I would not forget to hit up your realm forums...if anything, a post that you are recruiting can garner some attention (it did us), as well as visiting the guild recruitment forums (ZOMG, there is a guild recruitment forum! O.O I didn't find it until a couple weeks ago, seriously) as there are people there who are even looking to transfer realms to join you!

All our recruits know that they have a 2-week trial period. This saves us the trouble of PUGging. We will put you through the ringer to see how well you play your class. We took 5 new people through Kara last week, clearing all but Nightbane (we might finish it tonight), keeping them on the time table that we run for those of us who have it on farm. And ironically, the new guildies were able to keep the pace and learn our rules pretty quickly. At the same time, they are getting gear, possibly seeing something they have never seen before, etc, which can be exciting for them (excitement + new content = good potential of staying power). We've been doing HH runs, Heroics, helping the random members with keying, etc. Yea, the officers haven't gotten much sleep in the past week, but I currently have a guild sitting at 95 members (with a little bit of housecleaning) in 7 days--and still more coming. We even have 2 Kara runs and Gruuls scheduled for this week to keep people active.

The best thing to do is be honest with interested parties. I'm PAINFULLY honest with people. If we think your DPS/spec can use improvement, a class lead will talk to you. If we don't like your attitude in general/you're spamming trade/etc, we will call you out and request that you stop. Dropping instances with guildies after you run? Yup, we're going to get you on that one too. But every recruit knows this from the beginning. They are told that they have 1 chance to screw up. They are made aware of our DKP and raid policy as soon as they sign on.

If they like what they hear, they stick with us (98% of them have so far), and some even bring their friends over! Another great way to grow.

Aside from the forums, we haven't done much other "recruitment." But you'd be amazed at the number of people who lurk the forums to see what's up. It's a big center of information for many. One of the officers could barely do his portion of Kara due to the huge number of /w he was getting about recruitment! We've just been "parking" ourselves in major cities if we know we might be busy for the evening. I will go out of my way to speak to people who want to talk--I've sat in on more conversations in vent with another officer talking to potential recruits than I ever thought I would. Usually my only role is to back up what the officer is saying, but I think that showing a potential that a GM will leave their instance channel (and all communication for that instance, aside from /p chat) to spend 20-30 minutes talking to them about their concerns says a lot.

Most of all, make sure your officers are available, all speaking with one voice on your guild needs (the majority of the officers do a review of the recruitment needs list every couple days so that we are all on the same page), and good representations of what your guild embodies. To me, that speaks volumes about your guild as a whole.

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