This year for recruitment, we wanted to change up our strategy a little bit. As the first year where we have a Vice President of Recruitment, we were given a lot more freedom to focus on recruitment efforts. We set out this recruitment season with two goals in mind: To know the prospectives better overall and to rely less on same-section members for vote night. I think both of these goals were reached this past semester.
We first set out to make the prospectives as comfortable as possible -- we wanted to know people for who they normally are, not who they are when they think they're being tested. Changes to accommodate this included rewording questions in all interviews and changing some terminology. In example, instead of asking "What do you hope to gain from KKY?" (which I think kinda reads like you're getting grilled by your significant other's parents) we ask "What about KKY interests you?" We also changed the name of our video interview to a video questionnaire purely because we didn't want people to think it was as serious as something like a job interview.
Speaking of interviews, we also added an emphasis on a recruitment event we added a few years back known as "KKY Meet and Greet." At this event, we have actives and prospectives group up and answer speed-dating style questions to get to know each other. We ask some questions just for fun ("If you had a fleet of ships, what would the name of the flag ship be?") and some questions a little more focused on the values of KKY ("What do you value about being in an ensemble?"). We added emphasis on this even this year because of all the great feedback we've received from it for the past few years, and the brothers seem to agree that it was a good recruitment event!
One other thing we changed out this year was swapping out our concert recruitment event for a movie night! The idea was that there doesn't get to be a lot of interaction with the prospectives at a concert. It felt kind of like going to the movies on a first date. Sure, you can both have a good time, but you don't know much more about each other than when we started. So why replace this with a movie? We figured if we picked a really classic movie, it would allow for some casual conversation and get the prospectives to open up for us a bit. We chose to watch The Princess Bride this year because many consider it a timeless classic that is repetitive enough and simple enough to allow for some casual conversation. Unfortunately, Movie Night had somewhat low attendance this year, probably because of the short notice with which we announced it to the ensembles. Recruitment season runs on a very tight timeline, however, so the solution to this problem might be to plan all the recruitment events far in advance. If you have any suggestions for movies to watch, please let us know!
I think we've gotten a great start on a more focused recruitment program, but there's always room for improvement! If you have thoughts or ideas, please let us know so we can continue to strive for the highest with every MEC class!
Shane McPartlin
Vice President of Recruitment, 2017-2018
