What is Your Team's Application Process?

[AmiableVariable]

We are a similar sized team to the OP (somewhere around 36 on our competition team this year)

As our application process currently stands, there are two parts: club season and competition season. Club season is open application, so anyone can come to learn or get an idea of how the team runs; there's only a few forms, and it runs from the beginning of the school year to Christmas Break.

At the beginning of club season, we start keeping track of hours: to apply to the competition team, one has to contribute a minimum of 40 hours during the club season (at least 10 of which need to be outreach). If we aren't productive (learning or helping), those hours do not count, and can be removed from the log. There's then a formal written application to the competition team.

Once on the competition team, we require a minimum of 80 hours during the build season to attend the competitions, judged by the same criteria as during the club season, and there's benchmarks within the season that need to be met to stay on the team.

People that aren't super interested tend to leave during club season

[avanboekel]

Keep in mind there are alternatives to turning kids away. Is starting a second team an option? You can ask your FSM for help getting a second team started. What about using FTC or VEX as a feeder program for the FRC team? You can work alongside them to do design, and programming training. Another alternative is a STEM club that would work alongside the FRC team to put on science fairs, and do other STEM related activities in the community.

[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

Originally Posted by sergioCorral842

"Do you want to join?"
"Yes"
"Ok"

ctrl+c , ctrl+v

[Lij2015]

Originally Posted by avanboekel

Keep in mind there are alternatives to turning kids away. Is starting a second team an option? You can ask your FSM for help getting a second team started. What about using FTC or VEX as a feeder program for the FRC team? You can work alongside them to do design, and programming training. Another alternative is a STEM club that would work alongside the FRC team to put on science fairs, and do other STEM related activities in the community.

While I love the idea of it, without anymore mentors as we currently have no teachers involved with it this is out of the question without sacrificing the frc team.
However the responses here have been incredibly helpful as we move forward!

[runneals]

We are looking at doing it this year as well to get our team down to ~25 members. Being a 4-H based team (and having a long history with 4-H), this is kind of a hard thing for me to do as a mentor as I believe this is a form of discriminating students against joining, especially considering we only have 1 FTC team in the county freely available to join and our members mentor like 5 FLL teams.
My question for those who have implemented the process, how do you evaluate/rank/select the applications in an unbiased way? I've been thinking about having our captain/co-captain create a "member" number that we can use to prevent names from being on the forms and on the outreach hours/shop hours spreadsheets. Is this a good way to evaluate applications? Additionally, I'm planning on putting our application & evaluation/ranking/selection criteria up on our website as well to be transparent about it.
If we do interviews, I really like the idea of entrance/application interviews and then for veteran members doing performance interviews.

-David

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by runneals

My question for those who have implemented the process, how do you evaluate/rank/select the applications in an unbiased way? I've been thinking about having our captain/co-captain create a "member" number that we can use to prevent names from being on the forms and on the outreach hours/shop hours spreadsheets. Is this a good way to evaluate applications? Additionally, I'm planning on putting our application & evaluation/ranking/selection criteria up on our website as well to be transparent about it.
If we do interviews, I really like the idea of entrance/application interviews and then for veteran members doing performance interviews.

Member numbers won't really help, unless you find a way to do the process in a way that does not allow the evaluators to know whom they are evaluating. As attitude is more important than aptitude for us, our evaluation involves reading body language and listening to tension in the voice, so there will certainly be enough info for the evaluators to identify familiar individuals. (I regularly identify individuals out of sight by voice. I have even ID'd people based on a sneeze.) We do, however, have different people working each station, so that one or two artificially high or low votes for an individual are unlikely to have a major impact on who is selected. Last year, we did cuts based not on a pre-determined number of students, but on "natural breaks" in the scores, and that is also the intention this year. The important thing is to have each challenged judged consistently (preferably only one or two judges), but to have the different tasks judged by different people to dilute any favoritism.

Having done a bit of judging at FLL tournaments, there is definitely no effort to "anonymize" the numbers. The numbers are used to help sort out those who are worth considering for each award; the individual selections are often based on back-and-forth witness and discussions among the judges. Tryout selection is similar; marginal scores will be adjusted up or down a bit based on what the judges observed. And oh, yes, I have done the same thing when I have made or influenced hiring decisions, both at work and for my church. In the case of FRC, it's also necessary to remember that

Originally Posted by JamesCH95

sometimes the team needs the student, and other times the student needs the team.

However, if you take on a "project member", make sure that you don't take on more than your mentors and coaches can handle while still keeping the team moving along well.

[JustinCAD]

We let all members that sign-up join, which this year was around 18 members. Usually, the members that are actually interested in FIRST stay into it. The ones that aren't usually leave after a month or two (from what I'm aware of).

As stated, our team doesn't have a problem with space. We have a large classroom for Programming/CAD, and a Build Room that is the size of a regular High School Workshop for Build/Electrical. Fitting roughly 30 - 40 people in these two rooms aren't that much of a problem.

I wouldn't suggest limiting people that would like to join, but some ideas are:
- Limiting members due to grades.
- Limiting members due to what they want to do (For example, if they want to do CAD, but there were too many CAD members, they wouldn't be accepted/have to switch to a separate team.)

[meg]

On 900 at the beginning of the year we have 70-100 students show up. By the end of competition season it was high 30s.

We don't have any application process (for general students, Leadership does have some), but we do have some strict hour/time requirements.

Last year, it was 1 meeting per week (we met twice a week) during pre-season. This eliminated quite a few of the students off the bat. Then we had a minimum 6 hours per week during build season. This eliminated some more but we found that we were still getting students who used it as a social club and didn't pitch in while in the lab.

This year, we've increased the build season requirements to 6 hours for freshman, 8 for sophomores, and 10 for juniors and seniors.

All of these requirements are communicated in our interest meeting, as well as in our team handbook . Already, we've seen more up front commitment from some students than we had seen in the past.

[aryker]

You can view our team's application here. This application is typically due by the third pre-season meeting, and those who don't turn it in on time are not permitted to join. In addition, we require our students to raise $150 in sponsorship money from local businesses by early December in order to stay on the team. We typically have ~120 people show up to our call-out meeting, and end up with ~100 left by the time sponsorship money is due. During build season, we typically see ~40-60 students per meeting.

[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

We're trying a new way of recruiting;

we have a new training camp, where students can try whatever sub team they want.
After the camp, they have to prepare a CV-like paper, and pass an interview with our mentors. They have to say what they'd bring to the team, how much they want to participate and why we should *hire* them.
We're trying this to simulate a real life situation, and keeping away those students who come once a month!

[allgoodthehood]

We make a lot of various recruiting videos, posters, and we present in freshman science classes every year. We then have a very simple application process and from there we have interviews. Our application process is very simple but kind of selective. If you would like to see our application just shoot me a pm and I'll be more than happy to share it with you