Team recruitment

[GeeTwo]

Here are three recent threads on recruitment, two of which actually focus on recruiting girls:

• Girls on Teams
• Recruiting Girls
• Recruitment

One of the most effective means of recruiting any minority (gender, racial, lifestyle, whatever) is to do a targeted recruitment of one charismatic or well-spoken person of that group, and encourage and support that person in recruiting more. (This is in addition to continued efforts on other fronts, of course!) Try to get a female mentor, preferably somebody who's a professional in STEM, as well, and get her to as many of your recruiting events as possible, as well as technical sessions.

We've been pretty successful recruiting girls on our team, but the retention rate is not nearly as good as for boys; we think this is partially due to a lack of female technical mentors and partially due to girls' greater likelihood of giving up an activity when the personal drama gets to be too much. We try to keep drama to a minimum in any case; we discourage dating within the team, and will rearrange work crews to give couples some space from each other in the team setting when it does occur.

[Riri700]

@GeeTwo when you say recruiting events do you mean like when we are presenting at public events? May you please explain what a recruiting event is please and if you know how I would do such a thing at other schools.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Riri700

@GeeTwo when you say recruiting events do you mean like when we are presenting at public events? May you please explain what a recruiting event is please and if you know how I would do such a thing at other schools.

Here's how you tell if you're at a recruiting event:

1) Is your team there as a team?
2) Are there potential team members there (including future--1-2 years--team members)?

If the answer to both is yes, you are definitely at a recruiting event (regardless of whether or not you're treating it as one). If the answer to either one is yes, you aren't at an official recruiting event, but recruit anyway if you think it's a good idea.

And what you'd do to get one at another school... It would depend on that school's policy on "outside" organizations recruiting on campus. If you're a district-level team, you should be able to get in a little easier at club days and the like as "district robotics club" (and ditch the "club" part of that as quickly as you reasonably can).

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Riri700

@GeeTwo when you say recruiting events do you mean like when we are presenting at public events? May you please explain what a recruiting event is please and if you know how I would do such a thing at other schools.

Originally Posted by EricH

Here's how you tell if you're at a recruiting event:

1) Is your team there as a team?
2) Are there potential team members there (including future--1-2 years--team members)?

If the answer to both is yes, you are definitely at a recruiting event (regardless of whether or not you're treating it as one). If the answer to either one is yes, you aren't at an official recruiting event, but recruit anyway if you think it's a good idea.

And what you'd do to get one at another school... It would depend on that school's policy on "outside" organizations recruiting on campus. If you're a district-level team, you should be able to get in a little easier at club days and the like as "district robotics club" (and ditch the "club" part of that as quickly as you reasonably can).

I was thinking of a recruiting event as any team event at which you expect recruiting opportunities, especially if you were doing the event specifically to generate those opportunities (most commonly demos at your feeder middle schools and eligible high schools). In our case (single-school team), it includes when we bring the t-shirt cannon to football games; we try to have at least one of each gender present and tending or driving the cannon. Eric's definition isn't phrased the same way, but it pretty much amounts to the same thing.