Fall Recruitment is Now

For most of you, school is getting rolling right now. That doesn’t mean it has to be a complete drag. This is an opportunity to share with others your passion for Tau Kappa Epsilon. Whether you have been involved for one semester or four years, you can help secure its future and grow your chapter by having a good base of knowledge on how to get the best and brightest on your campus.

As Fraters, we often talk about how "Recruitment is the lifeblood of the organization," and "We have to recruit 24/7," but when it comes down to doing the work of recruitment, we often fall short. Recruiting is a hard task and sounds exhausting for those of us who have planned recruitment events before. So, here are a few tips to make recruitment a much more manageable task.

Tip #1: Cure Your Disease.

Many chapters have a nasty disease that can be hard to cure and that often prevents them from an effective recruitment season. The name of that disease: Eventitis. Eventitis is a disease that has spread to almost everywhere. It makes all the members believe that they have to spend a lot of money and time on planning a big event in order to make friends. The thought of having to put on big events every day or week is daunting. There is good news though - the cure for Eventitis is doing small activities. Men (non-Greeks) make friends by doing simple, small activities together (e.g. lunch, coffee, work out, hang out, sports, etc.). Recruit men by doing normal-people-activities and don’t put so much pressure on yourself to have big events all the time.

Tip #2: People Don’t Join Organizations.

It’s true. People don’t join organizations. People join people. Be honest, did you join a set of ideals, a calendar of activities, and a bunch of great T-shirts? Or did you join a group of people based on your relationships with one or two of the members? Most people can pinpoint the one person who recruited them into the organization. If we know this, we can focus our time on building one-on-one relationships, and not "selling the organization." People are going to join your group because of their personal relationship with you, so don’t spend your time, energy and money on cool t-shirts, barbecues, or events. Go out and make as many acquaintances and friends as possible and watch them turn into members.

Tip #3: You Can’t Recruit Who You Don’t Know.

It is a simple concept. You really can’t recruit who you don’t know. Go to class, the gym, the football game, the pep rally - anywhere you can meet some potential new members and, at the same time, spread the name of TKE. Talk with them and become their friend. If you feel like they would be a good fit and an addition to the chapter dynamics, ask them to join. If you go up to some random guy at Walmart and ask them to join TKE, they’ll say no. On the flip side, if you see a guy at Walmart who you had lunch with a few times and got to know him, he is much more likely to accept an invitation. 

With that in mind, build your recruitment plan so that your members are constantly collecting names and putting them on a Names List. For many chapters, the quality of their members is as important as the quantity of members they have. Tip #3 suggests that Quantity drives Quality. In other words, the more names you have on your names list, the more people you’ll have to choose from, and the more likely you are to get high quality members.

Let’s get our plans together now, so we can storm the campus on day one.

Adapted from an article written by Phired Up Productions, a recruitment training company. For more on recruitment, check out their site and tke.org.

Be sure to follow the latest TKE News with the RSS Feed, on Twitter or the official TKE Facebook Fan Page (Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity). Submit your news today. 

 Share  

 Tweet