a_Ferk's VHL Recruitment (Theme Week)

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Like many others have already stated this Theme Week, I think the issue with recruiting new users is keeping them here. As a relatively new member myself, the thing that kept me around was the community. I made some friends immediately in Saskatoon, as we have a really nice GM and AGM, and our captain is really cool. However, I think there are some things we could improve on to help improve the experience for new users.

 

The main thing for retaining members is making them feel welcome immediately, in my eyes. Whenever Saskatoon signs a new player I make sure to reach out to them, either through personal messages in VHL or through discord. When I first joined my create a player page was buzzing. I had a bunch of people commenting, and offers from several different teams. This was the moment when I knew I would stick around for a good while. I sometimes see other users with barely any welcome messages or offers, and think that could be sort of discouraging for new users. Back in March when I first joined the VHL discord, I also noticed that I would frequently be talked over and ignored by some of the other members. Although I don’t know if this was because I was a noob, or if it was just because I’m annoying.

 

One possible cause for the lack of interest in some of the new players is that there is an abundance of wingers in the VHLM. I remember that there was a warning for a large number of goalies when I first created my player, so I think that there should be some sort of warning for wingers when new users first create their player to combat this. During my player creation, wingers and centres showed up as the lowest population of players. This can be misleading though, since the needs of the VHLM and the VHL are very different. While the VHL has many good defensemen, and goalied the VHLM has a shortage.

 

On the recruitment side of things I think that the reddit recruiting will always be effective to some degree. It’s not like we’ll ever run out of users to recruit, because new members do join the hockey subreddits and we may reach members who didn’t see the previous posts. I saw some users saying that the reddit method is kind of dying, but I think that we could reduce the amount we use reddit to fight it. If we only recruit every other week on reddit and alternate some other form of recruiting it could be more effective.

 

A possible recruiting method I thought of is to use a site such as fiverr to get outside help to recruit. If you don’t know what fiverr is, it’s a website where you can hire freelance services to do pretty much anything you want them to do. Fox example, if we wanted to hire someone to make a VHL recruitment video professionally, we could do that. Heck, we could hire someone to stand on a street corner and hold up a sign.

 

I hope my suggestions can be somewhat helpful for recruiting, to help more people find this great sim league and stick around.

 

540 words, using for week ending April 26 (Doubles Week)