Fire Tortorella 2,653 Posted April 26, 2020 Share Posted April 26, 2020 Recruitment has gone through many phases in the VHL, but the one thing they all have in common is that at some point, leadership realized that it was more important than previously thought. The VHL has had mega drafts, normal drafts, and shallow drafts, with drafts 3 rounds deep 1.5 rounds deep, and basically 5 picks deep. What I'd like to discuss is some of the various phases the VHL has gone through with recruitment. I don't have stats or particular seasons to go back on, just my memory of being here since S25. I created my first player in S25. I was trying out sim leagues for the first time, so I didn't really try to recruit anyone that I knew right away. After a half season on the Ottawa Ice Dogs, I realized this league was kind of fun, so I went ahead and recruited @ContinentalCup036. He talked about in his media spot his thoughts on the league, but as far as actual recruitment rewards go, I don't think there were any, or they were minimal. It's possible I got maybe 2 TPE once he hit like 250 TPE or something like that. But this fits the theme of this time period of recruitment - it was very, very informal, and wasn't really pushed too hard. I found the league through a topic on HFBoards Fantasy Hockey section. I don't even remember why I was there, since I never did fantasy hockey in the first place, but I found the link that Claudio posted and joined. A little side note - I'm surprised that advertising (and I mean in the forums, not with actual adds, since those cost a ton of money) was not more successful than it was. As far as I know, I'm the only recruit to ever really come from HFBoards and stick it through their first player, and we had a topic there for years. But this is how recruitment was at the time. We had some links thrown out there, and some people were in the SHL or other sim leagues at the time and we all got exposure through word of mouth, but that was really it. At some point after this (I would guess around S30-S35ish, which I think was around original expansion) the league realized that we needed more recruitment rewards, so individual recruitment rewards were increased. I want to say it was something like 3 TPE for getting a player to 150 TPE, 5 TPE for some other milestone, and then 10 TPE for another milestone. The important thing here is that recruitment was still basically up to the individual members of the league, and there were some pretty hefty TPE rewards in place. This saw some highly motivated individuals (I mainly remember @Kendrick and @OrbitingDeath, but I'm sure there were others as well) go out and recruit well and earn a ton of TPE from it. Eventually, this led to some push back from other league members, as these two people were getting a ton of uncapped TPE. I don't remember the specifics, but eventually, the TPE rewards were nerfed slightly (I want to say to a max of like 10 TPE per recruit instead of 15-18ish?) For a bunch of reasons that were both league related and personal, most of these high recruiting members either stopped or slowed down, leading to the next recruitment phase. At some point, the idea that recruitment needed to be more centralized by the league came to be. While there was some sort of Recruitment Team/Recruitment Central group created back in 2014, I don't think it became more impactful/important until after the phase discussed above. There were multiple Recruitment Heads paid at I'm gonna guess like 2 or 4 TPE a week or something back when we had the 9 TPE cap instead of the current 12. The focus was on retainment just as much as recruitment. I want to say it was around this time that the auto-join PMs starting being sent to new members, a more focused welcoming committee was established, and more "official" positions were created. This saw an improvement in recruitment, as we started to utilize twitter, facebook, and other social media, as well as our affiliates (not the program currently in place with the EFL and PBE, but more so "you can advertise your league here and I'll advertise my league there"). Recruitment picked up for a time, but then really slowed down. I believe it was about at this point that led to the Dark Days of the VHL - contraction, and a need for change. This led to what I'll call the "current" recruitment strategy. Eventually, @Beaviss was hired as recruitment head, and he, as well as a team of others, began to change recruitment for the better. This part of history is a little more known by the members here, so I won't go into too much detail, but basically, reddit recruitment turned out to be a huge add for us, as well as recruitment from various EHM communities, and affiliate partnership programs. I'm almost at 1,000 words now, so I'll leave with my closing thoughts - I've never personally been a great recruiter, as @ContinentalCup036 is the only member I've ever recruited here, but I recognize that it takes a certain skill set to be good at it and it's a very important thing to keep the VHL going. I'm curious what will happen with recruitment next once reddit starts to dry up, since I'm sure we've been to a ton of the hockey subreddits at this point, but I trust the current leadership group to stay the course. I don't know how much of a tool Discord itself can be at recruitment (is it OK to go in other discords and advertise the league? I don't know how it would even work since THE DOWNSIDE OF DISCORD IS IF YOU'RE NOT THERE AT THE MOMENT SOMETHING IS POSTED, YOU'RE GOING TO MISS IT), but maybe we can go to the team specific forums of HFBoards and post in the off topic section of the forum, but that might be a better thing to do once traffic on the site picks back up when the NHL resumes. Kendrick and eaglesfan036 2 Link to comment https://vhlforum.com/topic/81502-vhl-recruitment-a-brief-history/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fire Tortorella 2,653 Posted April 26, 2020 Author Share Posted April 26, 2020 1,042 words 4/27-5/3 Link to comment https://vhlforum.com/topic/81502-vhl-recruitment-a-brief-history/#findComment-736985 Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotAVHLM-GM 1,858 Posted April 26, 2020 Share Posted April 26, 2020 Thanks for the mention Link to comment https://vhlforum.com/topic/81502-vhl-recruitment-a-brief-history/#findComment-736992 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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