sometimes i despair of the way young people run student organisations. they have, or think they have, a great deal of experience (from running other student organisations in JC and secondary school, having command positions in NS, and so on) and it is true they’re pretty good at getting things done, but very few of them know how to think about organisational development and how structure relates to needs and what is or isn’t in their interest. in particular when recruiting they have a very static way of thinking about roles as vacancies: i need to have roles a,b,c,d,e (i’m sure this comes of too much time spent in student clubs: you automatically think you need a p-vp-treasurer-secretary) and i need x number of people to fill them and when i have found the people to fill the roles the process ends. they never stop to think about what their organisation is meant to achieve and what sort of roles and skills you need to bring on board to get this done most effectively and whether their selection criteria makes any sense.

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example: you are starting up a new organisation and creating a pilot program to provide a service and your leadership and team members are on the whole all amateurs with no actual experience in providing this service. naturally you will expect to have a lot of teething problems, and will need to invest a significant amount of time simply making the inevitable errors and accumulating enough experiential feedback in order to improve your operations to the point you can go into proper launch. now fresh perspective is all very well, but it is in your interest, especially at the early, developing stages of your program, to recruit one or two people who have considerable on-the-ground experience in this exact area, so that you can identify and sidestep some of the pitfalls early on. you do not wait till 6 months later to say, right, what have we learnt? because that knowledge was already there for the asking at the start; you be using your time making other kinds of interesting mistakes instead.

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another example: if you’re recruiting for a team with people playing differentiated and specified roles, say you’re outfitting an expedition to the north pole, and you need one geologist, one technical guy who operates the fancy radio equipment, one anthropologist, etc; or if you’re trying to put together a group of people who will operate *as a group*, for example, a football team, then yes, you need people who can commit for the duration because if one person drops out the balance of what you are trying to achieve can be scuttled or you will be missing a particular expertise, or something.

if however what you’re recruiting for is a *pool* of people with completely undifferentiated roles, say, ushers or typists or interpreters, and everyone has an identical role and skill set and are therefore from a deployment perspective more or less interchangeable, then it is very silly of you to put so much weight on part/full-time commitments especially when you do not yet yourself know what demand patterns are like and you don’t even operate on a roster system but deploy ad-hoc by request. ​sure, your overall numbers might matter ​somewhat to your operations, ​but your organisatio​n​ ​​has also got in-built capacity to ​absorb the impact (if any) of minor fluctuation​s​ ​in membership. in fact this is precisely why you should have a mix of full and part-time people so you have flexibility during the low and high seasons, without stretching your people at times and having idlers at others.

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example the third: if you are thinking of recruiting n people for this pool (with X being an entirely arbitrary small number) and n+1 good people showed interest, you should ask yourself if this is the type of situation where exact numbers matter. keeping numbers low sometimes has to do with not having the institutional capacity to train everyone, and that is understandable, but if we’re talking about very, very small numbers and where marginal costs of training additional people are so low, and your long term goal is to train a large pool of people, what does an arbitrary cap achieve?

(all of the above applying to a single totally ill-conceived interview i was forced to attend a few days ago.)