HR Blog #3 - staff position pls?

A question I routinely get from players is how staff are selected, and if they can get a staff position. I wrote a very nice guide in the Help & Support section about how staff are selected and what the process is, but figured it would be best to go into a bit more detail about why we have stuck to the same system we have done for years now. So with that being said, let's get into it shall we?

What is the procedure?

Since the community's inception in 2015, we've always relied on the same system that we use today, this being how administrators are able to "recommend" a player for staff, then other administrators also vote as to whether they find the candidate suitable for the position or not. If the vote is successful, then great! A mentor is assigned to that person and they're promoted to trial mod. If not, feedback may be shared at HR's discretion with the candidate and hopefully they'll stand a better chance when they're next raised as a potential candidate.

Why do we use this system?

Seeing how administrators have to interact with our players on a pretty much daily basis (across forums, Discord and in-game), they should know our players quite well. Of course, we can't expect everyone on our admin team to know every player that joins our community - after all, over 46 thousand people have joined our servers since they've went live, that's a lot of people! Where an administrator is unable to form an opinion, they're able to "abstain" from voting whilst they try to gain an opinion, if they're unable to do this, they may be asked by HR to choose either to vote in support of the candidate, or vote against the candidate dependent on how tight the vote is.

Why do we continue to use this system?

This system has presented very few, if any issues for us over the years, and well, there's no need to fix what isn't broken. This system has been used to onboard/progress all current staff on the team (amongst either LL or pre-split) and has reliably worked for us since we've implemented it.

Would we consider allowing staff applications?

This is a difficult question to answer. There's many advantages and disadvantages to using a system like that, so let's quickly cover some.

Advantages:

• Those who would like the position can easily make themselves known, instead of hoping that an administrator picks up on them.
• It could possibly allow us to onboard more staff.
• Less paperwork for the admin team.

Disadvantages:

• It's very easy to make yourself look good on paper - people may not be as genuine as they make out.
• It may lead to a decrease in staff quality, as the bar for entering the staff team could be lowered due to this.
• A candidate may be able to persuade others to vote in their favour, when they should be solely relying on the opinions of others rather than trying to sway it in their favour. Keeping the process blind to the candidate would overcome this.

And those are just a few off the top of my head. Would we be willing to consider it? Maybe, who knows? Personally I stand somewhere in the middle. I see the advantages to it, but the disadvantages put me off. If the admin team wishes to change this, of course this will be discussed then but until that time comes, we believe we have a fair system that works well for all parties involved.

To conclude...

Do we want more staff? Yes, definitely. We're always on the lookout for new members of staff that might be able to join us and make a difference, but we would expect these candidates to prove themselves to us before a vote is made. If you'd like staff, chuck our tags on, try to be helpful to others, keep your record in check (after all, how can you be expected to enforce the rules if you break them yourself?) and keep a cool head, if you're lucky then you might just find yourself on top of a roof being offered the position!

We'd love to welcome more people onto the staff team, but we (or so I'd like to think!) have a high expectation of our staff and the candidates that we consider for staff. Whilst this blog post should hopefully help to clear up some questions and concerns, you can find a bit more detail on our staff process in the thread I posted a while back. If you've got any questions, you're more than welcome to ask either myself or Overlewd and we'd be happy to try and answer them.

Until next time!