First things first...

Before you even start recruiting, think about how you will look after the people when they arrive. New people often find XR quite bewildering and overwhelming! To minimise the chances they disappear as fast as they arrive, they will need a bit of extra care and attention at the start (typically for around a month). It is best this work falls to someone who is not frazzled from doing a ton of other things and typically this will be the team's integrator.

This does not mean it is the integrator's job alone to make new people feel welcome though!welcome! This is a job for the whole team.

Standard Integrator mandate

Purpose: to make sure team members are flourishing and productive and the team has members to fill its roles and support its workload.

• Managing the group account on the website, posting roles, dealing with role applications.
• Inviting new members to join the team.
• Onboarding / inducting / orienting new members into the team.
• Keeping a list of team members up-to-date.
• Requesting your group admin / tech champ adds new members to the Hub, as required.
• Checking in with team members about their fit with roles, projects and the team generally.
• Suggesting improvements to who fills roles if necessary.
• If a transformative conflict process does not resolve an issue and if in the team’s best interests, asking someone to leave the team (rare circumstances).

Different teams break this down differently (for example you might have one person handling recruitment and a different one for onboarding) but someone will need to be responsible for each of the tasks listed above. Work out who will do what ahead of time so everyone is clear about what to expect.

Not got a team Integrator?

Then this is the first role to recruit for! You may think this person would need to know your team inside out in order to welcome others but really the most important thing is for them to be friendly, empathetic and willing to learn as they go along. There are lots of resources on this toolkit to help them.

However, if you are using the volunteer website to recruit, it is important you get to know them before giving them login details to your group account since this is a position of great trust and involves handling sensitive personal data.