Too many sisters during recruitment?
 

Hi! I'm from a chapter that used to be pretty small, but we have grown a lot over the past several years, and now we have a problem we have never had before. There are too many sisters during recruitment! I am on the recruitment committee and we are having trouble figuring out where to put the 'extra' sisters. We don't have a house, so there are no spare rooms where they could hang out, and it doesn't seem fair to make some sisters show up to recruitment and let others off the hook. We are thinking it could end up being several dozen sisters who do not need to recruit. How do other chapters deal with this issue? We don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or divide the chapter in any way. (And I know some chapters let their seniors not recruit, but some of our seniors are our best recruiters and we really want them there.)

You set up a rotation schedule so that every sister is there at some point. If you have 100 members but only need 40 at any given time, then just number from 1-40 over and over and there you are. Of course, certain officers have to be there all the time so you pull them out of the rotation. Bottom line is that no one gets a pass and hopefully everyone would be on the floor the same amount of time - just not all at the same time. Many places have limitations on how many can be on the floor at any given time - sometimes due to fire marshall regulations. This is how we've always done it. The ones not recruiting can be doing other chores - getting things ready for the next party (food, handouts, etc) or for the next day or Membership selection after the parties. There are all sorts of things the ones who are sitting out any given round can do.

My chapter ran into this problem this past year as well, as Panhellenic set a max number of girls that could be on the floor recruiting based on the smallest chapter, and since we were the largest at the time we fell way over that. We have sisters who are involved with matching PNMs to active sisters to talk, setting up and taking down decorations, and a membership selection committee so all those pull some girls off active duty, but ultimately some sisters were just told they had a night off for recruitment. I like Titchou's idea of rotating girls in and out during the night so no one gets the entire night off, too.

Rotating is the fairest way to go. Everyone gets to meet PNMs at some point.

I'd give this some serious thought. While your seniors may be great recruiters, your sophomores are the ones who are going to be Big Sisters to the new class, will be taking over the officer roles soon, etc. They will also be around the most, need to learn how to be the best recruiters, etc. They should be the most involved in recruiting. The last thing you want is for a PNM to join your chapter because the seniors are so awesome, then drop out a few weeks later because she realizes everyone she knows well is graduating soon.

I had never really thought about this, but this very thing affected my chapter. Those who were seniors my freshman year were outstanding recruiters, but they were gone by my sophomore year, and none of the remaining sisters had learned to be great recruiters. The chapter dropped to, I think, nine members before things turned around a few years after I left. Our retention was excellent, and our sisterhood strong, but rush always left us way behind. I'd strongly recommend pairing your sophomores up with your strong-rushing seniors, and letting them know this is critical to their learning process.

Our chapter has "bump groups" in the earlier rounds. At each party some of the bump groups are rotated out and have an opportunity to study (we have deferred rush) or eat. We also rotate out some of the girls during the later rounds for the same reasons.

I agree with DGTess about pairing sophomores with seniors, or maybe having the seniors be the initial greeters to warm up the PNMs and handing thes off to the sophomores.

If this was an open bid party in April - yeah, if you don't need them, skipping the seniors isn't a big deal. But formal rush in August? The seniors are going to be there for a whole year. Why make them feel disenfranchised sooner than is necessary? If a girl honestly drops because of something that is 9 months away, she has other issues.

That's a bit of an exaggeration on my part, and obviously I don't know the size of the OP's chapter, but in a large chapter, you really interact most with your class and the ones immediately before/after you.

There are a variety of ways to skin this cat. There are a lot of tasks that need to happen outside of the parties, both by time and location.

Me personally, I'd put the girls who are most enthusiastic about rushing (accounting for plenty of sophomores for the above mentioned reasons) and delegate out the back office stuff to the seniors and the girls who hate it and/or suck at rushing. Everyone has a role to play, but not necessarily on the rush floor.

Please don't make any member feel that you consider her "unworthy" of approaching the PNM's.