2.4: Recruitment Guide
There are numerous benefits to having a team around your project – to help share the workload, keep you motivated, and improve the quality and impact of the final resource. Without a team, you may not be able to complete your project, or might take a very long time to do so. Take a look at our overview of building a team for more on why teams are important. Once you’ve worked through scoping your project, chances are you’ll see a number of different places where you could use some extra hands.
Given the need for extra hands, most teams will likely have at least some volunteers involved. Volunteers are, to put it simply, people who believe in your project and are willing to devote their time and expertise to it without much (or any) financial compensation. The fact that many volunteers will be expending time, energy, and more on your project without any payment, makes their contributions all the more valuable.
It’s also important to remember that even those who are compensated in some way, or who have a mandate in their day job to support OER (so might not be officially considered volunteers) are likely to be putting in more than they are paid to do. Many of the people involved are likely to be contributing to a project because they believe in it, and it’s important for managers to be aware of that and not take advantage. Project managers, and indeed the whole team, should recognise the value of the labour put into a project and find ways to make sure it is recognised and rewarded in a variety of ways, not just financial compensation.
Volunteers, whether officially designated as such or not, come with all sorts of wonderful skills that you might not have yourself – so recognize the value they bring, and most importantly, don’t take them for granted!
Before recruitment
Before you begin finding people to help, we recommend taking a few important steps to prepare.
Define what you need
The first step is to think about and write out the details of what you need someone to do, which might take the form of a job description. You might be looking for chapter authors, peer reviewers, or editors, but the job description helps you clearly lay out their specific duties. Try to be as precise as possible – you should list out the various tasks, expectations, and/or responsibilities of the new contributor. In so doing, you should also get a sense of the time commitment needed on the part of the contributor, include an estimated time frame for the job in the description – this is not only for you to keep track of the contributor’s workload, but also so that interested volunteers have a sense of how much time they will need to devote to the project.
Once you’ve been through this process, we suggest you preface the details of the task or job with a brief summary of your project and the work that has been done so far, then finish with information on how to volunteer or participate, and who to contact with any questions. Here’s a sample job des