If you are like me, you attend a school that uses deferred recruitment as the main cycle of recruitment. My school does our main round of recruitment during the spring semester, and does a second round of informal recruitment called Continuous Open Bidding during the fall semester. Here are some of the pros and cons of doing informal recruitment in the fall.
Pros:
You don’t have to attend all the recruitment events.
The events are generally more fun Almost all informal events have food at them which means that if you aren’t talking to people then you are free to eat all of the chapter provided food and as we all know free food is the best food.
You don’t have to buy as many outfits You have to drop a lot of money during formal recruitment buying the proper outfits. During informal the dress code is much more relaxed meaning that most of the outfits are probably already in your closet.
It feels less forced The shiny veil of formal recruitment makes it harder to have real conversations with a person, but with that veil lifted, it makes it easier to get to know people.
Cons:
You are doing the same amount of work for a smaller pledge class Informal recruitment is barely less work than formal recruitment because you still have to have all the workshops to prepare.
Harder to get to deep conversations Because informal is so much more relaxed you aren’t under the pressure to have values based conversations so the conversations are much less likely to lean that way.
It is hard to cut the list down to the few you need for informal You meet so many amazing women during informal recruitment and then you are forced to only pick a few when you want to take all of the PNM’s you meet.
There is a lot of pressure to get to total For smaller chapters there is a lot of pressure to recruit a larger amount of girls in order to meet the total number of members required.
