Posted by Vice Admiral Thomas (TECH) in Personnel Department Report - June 2019

Posted by Fleet Captain Adam W. (Former Ruler of the Club) in Personnel Department Report - June 2019

Posted by Commodore Cale Reilly (STF Surgeon General) in Personnel Department Report - June 2019
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Personnel Department Report - June 2019

Important Note: Given the small sample size to work with, these stats may not carry much meaning. Comments about this low numbers are at the end of the report.

Placements overall

There were 3 applications processed in the month of June.

Academy vs Non-Academy
= Requests =
1 (33%) Academy
2 (67%) Main Fleet
0 (0%) Abramsverse

= Placements =
1 (33%) Academy
2 (67%) Main Fleet
0 (0%) Abramsverse
(Everyone was placed in the Academy who requested the Academy.)

Placement Statistics

= Posting Speed Requested=
0 (0%) Infrequent
1 (33%) Slow
0 (33%) Average
1 (0%) Regular
1 (33%) Frequent

=Posting speed placed=
1 (33%) Slow
2 (67%) Medium

Comments: The club currently has no fast ships that accept new members.

= How they found us =
Web search engines: 1
Referrals: 1
Did not say or provide details: 1

Departments
= First choice preferences for departments =
Engineering: 2 (67%)
Medical: 0 (0%)
Security: 0 (0%)
Science: 1 (33%)

= Department Placed in =
Engineering: 1 (33%)
Medical: 0 (0%)
Security: 1 (33%)
Science: 1 (33%)

Comments: One cadet had to be placed in their second choice of departments due to DH for the first choice being absent on both Academy ships.

Processing Times

Average Processing Time: 10.5 hours
3 applications (100%) processed under 24 hours
0 applications (0%) processed between 24 and 48 hours
0 applications (0%) processed between 48 and 72 hours
0 applications (0%) processed over 72 hours

Member Tracking
(As of July 7, 2019)

=April 2019=

Academy placements: 4
Active: 1 (25%)
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (25%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 2 (50%)

Comments: Since the last report, the two AWOL cadets who were still rostered are now no longer rostered.

Non-Academy placements: 2
Active: 0
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (50%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 1 (50%)

Comments: No changes since the last report.

Abramsverse placements: 1
Active: 0
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (100%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Comments: No changes since last month’s report.

=May 2019=

Academy placements: 2
Active: 1 (50%)
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (50%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Comments: Since last month’s report, one of the cadets who hadn’t posted is now active.

Non-Academy placements: 0

Abramsverse placements: 2
Active: 0
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (50%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 1 (50%)

Comments: Since the last report, one of the AWOL JOs who was rostered has been removed from the roster.

=June 2019=

Academy placements: 1
Active: 0
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (100%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Non-Academy placements: 2
Active: 0
Rostered, but AWOL: 1 (50%)
Never posted: 1 (50%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Abramsverse placements: 0
Active: 0
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (100%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Open items from last report

MOTD: No new updates

Implementing PDept’s work into Exodus: No new updates.

Recommendations page: Pending TECH availability (may be delayed until next term).

New Member Resource Taskforce: The taskforce has started their reviews.

Placement policy review: This will most likely be an item for the second-half of the term, although I may put in on hold until our placement numbers increase. There’s not much point into reviewing our placement policies if we’re not engaging the policy that much.

Low placement numbers. In my last report, I commented about the low placement numbers in May, and I said I would monitor to see if it was an anomaly or a trend. Well, in May we had four placements, and in June we went down to three.

For those interested, using all of the reports I have filed since becoming the Personnel Director at the start of August 2018, I have complied the following graph for the overall trend in placement numbers. The graph can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N254W6SV4H7kPx890ggbZMapv3B_ksxwgyCqMR-IZW8/edit?usp=sharing. I would caution that this past winter saw an unusual spike in placements due to the spambot referral problem we were having at the time, with most of those placements not sticking around. But even without that spike form the past winter, the trend appears to be there.

Even without looking at the trend, I have to say that three or four placements a month is not sustainable. New placements is one pillar of our membership sustainability, the other pillar being retention. Neither work on their own. As Personnel Director, I am noticing some issues with our ability to sustain all of our RPG capability. We need to turn these numbers around, and soon. Unfortunately, the PDept’s role is more in processing and retention - we don’t have large role in the recruitment/referral aspect, and that’s where we have to build up our strength right now. I am open to suggestions of what can be done.

To be clear, the current trend –cannot – turn into the status quo.

Academy placements: I believe the Academy is looking at the issue of placements and the Academy ships, and I’ll save my comments about that elsewhere as part of the now-Academy discussion.

Comments:

Other than the open items discussed above, nothing new to report.

Daniel Lerner, Personnel Director

Even without looking at the trend, I have to say that three or four placements a month is not sustainable. New placements is one pillar of our membership sustainability, the other pillar being retention. Neither work on their own. As Personnel Director, I am noticing some issues with our ability to sustain all of our RPG capability. We need to turn these numbers around, and soon. Unfortunately, the PDept’s role is more in processing and retention - we don’t have large role in the recruitment/referral aspect, and that’s where we have to build up our strength right now. I am open to suggestions of what can be done.

Hi Daniel,

You alude here to some other body being responsible, which I assume you mean to be the CMM. Can you share here what your relationship with the current CMM staff (there are multiple staff I think, which is weird to me) is like? Do the PDept and CMM currently have any communications or working relationship? I am curious as to how the CMM is coordinating its internal relationships, and it seems to me that PDept would be a natural one.

Thanks,
-Thomas

I absolutely know I’m going to regret giving in to the urge to post in command…

The current CMM staff (Krys and I, with Steve Siegl and Kate O’Neill handling the newsletter) have an excellent relationship with the PDept. I regularly speak to all members of the department and we have had a large number of productive conversations.

Given the recent commentary concerning the CMM that Krys hasn’t been able to fully address because of her LOA, I will point out that Krys and I are always willing, eager, and able (where available) to talk about our activities and ideas.

Krys’ focus has been on internal marketing to enhance the player experience with the book club, infotainment posts, writing guides and such. My experience is with digital marketing, social media management and search engine optimization (SEO). Krys and I have suggested a great many things that we would like to do to boost our online profile among both the larger roleplaying community and general star trek forums. We have also put forward some ideas to optimize the site for Google in particular, boosting our ranking to enhance clickthrough. In particular, we’ve expressed a number of ideas to use deep linking, latent semantic indexing techniques, keyword density, and backlinking to boost our referral traffic.

Some of these strategies are more realistic than others, eg referral traffic, and keyword usage. I am skeptical that LSI is a worthwhile maneuver for reasons that don’t really enter this discussion. Regardless, some of what you describe here would require TECH’s assistance - outfitting the site’s technology is not within CMM’s scope, though I can see where it would be a natural partnership (and this is outlined in the CMM bylaw as well). The biggest recruitment strategy for STF has been and likely will always be word of mouth from our own people going out into conventions/other events to spread the Gospel of STF. When it comes to a club as niche as this, WOM will significantly beat SEO (in my judgment). All of that leads me to…

I have privately explained some of our more recent activity (or lack thereof), and in the interests of not misrepresenting the CMM, I will point out that support has not been what it could be for our recruitment and profile-boosting plans - certainly not what we would like it to be. We would certainly welcome input from the membership at large as to what they would like our direction to be, in terms of our recruitment plans, and encourage other government departments to weigh in with their own thoughts. Our inboxes and DM’s are always open.

Andy
ACMM
<SNIP - not because I disagree or am not interested, but because I want to dig into Andy's response a bit.>

I have privately explained some of our more recent activity (or lack thereof), and in the interests of not misrepresenting the CMM, I will point out that support has not been what it could be for our recruitment and profile-boosting plans - certainly not what we would like it to be.

Can you expand on this, in particular? The CMM reports to - and only to - the President. Is this indicating to me that the President has directed the CMM to disengage from direct recruitment of members? The revision of MAC -> CMM last year shifted the position in focus to absorb many of the internal events that had previously no real point of contact, but it didn’t disabuse the CMM of recruitment completely. In fact, one of the core requirements of the position continues to be: “Coordinate with outside resources to host events and/or represent STF” which seems to be what was recently discussed as has not happened. I believe strongly in an “if you build it, they will come” approach to communities, but it doesn’t very well work if we have no points of contact or outside engagement.

This may be getting away from the PDept report and might be better suited as a follow up to the CMM report which I’m sure is upcoming, as the last one I can find is from January 19.

Thanks,
-Thomas

One more thing I’m curious about. This discussion caused me to check the Ten Forward board and I see there’s a couple of posts there worth checking out from the past couple days that I didn’t know about. Are there plans to improve how we’re communicating to the membership about our engagement efforts? I noticed there hasn’t been an admin post on our Facebook page since May 25th. Are we planning on increasing our social media presence? I know people have been drawn to start an account because of our social media presence before when we’ve been active.

Adam