Member Recruitment

September flew by.  The sparseness of my past posts probably insinuated how busy I have been over the past month.  Ideally I would have posted about my brother’s and my vacation in a more condensed group of posts, but posting about these experiences stretched over three weeks was a result of the limited time I had to keep up with my blog.

There are a few reasons why I had been so busy over the past month, but most of it can be attributed to the work I was dedicating to my organization.  As I previously mentioned, from August 15 to September 30, my local committee was hosting six interns to execute two different projects- one which taught Italian and German to the youth in our community, and the other which hosted environmental seminars and activities in the area.  I took a large role in managing the environmental project, and I thought that after the photo campaign, where our interns toured Prilep and Bitola to market the project and our local committee, I would have more free time to focus on other duties while the interns taught the environmental classes.  However, one of the interns majorly starting slacking, and I often had to step in to ensure that the project was not a failure.

Yet, I needed as much breathing room as I could attain because by the middle of September, my organization would begin to implement the activity that is most important to our committee’s survival and success- member recruitment.  Throughout the summer, AIESEC Prilep was run by four people- our executive board.  All of the projects that we were designing and implementing relied on our energy and time in order to execute every detail, all the way down to minutia.  Thus it was imperative that we recruit a large number of quality members for our upcoming year, so we spent a whole week and a half marketing our organization, traveling to Bitola, and holding our breaths that our tireless efforts to showcase “how beneficial AIESEC is as an organization” would result in the recruitment of the best members.

On the first day of recruitment, we hosted a Global Village, where we converted one of the classrooms into an AIESEC information center.  Accompanied by blasting music and odors of ethnic cuisines, various tables displayed the benefits and components of AIESEC while our AIESEC interns from Poland, Italy, Germany, Lithuania, and Turkey flouted their international diversity.  Even though the event was well organized, oddly it was difficult to convince many of the students at the Economics faculty to enter the room and learn about AIESEC.  We gained some success in attracting applications, but the number was far below what we had hoped, and throughout the rest of the week applications materialized at a trickling rate. 

Set up for our Global Village

Our AIESEC interns

Simultaneously, a secondary project that I am coordinating (along with my site mate, Husted) for this year (CLIPS, or Civic Leadership in Prilep Scholars) was also hosting its recruitment for new members.  Even though I had assisted or managed a few seminars last year for CLIPS, I was new to the overall organization structure of the program, but aware that the group needed to recruit a diversity of talented students.  Seeing that the group still lacked a good number of applicants, especially from Prilep’s Economic high school, I arranged with two of the project assistants impromptu information sessions at two of the high schools in town.  These efforts achieved huge success, as applications from the Economics high school increased nearly 4-fold, and overall we received a hefty number of applicants for CLIPS.

As for AIESEC’s recruitment, we were disheartened as applications continued to remain stubbornly low, and few applicants attended our Info Day to better explain the vision and purpose of AIESEC.  We were well short of our goal of recruiting 28 new members, but fate finally decided to smile on us as AIESEC Prilep received an additional six applications as the deadline for applications closed.   

While the most tentative part of the member recruitments passed, the most time-intensive part was about to begin.  For a whole week, I became busy with interviewing applicants for both CLIPS and AIESEC.  Each interview was scheduled for about thirty minutes, which means that I dedicated 22 hours of interviews over the course of 5 days.  Of course, with my other office duties, managing the environmental project with the interns, and spending some time with my host family, my day was packed.  One of my busiest days included interviewing both AIESEC and CLIPS applicants in the morning at the economics faculty, coming home to eat and help my host family roast peppers for ajvar, returning to the faculty to interview CLIPS members, returning home to roast more peppers, conducting an interview with an AIESEC applicant from Bitola by Skype, and then heading to the center to overcome a crisis with our interns’ trash fashion show.  I never thought Peace Corps would involve 12+ hour workdays!

Roasting peppers for ajvar

Domestic work with the host family

AIESEC Info Day

Looking back on those weeks, I am amazed at all that my counterparts and I were able to achieve.  We invested a lot of sweat, hope, and time into the member recruitment, and with the educational plans, tracking and evaluations, and reward and recognition program that we designed over the following week, we can say that we succeeded in building the HR process for our organization.  Never did I imagine that I would have the opportunity to design and implement a complete HR functionality within an organization before coming to Peace Corps, especially while simultaneously coordinating a handful of other projects.  Thus I look back on these weeks with pride.

September felt like a prolonged sprint, and now that I can catch my breath, I cannot believe that it is no longer summer.  The vegetables are bland, running on the trails everyday in mild weather is no longer an option, and in about a week we will meet the new PC volunteers at Field Day in Skopje. 

In a way, this Peace Corps experience feels like climbing a mountain.  At first I had no idea how to get to the top, and many of my days were spent surveying the best options.  But as I begin to climb at higher elevations, the gradient is steeper, and sometimes giving up or taking it easy means that I will simply fall off the face.  I do not think there is any Peace Corps volunteer who knows exactly how to achieve whatever the ideal situation may be during their experience.  Instead, we just become better climbers, and the challenge of climbing steeper, higher, or scarier terrain becomes more tantalizing than descending or maintaining elevation.  But once we reach a new high and stop to take a breath, the views can be astonishing.