Building your project team is one of the most crucial parts of running a successful project.
The following are a few steps that your team can take to help put together the best team possible.
Step 1: Understand What Skills You Need
Prior to recruiting, understand the skillsets required for your particular project.
- Example: if your project deals with water quality issues, perhaps it could be useful to recruit geography and environmental science students
- Example: if your project is focused on the creation of a physical product, you may consider recruiting engineers
Successful Enactus teams build truly multidisciplinary teams that are able to tackle complex problems in a truly innovative way.
Step 2: Cast a Wide Net
While it is important to eventually be focused, your team should first start recruitment by letting as many students as possible know about joining your project.
- Send out blasts through school e-mail listservs if possible
- Engage in recruitment through classroom presentations and various club days
- Do you own “Enactus Day” with each project having it’s own booth
Do whatever you need to do to get the word out about joining Enactus and your project – let people know it’s going to be awesome!
Step 3: Filter
Now that people are excited, ask everyone interested to submit a resume and set up coffee or beer meetings with qualified candidates.
- Get to know them and their passions and see if they would be a good fit on your team
- Sell them on a particular project and why it would appeal to their interests
- If the person doesn’t seem like a great fit for one particular project, make sure to recommend that they get involved with another initiative.
Enactus should have something for everyone!
Step 4: Project Orientation Meeting
- Invite everyone who wants to join to an orientation meeting to introduce everyone to each other and to the project in more detail.
- You should have an idea of how you’d like the project team to be organized (i.e. what roles and positions you’ll need). If your team has a Project Manager already, please introduce him or her. If not, tell everyone that you will be accepting leadership applications for the project.
- When choosing leadership positions, try to get a diverse range of faculties represented.
- In addition, if your project has a multidisciplinary team, try holding the meeting in a neutral, easily accessible location.
If you follow these simple steps, you should be able to build your project team fairly effectively.
Keep in mind that this is only the beginning – you will need to devise strategies to utilize your members and retain them.