Our guild used to do face to face In character interviews. With an office and a contract and everything. I loved doing them. My guild leader loved not doing them, leaving them free to actually manage other aspects of the guild.
But even with a couple of assistants, I was doing at least 5+ interview scenes a week. Each one lasting an hour or more. Not counting all the times where someone agreed to an IC interview and I had to wait 30 minutes because they’re running late, only for them to cancel.
I was spending upwards of 8+ hours a week dedicated to nothing but IC interviews. That’s a lot of time devoted just to interviews, which mostly consisted of me copy/pasting/rephrasing the same questions over and over, with some light banter here and there to break things up.
Even then, I was a little hesitant on the whole move online applications myself. For much of the same reasons cited here. It felt less personal and interactive, which I think robbed us of an opportunity for immersion and showing investment in potential players. So I made sure we’d try and capture that in our application, which really plays out in a sort of one-sided-RP experience that still ties into the actual lore/RP of the guild.
And I’m actually happy with how it worked out. And all the time that’s been freed up!
The many hours I spend not doing interviews are now spent educating people about the guild. Also getting our guild involved in community events, and helping newer members better integrate into the guild through in character orientation, coffee dates, and the like.
My preferred method of recruitment personally is to meet and interact with people in game first, and when the question of hiring comes up, refer them IC to our goblin designed “automated kiosk” in the Drag, followed by the OOC link.
And even though we do use online applications, we have all the in game/discord contact information of our recruitment folks there. So if at any point in the process, someone wants to get in touch with someone for some RP or questions or anything else, they can just send a message.