Picture this. You are the legendary head coach of a college basketball team that just ended a dream season by winning its second national championship. How do you spend the next day? Giving a press conference or being interviewed by Sports Illustrated? No, you fly to the home of your lead potential recruit and convince him to play for you the following season. This is just what Dean Smith did in 1993, and the player he recruited was Rasheed Wallace.

You are the head coach of a college football team that capped its undefeated season by winning the national championship. How do you spend the early morning hours of signing day? Sleeping like most coaches? No, you are awake and manning the fax machine at 5:02 a.m. when the letter of intent from the number three wide receiver in the country comes through. This is just what Pete Carroll did two weeks after the 2005 Orange Bowl, and the player he recruited was Patrick Turner from Nashville.

Recruitment is about people-whom are you bringing into the Fraternity, what are you offering them, and how? Take the analogy of recruitment and athletics. Your goal is to have a "deep bench" or a pool of talent from which your chapter can fulfill its mission. Even after the end of the season or, in this case, the school year, recruitment should be the priority. Look at Dean Smith and Pete Carroll. For them recruitment never ceases. It is a way to "keep score" between the end of the last season and the start of the next.

As you browse the recruitment area, you'll notice multiple resources you can use in your chapter's quest to recruit more and better men who exemplify the Balanced Man Ideals of Sound Mind and Sound Body. As Carroll and Smith recruited to ensure their overall success, so must you use your talents and the resources provided to reach the ultimate goal of chapter excellence.

is one of the largest and most successful advertising firms in the world. With clients like Apple Computers, Anheuser-Busch, Energizer, Nissan, and Absolut Vodka, TBWA can claim a large and extremely influential client base stretching across six continents. The “T” in TBWA is Brother William G. Tragos, Washington University in St. Louis, who founded the company and served as longtime CEO.

Brother Tragos is undoubtedly one of the most successful businessmen our Fraternity has ever known, and one of the most involved. Whether as a chapter officer, local chapter volunteer, National Board member, or Grand President, Bill Tragos has served SigEp ever since joining. Brother Tragos gives so much back because he credits much of his success to the lessons he learned as an undergraduate recruitment chair. Here’s how Brother Tragos described his experience:

"Working as a recruitment chair, I came to understand how difficult it was to convince someone of the value or meaning of an idea, like brotherhood. As an undergraduate, I maintained a part-time job as a shoe salesman, and was good at it. But I found that selling something one could see and feel was much easier than selling an idea. I brought this understanding to my office as Vice President of Recruitment and made it my mission to use the same ideas of seeing and feeling to make potential members understand the value of the SigEp experience.

To demonstrate the value of a concept like brotherhood, you have to go beyond talking about it in the way every other fraternity does. Telling recruits, “We’re tight,” simply did not get the job done. You have to expose a potential recruit to who you, as a chapter, really are, through inviting them to social events, intramural competition, or even chapter meetings. Even if all they see is how you simply hang around and interact with one another, that’s a powerful statement. Successful salesmanship requires a demonstration of what you are selling, just like a product in a store. That is a lesson I never forgot in advertising. We were most successful persuading our clients of our ideas when we took the time to go beyond words and opinions or “jive” to show them how the consumer responded to what we were showing and saying. This was key to our success at TBWA, and it’s really a skill I learned and developed through my time and experience as a recruiter in the chapter.”

Recruiting teaches invaluable skills and knowledge that you can cultivate during your time in the chapter and use for the rest of your life. Most of us will find ourselves in some sort of official sales position, but, in every business, these are the skills that the most successful people have and use. You can learn how to articulate value in the chapter with the resources you will find here and use those skills in your chosen career after graduation.