Personnel Department Report - March 2020

Placements overall

There were ten applications processed in the month of March. All ten applications were placed by the Personnel Department.

Academy vs Non-Academy
= Requests =
9 (90%) Academy
1 (10%) Main Fleet

= Placements =
9 (90%) Academy
1 (10%) Main Fleet

Placement Statistics

= Posting Speed Requested=
0 (11%) Infrequent
1 (10%) Slow
1 (10%) Average
3 (30%) Regular
5 (50%) Frequent

=Posting speed placed=
10 (100%) Medium

Note: The only ship speed available in the Academy is Medium (which is where all the requests for anything other than regular came from this month).

= How they found us =
Web search engines: 5
Referrals: 0
Returning member: 0
Confusing us for another RPG site: 1
Did not say or provide details: 4

Departments
= First choice preferences for departments =
Engineering: 2 (20%)
Medical: 3 (30%)
Security: 3 (30%)
Science: 2 (20%)

= Department Placed in =
Engineering: 3 (30%)
Medical: 2 (20%)
Security: 3 (30%)
Science: 2 (20%)

Note: It is basically impossible to ensure cadets are given their first choice of departments now, even with the changes mentioned in my comments at the end of this report. This is due to there being very limited availability in the Academy now. Of the nine placed cadets, two cadets were given their second choice and one cadet was given their third choice. This will change in April once we start placing Academy requests into non-Academy ships due to limited availability.

Processing Times

Average Processing Time: 8 hours (not including application delayed due to delayed response from new member); 28.9 hours (including application delayed due to delayed response from new member)

9 applications (90%) processed under 24 hours
0 applications (0%) processed between 24 and 48 hours
0 applications (0%) processed between 48 and 72 hours
1 application (10%) processed over 72 hours (due to new member having a delayed reply to a PDept email inquiry about their application)

Member Tracking
(As of April 9, 2020)

= January 2020 =

Academy placements: 6
Active: 1 (17%)
Rostered, but AWOL: 0 (0%)
Never posted: 2 (33%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 3 (50%)

Comments: Since last month’s report, one formerly active cadet who went AWOL is now active again; one active cadet is AWOL an no longer rostered.

Non-Academy placements: 4
Active: 3 (75%)
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 1 (25%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Comments: No changes since last report.

= February 2020 =

Academy placements: 5
Active: 2 (40%)
Rostered, but AWOL: 0
Never posted: 3 (60%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Comments: Since last month’s report, one AWOL cadet who was no longer rostered is now active.

Non-Academy placements: 3 (excluding recently returned members)
Active: 0
Rostered, but AWOL: 1 (33%)
Never posted: 2 (67%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 0

Comments: Since the last report, one active JO is now AWOL but still rostered.

= March 2020 =

Academy placements: 9
Active: 3 (33%)
Rostered, but AWOL: 2 (22%)
Never posted: 3 (33%)
AWOL (and no longer rostered): 1 (11%)

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

Open items from last report

MOTD: Anticipate remaining changes to be done after the policy review in February (which will affect other PDept pages).

Recommendations page: No updates.

Placement policy review: I started the review in late February with an anticipated plan to wrap it up in early March. However, due to a variety of RL factors, I will not be able to close the review until mid-March.

Low placement numbers: We have had three months in a row of between 7-10 active members. I’ll keep monitoring to see if this trend continues. Nine of those new members are currently active, so our retention is very approximately about 1/3.

New ship speed criteria: I will update this after closing the placement review threads.

Comments

We are filling up the Challenger like crazy. With an average of just under 10 new members being placed per month, and the majority of them requesting the Academy, we are quickly running out of space. The Academy recently changed their policy on a department’s maximum size, increasing the number of cadets from 3 to 4. That allowed the issue to move over to April, however I anticipate that next month I will most likely be reporting that we are sending Academy requests to non-Academy ships with mentors. This not unheard of in the club’s history, and was part of the normal process when I first was involved in the PDept a loooooong time ago. But it may be new to people who haven’t been paying attention to this prior to 2010 or so. It does mean that we will need a lot more active involvement from the Academy’s mentorship program to make sure we are finding suitable mentors for these new members who want to be in the Academy but can’t.

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director