Smart teams consider the future to ensure the possibility of long-term success. Student teams by their nature are high-turnover organizations, with many members (sometimes up to 60-70%) leaving each year due to graduation or other commitments. This is why the team must regularly replenish its talent. Here are a few ideas on how to do this.

The lifeblood of student project teams is people. Without a constant supply of new talent, teams will eventually suffer from attrition and die. Team leaders and faculty advisors must therefore take an active interest in making sure that the team sustains and improves its human resources over time.

There are two primary considerations in recruiting new team members:

1. What skills are necessary to further team development?
2. What skills are we in danger of losing to graduation and other forms of attrition?

What skills are necessary?

Recruiting is often necessarily structured by the requirements of the here and now. For example, if a project requires a certain degree of expertise in electrical engineering and there are very few electrical engineers available, there is obviously an immediate requirement for new team members. Many project teams find themselves in need of specialized administrative skills in cost accounting, business administration, and similar fields. Too often, these jobs are tackled by engineers who have little interest or passion for administrative tasks. Again, there are excellent reasons to consider recruiting people with skills and interests in this field.

Outside of immediate task requirements, team leaders should also consider more intangible skills and talents. An effective team is a diverse team. Although it may be easier to manage a team of friends and people with like interests and backgrounds, people from diverse backgrounds, histories, and experiences bring new life and ideas to the table. Too many social extroverts might be difficult to manage, but a team staffed entirely of introverts might find it difficult to communicate amongst themselves and with the outside world. Highly enthusiastic and motivated people are always useful, but too much unbridled enthusiasm can quickly get out of control. Calm and reasoned people can help keep the team on an even keel. Innovative and gifted thinkers are often helpful, but sometimes the quest for innovation can consume valuable time and energy needed to realize team goals if unrestrained. Conscientious and reliable people are often necessary to maintain balance. Effective leaders are necessary, but too many cooks can spoil the broth, as the saying goes.

Building an effective team involves keeping these and other dimensions in balance.

What skills are we losing?

A major consideration for student project teams is turnover. Given that student project teams are usually staffed by students in the latter phase of their academic careers, turnover on an annual basis can hit 50-66%, posing serious challenges for team continuity. Successful teams like FSAE and RoboCup can nevertheless be competitive by taking turnover into account in recruiting.

One strategy is to pay attention to turnover early and make plans to recruit new team members to meet project future needs. Indeed, many teams (ASTRO, Mini Baja, Solar Decathlon) are looking to recruit early in the spring semester to meet their current and future requirements.

Again, you must consider what kinds of people will be leaving and how best to replace them. On a task level, it is relatively easy to determine what skills will be needed and who, if anyone, will be returning with those skills. Many graduating members will have risen to positions of leadership, either formally or informally. Grooming new team leaders early can be invaluable in helping the transition process. Graduating team members should also play an active role in later phases of the project, guiding, mentoring, and training new and returning members to transfer their skill-based knowledge to next year’s team.

It is also smart to consider more intangible factors. If a team is losing many of its more enthusiastic and driven members and this enthusiasm is neither transferred nor replaced, the following year’s team culture will be noticeably different.

Also important is the effect of losing people who play liaison or bridging roles on the team. Social network analysts call these people "structural holes" (Burt, 1992). They are people with non-redundant ties to others. So, if person A is connected to person C through person B, person B is a structural hole because her/his removal eliminates a previous indirect connection between A and C. Conversely, if A is connected to C directly as well as through person B, the effect of B’s leaving is lessened.

This is perhaps best described visually. Consider the following diagrams depicting the task affinity network of the 2001 FSAE team after the conclusion of the manufacturing phase. The first diagram represents relations from a survey asking team members to note those they thought were highly skilled. For simplicity’s sake, the diagram has been reduced to bidirectional links (e.g., four cites five and vice versa.) The second is the same diagram with non-retuning members blocked out, depicting where structural holes were destined to emerge.

As you can see, the latter diagram is considerably more sparse and gets weaker still when you consider that a few of those who did return the following year were doing independent MEng projects that limited their involvement considerably. Had they not returned as well, there would be even fewer connections remaining.

That noted, we also see the emergence of new technical leaders in this second diagram, including the two technical leaders for the coming year. Less obvious is how some team members quickly became informal leaders, filling the gaps created by departing members.

If this appears severe, consider that the 2001-2002 transition was considerably less dramatic than the following year, where many skilled team members (including most of this year’s main members) graduated.

On both fronts, therefore, it is important to think about the larger effects of attrition and to plan around this inevitability, both by recruiting new members to fill in and by building knowledge and connections among those who will be returning.

Note that the goal is not necessarily to replicate previous teams. This is neither possible or advisable; there are simply too many mitigating factors. The team culture will change from year to year. Forecasting that change and trying to structure it so that valuable skills and social connections are not lost should be the goal.

Considerations in Recruiting

There are many considerations worthy to note in setting up a recruitment process.

• Timing: Recruiting should take place at convenient times for your project and its timetable. The beginning of the school year is a common choice, but there is some benefit to early and even late spring recruiting. FSAE, for example, recruits for the following year in April, gets new recruits active in preparation for competition, and brings recruits to competition to learn from the experience. When these recruits return in the fall, they are considerably more prepared for the team experience than those the new fall recruits, even with only one or two months of seniority.
• Competition: With a large and growing number of project teams at Cornell, teams have to compete for talent. Individuals can shop around and pick projects of interest to them, and teams must attract individual students’ attention with interesting projects. Inter-team competition for strong candidates is increasingly common. In the interest of building and maintaining good relations with other teams, it is good to coordinate recruiting efforts with other teams to ensure fair access to talent. This will allow individuals to pick the team that best suites their interests and personalities vs. ending up with a team by virtue of that team’s jumping out of the gate early and cherrypicking the best candidates.
• Process: Teams should be selective about whom they pick. How that selection happens is up to the team. Many will have a formal application and interview process and make selections based on information gained from that process. Some teams (e.g., Solar Decathlon) are relatively liberal in the number of people they pick; others (e.g., FSAE, RoboCup) will reject most applicants. Other teams forgo a formal process. Team membership emerges naturally as people help out and become involved. University of Toronto’s Formula SAE team, for example, will reduce more than 200 potential volunteers at the beginning of the year to a manageable core team and group of regular helpers. Team members are selected by interest and demonstrated motivation.

Both processes can work and can even work in concert. FSAE has long told those rejected in interviews to prove that the team made the wrong decision. Very good team members did just that, one to the point that this process of persistence in the face of initial rejection has been named after him. Conversely, the interview process can be a marked failure at times. Many quality team members were initially rejected—one member a record five times. Once brought on board, he proved his value quickly and is actually one of the central people in the diagram above.

Although it is tempting to say that this osmosis into team culture is the best method, do consider that a formal recruiting drive and process can attract others (particularly non-engineers) into the process. Another recent FSAE team leader found out about the FSAE team during recruiting; without the effort, he might not have otherwise been aware of the project because he was nominally a economics major. Interviews can also help weed out those who the team consider to be potentially poor fits technically or socially.