Hellcats has reopened recruitment.
People make a big deal of the Hellcats being a women-only corp. It's what attracts many of our applicants, and you know what? Everyone's got their focus wrong. We're pirates. We may be all female, but we are pirates first. We've had to put strict regulations on our application procedure because too many women simply wanted to be in a corp with only other women. This is the wrong reason for wanting to join us, and so many of the recent applicants just do not seem to understand that.
In the early days, Hellcats got our applicants from women who heard about us and had already been in the action for a while. The corp was an unknown and didn't have a reputation beyond Mynxee's public journal; women applied because they wanted in on the action, not a place to knit and gossip. Mynx and I had both been yarring it up for ages before Hellcats was even on the radar. It's only been in recent months that we've had women asking to join because their husbands/brothers/male friends have said, 'It's an all-female corp! you'll fit right in!'
Words cannot express the frustration.
It is from this 'recommendees pool' that we get the sorts of applicants we really don't want in the corporation. YES, I said there are people we don't want. What do we look like, Mrs Biddle's Happy Tea Society?
We get the sorts of women who are accustomed to leaning on others and letting them do all the work; the types who make their way through life by wrapping others around their delicate little fingers and whining for 'help'; the ones who'd rather sit around gossiping and painting their nails whilst riding on the credit of the group. These women are useless, or worse than. We may take raw rookies from time to time, but only if they show initiative and are willing to follow instructions; we are not a training corporation. We do not teach women to fly their ships; they should already know this. We do not accept women who can't bear the risks involved in an outlaw lifestyle or who simply want to wear the corp logo on their flight jackets.
We've even had a few applicants who detest the idea of working with men, which is so wrong I don't really know how to express it. Hellcats is not anti-male. We've been proud members of The Bastards. alliance and Doom Armada, and our more experienced members have previously served cheerfully in corps in which they were the only woman. We have husbands and boyfriends and generally get along better with guys. When an applicant says she doesn't want to fly with men... we really don't know what to say, because we can't understand why someone would not want to work with them.
An applicant walking into my office and being pushy, self-centred, passive-aggressive and trying to jump our now standard recruitment steps is not going to get into Hellcats. Someone who asks to join, then ignores all the relevant Read This First! information I give them whilst acting like they're already in and talking about how awesome they are is NOT going to impress upon us that they will be a benefit to the corporation. I'm a diplomat, and what that means is that while I'm smiling, nodding and being helpful, I'm making a note on our management boards that that woman is never to be accepted to the corp.
Yes, NEVER. She has wrecked her chances forever based on the first impression she has presented.
How many times do we have to say this?
So you want to go kill stuff? Go! Fit up a ship and run rampant through lowsec, you don't need a corp to do that. In the meantime, you'll have to go through the process like everyone else. If a girl simply cannot wait, then she lacks the most vital attribute in a pirate's arsenal: patience. Without that, a pilot is useless and a liability.
Hellcats recruitment is open. Please see the information here if you have any questions. If you wish to be considered as an applicant, by all means, join us in the Hellcats Pub comms channel, express your intentions and we'll see about getting you started!
