Xjyuk

This particular coven operates as a powerful and wide spanning enterprise focused on accumulating power to direct the world in ways that align with their interests. This group operates similar to HYDRA or COBRA, recruiting members mostly from young people seeking power in society, with the intention of using them to expand the covens interests. These individuals may rise in the hierarchy due to their successes and eventually become key members and important players. Witches gain more power through a dark ritual, which steals the life force from an unwilling victim and adding it to their own, making their magic stronger. Rituals are performed with a circle of 5, with each witch sharing in the power gained. This means that a young witch will join the coven in the hopes that, one day, she will be promoted high enough to start performing such rituals to eventually become a goddess.

The process of being versed in enough occult knowledge to perform spells takes decades (the equivalent of obtaining multiple PhD's, for example). So a simple human would have to study REALLY hard (while also being a servant for the older witches), a lifetime, in order to eventually get to the point where the other witches will grant her the opportunity to start taking part in the ritual.

The problem is that many of the higher ranking witches view these prospective members as mooks, using them in irresponsible ways. This is done to shield higher ups from dangerous tasks, leaving lackeys to take all the risks while protecting themselves. Using them as expendable shields against authorities or competing criminal organizations, or as run of the mill goons who can be easily sacrificed when they outlive their usefulness, is problematic for long term survival of the coven.

Interns cant exactly unionize because...well, it is a criminal organization. Expecting then to take up pickets and marching through the streets demanding equal pay and treatment is unlikely. How can I encourage my underlings to use their recruits more responsibly and prevent them from being expendable?

There's a culture of master/apprentice relationships, where each high-ranking witch has a few protégés. The high-ranking witch encourages competition between her apprentices, who are eager to gain her favor.

However, this works hierarchically. The high-ranking witch is one of a few apprentices of an older, even more powerful witch. Members are held accountable for the failures of their subordinates, so competition between high-ranking witches gives them an incentive to make their apprentices as effective as possible, as this reflects well for them.

Since it takes a long time to train, it would be a wasted time investment to throw away an intern who's already been trained in the basic stuff their master doesn't want to teach some new guy all over again.

That's a solution that doesn't require any magic, just a few tweaks to the workplace culture. The organization can be expanded as a pyramid without breaking this effect.

You could turn the system so that the lowest-stage witches need a power investment from the witch higher up. Say, they don't come to the coven themselves, but instead more experienced witches need to find new recruits and become their patrons.

In order for these new witches to be able to do at least something, and also to ensure their loyalty, elder witches need to invest them with the part of their power. If the young witch dies, the power is lost irretrievably.

This way, there's a balance between enlisting young helpers and keeping powers for oneself. Also, there is a necessity to protect them and keep them alive - even if elder witch plans to sacrifice her helpers later in a dark ritual to retrieve the power back.

They can advance when they realize the occult they are studying is a lie.

Western society does like to promote this idea: "one studies for their first part of their life, producing nothing of worth, until they graduate, and then they stop learning and go do things." Every aspect of that phrase is false, but it is the rationale we instill in students in order to get them to suck it up through college. This process becomes absurd when one starts to look at learning phases which extend the lifespan of the learner.

The witches move up out of the intern status once they realize this.

Fundamentally, the older witches better understand a fundamental problem: if they die without ascending to goddesshood, everything they learned and taught disappears with them. Witches which don't understand this tend to lead covens that cease to exist soon thereafter. Thus, from evolution, we can expect the successful covens work around this.

There's plenty of ways to make this happen, but my favorite is to make it so that, once you have learned all of the occult (a lifetime of work), you can synthesize this into an obvious conclusion: the path described in the training doesn't lead you to any lasting change -- just suffering. And yet, there's something cloying about the end-state the elder witches describe. It looks like it should almost work. The "correct" path may be tremendously close. It's just not the specific path taught in witch school.

In such a system, the eldest witches would certainly be plying the universe for its secrets in the best way they know how. But they're just one witch. They can't try everything. Thus, they should rely somewhat on the apprentice witches. If an apprentice witch finds something small that the elder witch missed during her training, she may be able to build upon this small thing and bring the entire coven closer to the right answer.

I'd recommend there be an interesting phrasing in the book about how only a child can lead to the true path to goddesshood. Many witches may mistakenly translate that into child-sacrifice, which would do well to keep the evil flavor you appear to seek alive in your covens, but perhaps the eldest witches figured it out. Only the child-like mind can possibly find the subtle overlooked thing which makes it all work.

Think like that for a while, and then look at social constructs you consider to be "respectable and mature." Look at the father who volunteers at the YMCA to help keep kids off the streets, or the martial arts teacher taking his time to improve his students' lives. Or perhaps it's the minister or priest who truly strives for greatness for their entire congregation (and maybe, just maybe, the entire world). Look at how they act, and borrow that for your witch covens.

They must feel their underlings' pain

Part of the initiation involves a sharing between higher and lower and peers, after which each human will forever feel some of the (physical) pain of the others.

This means that some coven members will encourage someone else's underlings (with whom they have not shared) to be fodder and get killed, while protecting her own underlings and the life of her peer (whom she has shared with). This encourages intrigue within the group while seeming to cooperate.

It also means that initial screening will weed out folks prone to headaches, chronic pain, or severe cramps, regardless of how good a witch they might make.

Rarity. Not everyone has the potential for the occult; in fact, just finding an intern with any promise may take a few years. If your ritual takes five talented witches at a minimum, then a witch dying will be a serious blow to the coven unless they have backups, and by the time one has more than four backups, they'll probably have left to form their own coven (they wouldn't be in this business if they weren't a bit distrusting of larger groups and willing to tamper with things they don't fully understand).