RETAIL Recruiting

Local recruiters shoulder burden to keep Guard numbers up

Army National Guard recruiters say there's no single reason why recruiting numbers are down. In fact, several reasons make the best recruiting methods difficult to pinpoint. No matter what actions the Guard takes from above, however, the real recruiting impact occurs at the state level.

Right now the Army Guard is about 15,000 troops below strength. But they hope to make up the difference by early fall, and accomplishing that daunting goal is a state-level recruiter responsibility. It's not easy.

Variables include stop-loss, which keeps some personnel from separating on time, lengthy deployments, high-strung parents and low ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) scores.

"We have found that [the environment] has changed," says Col. Mary Norn's, Alabama Army Guard recruiting commander. "We have all these great benefits. But service to country is the number-one reason people are getting in the military nowadays."

Florida changed its recruiting message about six months ago. According to Capt. Kelly Chestnut, Florida Army Guard's recruiting and retention commander, the state recruiters are now trained to "appeal to the call to duty and sense of service to country and state."

Many used to join only for benefits and because deployments were infrequent.

"Those same people don't want to join now. They want to stay in college. They don't want to go to war," he says. "Previously, people who were joining ior duty and service, didn't because there was no hope of war."

Senior Master Sgt. Tim Fisher, Wyoming Air Guard's recruiting superintendent, says they haven't changed recruiting tactics but have had to answer many potential recruits' war questions.

Sometimes people even ask for a guarantee they will not have to go overseas if they join, he says. "We tell everyone, when you come in, you ultimately sign a contract, and that can mean you may go to war."

The Northeast has felt a huge recruiting impact.

"Recruiting is not going to be so good at a Guard unit that is smack dab in an ultra-liberal community because there is so much propaganda out there," Sergeant Fisher says.

But it really depends on where in the country you go. Politics in the more conservative South have not affected recruiting as much.

In some states, overall numbers might be high but are low in certain demographic areas. In others, overall numbers are low because people are so spread out.

In 1999, when Maj. Gen. Paul Sullivan, National Guard Bureau vice chief, was Ohio Air Guard's assistant adjutant general, he approached recruiting as a business.

With sales, he says, it all goes back to how much one believes in the product and its intrinsic value.

"You kind of have to look recruiters in eye and ask them if it's something they're interested in for themselves, their children, their wife, and if they can't answer yes to that, they're not going to be successful," he says.

To be competitive for new missions, Ohio needed to stress manning as one of its overall strengths. At the time, the Ohio Air Guard was at 96 percent of its end-strength.

So General Sullivan assembled a team to discuss and address Ohio's many recruiting challenges.

"The important thing is to try to identify the leading indicators as much as you can so you can see early on what's working and what's not working," he says. "By the time you're in a month where recruiting is bad you're about two or three months too late."

The team created various strategies to monitor recruiting progress and shortfalls.

It compiled information, from how many recruits it'd had in the previous month or previous year, to what motivated recruits to come talk to recruiters.

Over the course of time the group developed a good measurement system of how many folks recruiters had to talk to, how much money was necessary and where they could find new recruits.

General Sullivan applied the same system to retention.

Their primary tracking method was through personal interviews, during which members were always asked why they were leaving.

"Some people finished their six years in the service, and that was just it. But in a lot of cases, we discovered that wasn't really the whole story," he says.

Most often, people left because they didn't know of other opportunities the Guard offered if they were unhappy with their current situation.

"It was all about feeling that people cared about them and a sense that they belonged someplace and if you can make that happen, people will stay with you," General Sullivan says.

One of the biggest ways, recruiters try to meet recruiting and retention goals is through its own members, Captain Chestnut says.

Guardsmen have all kinds of incentives to spread the word about citizen-soldiers and reter others, like monetary rewards, letters of thanks and various medals.

"It's a collaborative, synchronized effort," Captain Chestnut says. "It's a crime to deploy without a soldier to the left and right in our ranks. Soldiers lives are at risk if someone is missing in the form of a vacancy. "

With recruiters unable to rely on prior service recruits as much as before, the focus has shifted to high schools and junior colleges.

In Florida, high schools are the state's most targeted market.

"It's always challenging. I've been in the military 14 years and my mom still doesn't like it. Parents will always be that way," Captain Chestnut says.

The best thing to do, he says, is have discussion groups with people who have been there and done it to try to dispel any myths or concerns parents and students may have.

"It's really always been like that. It's just a little different today," he says. "It's a little more emotional. The war has impacted it, changed it, made us adjust our message and how we go about doing our business. But it's not an obstacle or barrier that can't be overcome."

Colonel Norris says with high school and junior college students as primary target recruiting groups, parents must be knowledgeable about the Guard, to eliminate anxieties they may have.

Students and parents participate in a pre-basic training program called the Recruit Sustainment Program. Students can sign up as early as age 17 with a parental signature but are not deployable until after they graduate from high school.

In the meantime, they attend drill and monthly meetings so they understand what is expected of them upon graduation. Recruiters work with applicants and their families and explain all of the benefits and the ins and outs ol basic and advanced individual training.

Wyoming recruiters often have a question and answer dialogue session at schools. Sergeant Fisher says the open and honest talks, especially about the war and deployments, are the key to successfully recruiting students.

It also helps, he says, to bring in younger people who have just finished basic training and technical school "to give their testimony on things they were apprehensive about and how it was in real life," he says.

Getting past parents, however, isn't the chief problem recruiters face on a daily basis.

"If I had to say one thing that hurts us more than anything, it's the ASVAB test," Colonel Morris says. "They can't pass it. And if they can't pass the ASVAB, chances are they can't pass the SAT."

The test, which is similar to the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), is the perfect vehicle for schools to determine students' strengths and weaknesses, but schools don't automatically administer the test or provide study guides for it. she says. So students are typically unprepared.

Lt. Col. John Goulet, Maine Army Guard recruiting and retention manager, agrees.

"The hard part of it is not finding young men and women who want to join, it's finding young men or women who can join," he says. "Many of them do not have the educational skills."

Many others, he says, don't meet the medical, physical or moral qualifications.

Colonel Goulet says potential recruits must follow a whole litany of rules and regulations before enlisting, with a hundred or more reasons for disqualification.

"It's simple things, like, we had a girl come in with a tattoo of (lowers running up her neck. But if you're in a Class A jacket, and it shows, you can't come in," he says.

Colonel Goulet says recruiters often estimate that only one of every 15 to 20 people who want to join actually meets the qualifications to sign a contract.

Even though the recruiting environment is more difficult than in past years, Captain Chestnut says, selling the Guard is a matter of confidence.

"The image that they portray and what they tell about our organization is what helps us keep people flowing through those doors," Sergeant Fisher says.

For example, the volatile hurricane season actually helped increase recruiting numbers in Florida and other southeastern states.

"It was better than any commercial, than any advertising campaign we could have had," Captain Chestnut says. "People aspired to be like us. They felt a sense of service to the community when they saw what we were doing," he says. "I had people giving me their name wanting to join in the midst of that."

Copyright National Guard Association of the United States Mar 2005
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