[July 26, 2015] Attracting the best young folks to join the military has special challenges; it’s a dangerous job with long hours and below-average pay. Fortunately, military recruiters have been successful and I will share some of their secrets here. Elsewhere, an entire business sector has grown up around helping civilian organizations recruit the best people.
I was asked one time by a number of senior army civilians and military officers if I could give them ideas on how to recruit young people … those who had valuable civilian technical training … that could be applied to military occupational skills. As an engineer officer this had always been a deficiency because it was difficult to get new recruits that met higher requirements to be an engineer. This may seem self evident but I discovered that unless a comprehensive, long-term effort was made, the best people would not join in the numbers we needed. Keeping them is another difficult issue that I will discuss in another post.
In the corporate recruiting business there are some standard practices that are successfully being used. Like any human enterprise, these practices are successful but have challenges as one would expect and they are expensive. I’ll leave the reader to review them (see a few articles here, here, and here). But because there is another way to recruit that only a few corporate users have discovered and one the military uses but not always fully.
The most successful tactic for recruiting the best talent is a dual approach. First, everything must be done to make the organization as attractive as possible. This means appealing to patriotism, adventure, job experience, being part of a team or of something special, etc. Appealing to that “something special” is a powerful allure for the young seeking to do something that makes a difference in their lives. The military does this well and only a few in the civilian world have used this as a way of getting better employees.
Second, and probably the most important of this approach, is to start recruiting them as children. I once told a military recruiter that he should put less emphasis on getting high school seniors to sign-up and place more emphasis on showing what the military does in grade schools. He thought I was nuts but when I asked why junior soldiers what got them to join the army, it was an event in their childhood that got them on the right track to be part of it. This is a longer term technique that is unexpectedly valuable and should be pursued as a matter of doing business. Recently, engineering firms have made progress in working with schools to promote STEM and thus engineering as a whole.1
Civilian businesses should, therefore, attract better and more talented people by appealing to “something special” and by recruiting at “very young ages”. In conjunction with the more traditional approach that they are already applying, attracting the best people to your organization will be most effective when employing this broader range of techniques.
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- Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)