Selling the Military : In a Highly Competitive Market, a New Breed of Recruiter Is Filling the Ranks
John Porta flies to work every day from his home in San Bernardino to his office in Huntington Beach.
The flight takes the tedium out of commuting, but more important to Porta, it’s an effective sales tool.
Sgt. John Porta is an Air Force recruiter, and his job is to persuade young people that a tour, or even a career, in the military is worth considering.
The fact that he got his private pilot’s license for a great deal less money than it would have cost a civilian is part of the sales pitch. But that’s not all he has to offer, nor is it enough in a competitive market with a limited number of customers.
With the end of the draft in 1973, the armed forces realized that new strategies were needed to fill the ranks. Major advertising campaigns were launched in television, radio, magazines and newspapers.
Since then, the people in the front lines have also changed. Recruiting is no longer left to anyone in a uniform sitting in an office waiting for customers. A new specialist has emerged, one who talks about “prospecting,” “contracts,” “hot leads,” “cold calls” and “market penetrations”--the argot of sales.
The change has happened in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force. In each branch, the new recruiters sometimes are volunteers, but most are assigned to tours of up to four years.
“We look for certain indicators, such as sound judgment, the ability to work alone and appearance,” said Maj. Robert Robichaud, commanding officer of Marine Corps recruiting services in four Southern California counties and a portion of Arizona.
During five or six weeks of schooling, the recruiters must learn a host of skills not usually associated with the military: basic sales techniques, telephone prospecting, public speaking and classroom presentation.
Then they hit the community.
“When I worked in electronics at Moffett Field, it was a straight eight-hour day,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Pat Christian of the Navy’s Garden Grove recruiting station. “But when you first get here, it involves a lot of what we call ‘half-days.’ That’s from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. You’re just trying to get established in the community, and you put in some long hours. That can be trying. It’s hard on you, and it can be hard on your family because you’re not always around.”
The salesmen of the military go to career days on campuses. They talk to classes about opportunities. Some schools even provide telephone lists of their seniors.
“But recruiters are only limited by their imagination,” said Capt. Franklin Gibson of the Air Force Recruiting Service in San Bernardino. “They are really like independent businessmen in that they have an office, a company car and this very large organization backing them up. Everything we do is geared to support the recruiter and help them get their job done.”
Navy recruiter Steven Nester said some of the prospective clients “are looking for a job. But a lot are also looking for help. Instead of going to college or going out to find a job, they’re looking for background, for experience. . . . You work on finding out what the person wants, and once you find that out, you try to help them get what they want.”
The training and college tuition programs can be strong selling points, but in an affluent area, such as Orange County, they are not always enough.
“This is when you get into the sales side of it,” said Sgt. Robert Chapman, an Army recruiter in Huntington Beach. “You have to show what the Army has that Mommy and Daddy can’t offer. They can’t buy leadership training and experience. These are the types of things you ought be able to flip to and say, ‘We can do this for you.’ ”
The shrinking size of high school graduating classes and consumer savvy among young people mean recruiters must compete.
“We just tell them what we can offer,” said Chief Petty Officer Rollie Lim of the Navy’s Garden Grove office. “If they like it, that’s fine. If he thinks, say, the Air Force can offer more things, all I can do is try to persuade him we can offer something much better.”
The salesmen must also compete with the weather and even the time of year.
“Trying to recruit during a holiday season is almost unbearable,” said Christian of the Navy’s Garden Grove office. “Nobody really wants to join at Thanksgiving or Christmas because they think if they do go down and talk to a recruiter, they’re leaving tomorrow. That just doesn’t happen anymore. It can take two to three weeks for someone to go in.
“And if the surf’s up at the beach, you can pretty much forget about a kid calling you back that day to talk about enlisting.”
Quality Is Important
While the number of enlistees is important, quality is more so, recruiters are quick to point out. In the past, Lim said, judges sometimes aimed wayward young people toward the military, even offering to drop charges if the person enlisted.
“We don’t do that anymore,” Lim said. “When someone walks in and just wants to join the Navy, they have something going wrong.”
And now, a high school diploma is as important to the military as to other employers.
“The days of a poorly educated person being in the military are just about over,” Army’s Chapman said. “It’s important to have a well-rounded individual to deal with the taxpayers’ equipment.”
The diploma is more than an indicator of intellectual ability. Studies by the armed forces show that graduates are more likely to have successful service careers.
“If you got your diploma, you made a commitment and you followed it through,” Christian said.
Highly Selective
Marines, with a tradition as an elite service and with smaller personnel requirements--less than a quarter of the Army’s--can be highly selective about their recruits.
“The people we’re looking for are self-starters; they’re very goal-oriented,” said Sgt. Tim Haught, a Marine recruiter in Huntington Beach. “These people are looking to achieve something, to make themselves more marketable when they leave the service.
“And it’s hard to find people, 18, 19 and 20 years old, who look that far into the future.”