Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

—Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategist

Recruiting is a blend of art and science. The art is influencing people to make commitments. The science is finding the right people to influence.

It’s true that the more people you talk to, the more people you will enlist. That will not change. But I need to make something very clear. Nothing you learn in this book matters a hill of beans if you are not dealing with qualified prospects.

You can be the greatest prospector the world has ever known, but if you are dealing with a prospect who is not going to get past MEPS or who is unmotivated, and unwilling to engage, make micro-commitments, and advance through the process, you are going to fail. Period, end of story.

I know that you know this because it was beaten into you the moment you went to recruiting school to learn how to be a recruiter.

Ultra-high performers understand that time is mission and it is a waste of time to work with prospects who are unmotivated and not going to enlist. They know that qualified prospects are scarce, and investing too much time with a low-probability prospect takes them away from their most important task—prospecting to identify qualified prospects who can and will enlist.

But effective qualifying requires far more than just a quick profile, blueprint, or APPLEMDT on the phone. That’s only part of it. It begins with gathering information while prospecting. It continues during your initial interview and requires maintaining acute awareness throughout the entire recruiting process for signs that might disqualify your applicant or lower the probability of a win.

Don’t Swing at Nothing Ugly

I’m a big fan of Little League baseball. It is a rite of passage that helps kids build character, hone their values, and learn how to win and lose.

Several years back, when my son played Little League, we were fortunate to be on a team with great coaches who invested their time to help our sons learn to love the game. Along the way, they helped our tight-knit group of parents learn a few lessons, too.

In one of our most intense games, we were in the bottom of the final inning with two outs and the bases loaded. The game was tied. With the winning run on third base, all we needed was a hit to win the game and advance to the playoffs.

As our next batter walked from the dugout toward the batter’s box, Coach Sandro pulled him aside for one last pep talk. He kneeled in front of the ten-year-old young man, grabbed a handful of his jersey near the collar, and gave him some sage advice.

“Whatever you do,” Coach Sandro admonished, “don’t swing at nothing ugly.”

It was profound advice for batters and recruiters.

If you’ve ever played baseball or softball or watched your kids play, you’ve no doubt witnessed a player chasing a wild pitch—too high, too low, or way outside of the strike zone. The awkward swing of the bat, swishing through thin air, leaves the player off balance and embarrassed. It is sometimes funny to watch, but mostly the fans, coaches, and players emit a collective groan and wonder why in the world the player took a swing at that pitch.

It is no different in recruiting. Each day, recruiters waste time, energy, and emotion swinging at applicants who have little chance of making it past the floor. Sadly, the results are predictable. These recruiters strike out.

This is exactly why effective qualifying was a front-and-center lesson in recruiting school. It’s easy for new recruiters to waste time on prospects who are not qualified.

We know that the more qualified people you talk to, the more people you will enlist. The problem is that far too many recruiters use qualifying as an excuse not to talk to people. Qualifying is a wall they put between themselves and human engagement. The result is they have far fewer face-to-face interviews than ultra-high performers.

Moneyball

“Two” blurted out Sergeant First Class Ramirez in response to my question, his right hand raised with two fingers up.

My question: “How many qualification questions do you need to ask on a prospecting call to make the decision to set up an interview?”

“I just need height and weight.” He was shaking his head incredulously at the other recruiters in the room who argued that they had to complete an APPLEMDT questionnaire in its entirety before setting up an interview.

A Staff Sergeant in the back of the room shouted out, “Three.”

“Which three?” I asked.

“Height, weight, and have you been arrested. The schools where I recruit have a high instance of arrests.” he responded.

When I poll recruiters on what they need to know about a prospect before conducting an interview, there are consistently two schools of thought:

1. They need to know just enough about the prospect to conduct an interview.
2. The prospect must be fully and completely qualified before conducting an interview.

In 2002, Billy Beane, the general manager for the Oakland A’s, changed Major League Baseball forever with his sabermetric approach to scouting and building a winning baseball team with limited resources. His story was chronicled in the movie Moneyball, which was based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

Beane’s analysis demonstrated that on-base percentage (OBP) was the best indicator of success when evaluating a player’s ability to contribute and be productive. It was a radical departure from the traditional model and stats used for scouting. Two years later, in 2004, the Boston Red Sox adopted Beane’s approach on their way to winning the World Series and breaking the Curse of the Bambino.

The OBP of military recruiting is the interview. The recruiters with the highest percentage of interview conducts are, almost always, the highest-performing recruiters—the ultra-high performers. The interview is, essentially, getting on base. It’s simple and intuitive. The more times you get on base, the more opportunities you have to score.

Clearly you should not waste time with applicants who cannot or will not enlist. The most expensive waste of time in recruiting is to spend it with the wrong prospect. But poor-performing recruiters take this to the extreme. They allow qualification to become a reason not to talk to people.

Poor performers usually have a low number of attempts to begin with—a bad thing. But when low activity is combined with a low contact to conduct ratio, it becomes almost impossible to make mission.

The Balance and Nuance of Qualifying

Qualifying prospects is about balance. You want to get enough information to avoid interviewing candidates who are completely unqualified but not allow hard qualifying questions to chase good prospects away or put them in a position where they lie to you.

You want to schedule as many face-to-face interviews as possible. This means some prospects will be disqualified during the initial interview or during subsequent steps of the recruiting process. This does not mean that you should throw mud at the wall by sending every applicant who can fog a mirror to MEPS.

Ultra-high performers know three things about interviews:

1. The recruiting process begins with the interview. This is why a recruiter who conducts many face-to-face interviews will beat out the recruiter who conducts only a few interviews because “no one is qualified,” every time.
2. When faced with tough qualifying questions, prospects will tell you one thing on the phone and something completely different in person. You’ll get far better information during a face-to-face interview than in a quick prospecting conversation.
3. When you conduct an interview, if the prospect is unqualified to move forward, you may, at a minimum, be able to flip the interview into a referral.

There is not a one-size-fits-all solution for qualifying in every recruiting situation. Every market is different.

In recruiting, context matters. Each prospect, conversation, zip code, territory, school, or recruiting segment is different and requires recruiters to adapt and adjust to those unique situations. If you work in the inner city, past run-ins with law enforcement may be more prevalent than if you are working in a rural area. In the suburbs, ADHD drug usage may occur at higher rates than in the inner city. Height and weight may be a much bigger issue in some zip codes than others.

Depending on your branch, battalion, or company, your leaders may have different requirements for qualifying. And mission? That’s always a moving target.

I’m certainly not going to tell you how to initially qualify before setting up an interview. You need to determine what works best based on your unique situation.

It’s about developing a qualification routine that gives you the highest probability of setting an interview with a qualified prospect while using the lowest number of hard qualification questions during the initial prospecting engagement.

If every prospect must be 100 percent qualified before any interview, it’s unlikely that you’ll be speaking to very many people. Because you’ll:

• Turn off people who don’t want a proctology exam before they meet to learn more about a career in the military.
• Disqualify people who may eligible once you get more information.
• Miss opportunities for getting referrals from prospects.
• Get burned because people will hide crucial information from you.

It’s also important to remember that effective qualification is not a single decision point at a single place in time; rather it’s an ongoing series of decisions along the entire recruiting journey.

Your branch’s qualifying format or process may help you decide if the prospect qualifies to join your branch of the military on paper, but it doesn’t tell you if your prospect is engaged, willing, and motivated to join the military. That happens during your interviews and as you build a relationship with your prospects.

Never forget that prospects enlist first with you and then the military.