The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

—General George S. Patton

Recruiting is a war. Just a different kind of war than the one you prepared for and trained to fight. Recruiting is a War for Talent—for the hearts and minds of the next generation of talent that will protect and defend our country and way of life.

Rather than bullets and bombs, this War for Talent is won through disciplined use of time, intellectual agility, emotional intelligence, mastering your own disruptive emotions, leveraging human influence frameworks, and massive prospecting activity.

But make no mistake: The War for Talent is real. All organizations in America—businesses, health care, nonprofit groups, sports, education, and the military—are in an outright and never-ending battle to recruit and retain the brightest and most talented people.

Smart, competent, and capable people are rare and in high demand. You are competing with every other organization and your fellow recruiters from other armed services branches to gain the attention of and engage this talent. It’s winner takes all. There is no good enough. There is no prize for second place. Once you lose prospects to your competition, the probability that you will ever get them back plunges.

On this highly competitive, ever-changing, asymmetric battlefield you must be at your best—always. If you:

• Allow your discipline to slip, you lose.
• Let your guard down, you lose.
• Whine about how hard things are, you lose.
• Get distracted, you lose.
• Get tired, put down your ruck, take a knee and rest awhile, you lose.
• Are unable to manage your emotions, you lose.
• Are undisciplined with time, you lose.
• Fail to execute a systematic and methodical daily battle rhythm, you lose.
• Fail to maintain focus and attention control, you lose.
• Are afraid to interrupt people and ask for what you want, you lose.
• Don’t talk to enough people, you lose.

On Most Days, Recruiting Doesn’t Feel Much Like Winning

You are a winner. You are the type of person who hits every target you put in front of your sights. That’s how you landed this recruiting tour in the first place—you are among the most talented people in your branch of the military. The top tier. You are used to winning.

Yet on most days, military recruiting doesn’t feel much like winning. You strike out a lot. You are rejected, told no, and pushed aside. When you are used to winning, what seems like almost constant failure can be demoralizing. You feel out of your element and out of control. If you failed this much on any other tour, you’d be removed from the service.

But military recruiting is different. The competencies, mind-sets, and skills required for high performance in recruiting are different from almost anything else you’ve been asked to do in the military. Nothing you’ve done in your military career prepared you for this battle. For a Soldier, Sailor, Marine, Airman, or Guardsman, it is and will be the most demanding and unrelenting fight you will face.

Asymmetric Battlefield

In the War for Talent, the battlefield is nonconforming, ever shifting, and always changing. It is impossible to control and unpredictable. Every prospect, every applicant is different. Every day is different. You must adjust on the fly. You must be flexible. You must be agile.

Civilians

For the bulk of your career, you’ve interacted primarily with other people in the military. These people understand you and your language. There are rules of conduct, tradition, and respect. It’s challenging but comfortable, because you know what to expect. In the military, there is predictability and stability. In recruiting, not so much.

Civilians—and their erratic and irrational decision making—control your destiny. Parents, educators, and especially teenagers don’t understand you and at times don’t respect you. Military recruiters have one foot in the military and one foot in the civilian world. It’s no wonder why you feel like a schizophrenic at times.

Rejection

Before you deployed, the military trained and drilled you on how to function effectively on the battlefield and manage your emotions and behaviors while under fire. You received a weapons kit—a rifle, artillery, tanks, drones, aircraft, boats, grenades, and so forth. You rehearsed constantly to perfect a response to any situation you might encounter.

Whenever the enemy engaged you or you engaged the enemy, you knew exactly what to do. It may have been a chaotic two-way range, but your training kept you in control and in the fight, so you could shoot back.

In this role, you face a different type of bullet. Rejection. Nothing prepared you for the neuro-physical and psychological pain of rejection. No one taught you how to handle being rejected by a teenager, parent, educator, or administrator.

You can’t shoot back, which makes it feel like you have little control. You cannot order people. Instead you must leverage interpersonal skills and/or influence frameworks to get them to comply with your requests.

FMR versus What You Learned at the Schoolhouse

Remember when you went to boot camp? You were transformed from a civilian to a member of the military. You gained a foundational knowledge of your branch, expectations, military life, and working as a unit. But you were not ready or prepared to execute on the battlefield or for your MOS.

It was akin to being in first grade, where you learned the alphabet and how to add one plus two. You began building your vocabulary, but you weren’t ready to write a college essay. It wasn’t until you graduated from advanced training and then learned on the job that you began to master your role and responsibilities.

Likewise, when you became a recruiter, you were sent to recruiting school. At school, you gained the foundational knowledge required to earn your recruiting badge. You learned systems, processes, policies, and expectations. You learned the language of recruiting. You were given a manual. But the schoolhouse is not reality. It is the basics, the ABCs, first grade.

The truth is, it was difficult to learn at the schoolhouse because it was an overwhelming firehose of information shoved down your throat and many times you weren’t actually listening. Most of what you’ve learned so far has been on the job.

Fanatical Military Recruiting begins where the recruiting and retention colleges and schools of the various branches of the military leave off. It’s designed to hone and amplify what you’ve been learning OTJ.

Will many of the things we discuss sound similar to what you learned in basic recruiting school? Of course. The basics and fundamentals are always in play.

Fanatical Military Recruiting, though, is a masters in military recruiting. FMR is real life in the real world. There’s no BS and no theory. You’ll face the uncomfortable truth about why you are missing mission and exactly what it takes to make mission every month, without fail.

It all begins with a fanatical, relentless focus on prospecting.