Recruiting The Recruiters- The US Army's recruiting command is working on ways to get more people to volunteer for the duty rather than being "drafted" into it. Recruiting duty is feared by most career NCOs as it is easy to fail, hard to keep in touch with what's going on in the real Army, and (for both of those reasons) generally bad for your career to be sent to recruiting. There are 1,000 soldiers permanently assigned to recruiting for their entire careers, and another 5,100 are on 2-4 year assignments as recruiters at any given time. The first change is that recruiting stations now have a team quota rather than each recruiter having his individual quota. This will, at least in theory, make it less likely that a recruiter will have a career-destroying failure on his record. Recruiters can work as teams rather than competing against each other for recruits. The second change is that recruiters will be offered the chance to ask for a four-year tour in a city of their choice. Obviously, positions in each city are limited, but if there is an opening, giving a soldier a four-year tour may attract a volunteer. Families like the stability of long tours; sergeants with teenagers complain that their children cannot graduate from the high school they started in. Other sergeants may find the four-year tours attractive because they would have the chance to take college courses and earn career-boosting degrees. Sergeants assigned as recruiters were previously given a choice of which of the nine recruiting battalions they wanted to go to. (Each covers several states, so the choice was arguably meaningless.) Under new rules, a sergeant sent to recruiting duty can list the specific company (which usually covers one or two states) they want to go to. About 60 percent get their first choice. Recruiters who are reservists can now recruit for the active Army. About 20 percent of those recruited by reserve recruiters now go to active units. To avoid career suicide, sergeants who work as recruiters now get bonus points at promotion boards. --Stephen V Cole