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(October 9, 2002) - Who'dofthunkit? It's a little hard to believe, but the US Army is defining the recruiting techniques of the near future. With a highly downloaded interactive game and a blog, the military is doing things that most in our industry would consider science fiction. Centered around GoArmy.com with its heavy metal soundtrack (music is a key part of next-gen recruiting), the Army's online, hyper-interactive, state of the art recruiting spiel is one that you should sit up and notice.

The blog, written by an Army economist (!), is carefully positioned as a research process for next iterations of the video-game. It's brilliant, demographically correct targeting. The GoArmy.com website shows career paths, options, jobs and role models. If you want to talk with a recruiter, an online chat system is a part of the web offering.

There's an interesting (as in you should figure out how to get involved) program that links enlistment to career options at Fortune 500 companies. Here's how it works:

Just join the PaYS program when you enlist and select a participating company that best matches your military occupational specialty. When your tour of duty is up and you're ready to return to civilian life, you'll have priority consideration with your chosen employer.

This is the sort of advance Recruitment project that will be the norm in a variety of settings as the labor shortage evolves. One might imagine similar relationships between companies and various sources of talent (schools, associations, etc.) evolving rapidly.

We'd suggest that the Army has developed a benchmark for career websites. Compare yours.

-John Sumser