Innovation: Digital communication increases prospecting
April 2, 2014
By Capt. Daniel Hudalla, Atlanta Recruiting Battalion
Knowing that young men and women increasingly rely on Smartphones, text messaging and social media for interaction, the Athens Recruiting Company turns to digital communication to increase prospecting.
The first tool is a combination of a free reverse phone number lookup website and a free application called Google Voice. Recruiters were able to copy and paste phone numbers from lead lists into www.searchbug.com to identify the number as a cell phone or landline. Recruiters send a personal text message created by a template to the cell phone numbers. Google Voice enables NCOs to see every text message in conversation format for easy follow up.
Our second tool is Twitter. We use it as free marketing to disseminate information to our high schools about ASVAB, March2Success and Army jobs. The key to this tool is enticing other Twitter users to interact with your tweets. We use Twitter as a COI engagement tool by providing information about our schools and high school students and to monitor our Future Soldiers. Some of the recruiters are just now becoming comfortable enough with the tool to use it for prospecting.
The next tool is Mail Merge, a Microsoft Office tool enabling us to use lead lists to send personalized mass e-mails. As a University of Georgia alumnus, I created an informational e-mail directed at its current students. The e-mail emphasized to respond with a “no thanks” if a student wasn’t interested. This method allowed us to share more information than we typically would in a text message.
Once the message was created using Microsoft Word, we programmed the mail merge to insert first names into each e-mail for a personalized touch. In a matter of several hours, more than 19,000 students had personalized messages from an Army recruiter.
Although leadership did not count every response, it’s safe to say that somewhere 3,000 to 4,000 responded and about 80 requested more information. Our team is still following up with these students and we were able to refer several solid prospects to local Army Medical Department (AMEDD) recruiters as well.
Our emphasis on prospecting increased our attempts by more than 400 percent from nearly 20,300 attempts during the first half of 2013 to more than 94,700 attempts in the same period this year. Our contacts increased over 300 percent from just less than 3,200 last year to almost 10,300 during the same six-month period this year.
We’ve developed a consistent work ethic focused on broadcasting the Army message and have increased total enlistments despite losing three of our top four recruiters in the company. I expect our work ethic to continue and for better results as our recruiters become even more comfortable utilizing whichever methods work for them.
Hudalla won the Innovator Award for 2nd Recruiting Brigade at this year’s Annual Leadership Training Conference for his prospecting techniques.
April 2, 2014
By Capt. Daniel Hudalla, Atlanta Recruiting Battalion
Knowing that young men and women increasingly rely on Smartphones, text messaging and social media for interaction, the Athens Recruiting Company turns to digital communication to increase prospecting.
The first tool is a combination of a free reverse phone number lookup website and a free application called Google Voice. Recruiters were able to copy and paste phone numbers from lead lists into www.searchbug.com to identify the number as a cell phone or landline. Recruiters send a personal text message created by a template to the cell phone numbers. Google Voice enables NCOs to see every text message in conversation format for easy follow up.
Our second tool is Twitter. We use it as free marketing to disseminate information to our high schools about ASVAB, March2Success and Army jobs. The key to this tool is enticing other Twitter users to interact with your tweets. We use Twitter as a COI engagement tool by providing information about our schools and high school students and to monitor our Future Soldiers. Some of the recruiters are just now becoming comfortable enough with the tool to use it for prospecting.
The next tool is Mail Merge, a Microsoft Office tool enabling us to use lead lists to send personalized mass e-mails. As a University of Georgia alumnus, I created an informational e-mail directed at its current students. The e-mail emphasized to respond with a “no thanks” if a student wasn’t interested. This method allowed us to share more information than we typically would in a text message.
Once the message was created using Microsoft Word, we programmed the mail merge to insert first names into each e-mail for a personalized touch. In a matter of several hours, more than 19,000 students had personalized messages from an Army recruiter.
Although leadership did not count every response, it’s safe to say that somewhere 3,000 to 4,000 responded and about 80 requested more information. Our team is still following up with these students and we were able to refer several solid prospects to local Army Medical Department (AMEDD) recruiters as well.
Our emphasis on prospecting increased our attempts by more than 400 percent from nearly 20,300 attempts during the first half of 2013 to more than 94,700 attempts in the same period this year. Our contacts increased over 300 percent from just less than 3,200 last year to almost 10,300 during the same six-month period this year.
We’ve developed a consistent work ethic focused on broadcasting the Army message and have increased total enlistments despite losing three of our top four recruiters in the company. I expect our work ethic to continue and for better results as our recruiters become even more comfortable utilizing whichever methods work for them.
Hudalla won the Innovator Award for 2nd Recruiting Brigade at this year’s Annual Leadership Training Conference for his prospecting techniques.