The first of the Army‘s talent acquisition technicians graduated Thursday, the products of a new warrant officer program seen as the second major phase in a recruiting overhaul aimed at overcoming a historic slump in enlistment.
The new career field is in its infancy and is still being hammered out, but it will broadly serve as a liaison between recruiting efforts on the ground and the upper echelons of the service, which make the major decisions on where to allocate funding for recruiting and advertising tactics.
Those specialists will focus on data analytics, marketing and understanding how the service can capitalize on broader labor trends — as the Army lacks any serious efforts on targeted marketing or targeted recruiting. Instead, the service has relied heavily on generally outdated, broad television-style advertisements and recruiting campaigns that don’t reach any particular demographics or region, methods that have not been fruitful in nearly a decade.
Read Next: Feds Say Air Force Employee Skipped Key Maintenance Ahead of 2017 Plane Crash that Killed 16 Troops
“The Army is ultimately a brand, just like any other company,” Col. Christine Rice, who oversees the new career field’s development, told reporters. “We have to analyze the market out there to identify demographics and what those people are into and what motivates them. That’s the type of thing we’re looking at diving deeper into.”
The Army graduated 25 warrant…
