Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Army Times

Recruiters to be recorded in hopes to improve

Your visit with the recruiter may be monitored for quality purposes.

Army National Guard recruiters in Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana are testing software that allows them to record conversations with potential recruits.

Those audio files are then uploaded to a secure server where commanders and noncommissioned officers can skim hours of audio in mere seconds to find key phrases and actions, enabling them to provide feedback and more effective training to their soldiers.

Guard officials said the program is promising, but it’s too early to know if it will work.

“We don’t know what it’s going to do, but we wouldn’t be trying it if it didn’t hold the potential for success,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Carden, commander of the Georgia Army National Guard’s recruiting and retention battalion.

Col. Mike Jones, chief of the recruiting and retention division for the Army National Guard, said the concept is exciting but unproven.

“Anything that helps improve a recruiter’s effectiveness ... would be a boon to all services,” Jones said.

The program comes at a time when the Army is trying to grow a bigger force and ease the strain on soldiers stretched by the deployment demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The program unofficially began in late 2006 when Recordant Inc., based in Alpharetta, Ga., approached the Georgia Guard with its recording devices and software.

The company conducted a 13-week pilot with 24 recruiters and collected data to compare their performance using Recordant’s technology with recruiters who did not have the technology, said Julie Counterman, senior vice president of sales for Recordant.

According to the company’s data, recruiters in the pilot program successfully saw 73 percent of their recruits through tests and qualifications conducted at the military entrance processing station, Counterman said.

At the time, the average success rate statewide was 40 percent, and new recruiters typically had success rates of 26 percent, she said.

The current program involves all the 361 Guard recruiters in Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana, and operates under a 12-month contract which began Oct. 1.

How it works

Recruiters wear a portable recording device, similar in shape and size to an iPod nano, on a lanyard around their necks or attached to their uniforms. The device, using MP3 technology, then records the recruiter’s conversations with potential soldiers.

The idea is to monitor the recruiter’s performance and find ways to improve his or her skills, Counterman said. The recruiter tells each applicant that the conversation is being taped, the device is visible to the applicant and words on it state that a conversation is being recorded, she said. Recruiters can choose to turn off the recorder.

“We’ve made sure to abide by all privacy laws,” Counterman said. All three participating states are one-party states, which means consent is needed from only one party — which in this case would be the recruiter — to record a conversation, Counterman said.

“As long as there’s full knowledge and consent of the recording then there’s no problem with them making the recording,” said Richard Balough, an adjunct professor at the John Marshall Law School’s information, technology and privacy center in Chicago.

The program the Guard is undertaking is not unusual, he said.

“This essentially is an employment interview,” he said. “I think employees should have no expectation of privacy with any relationship they have with their employers.”

However, Balough said a uniform policy on when a recruiter should record his or her interviews would provide better protection to the recruiter.

For example, such a policy would protect a recruiter from accusations that he or she improperly made promises to certain recruits or from being questioned about why certain interviews weren’t recorded, he said.

“If I were on the other side, I would have some concern that I have the discretion of whether or not to record a conversation,” Balough said. “I would record everybody. And if you give the recruiter total discretion, then how are you really ensuring that what the recruiter is doing meets all your expectations?”

Jones pointed out that recordings could prove useful should accusations arise of any wrongdoing during the recruiting process.

At the end of the day, the recruiter attaches the recording device to a USB port and uploads the information to a secure server. The audio is then processed by the computer, filtering to look for specific soundbites or key phrases.

Recordant’s system needs about 8 seconds to analyze about 17 hours of data and find the key phrases specified by the client, said Chris Etter, president and chief executive officer of Recordant.

The recordings can be accessed by commanders and NCOs to find training tips or as a way to review a recruiter’s performance.

Carden said he has received mixed reviews from his soldiers.

“The younger recruiters tend to embrace all things regarding technology,” he said. “Some of my older, more traditional recruiters are a little slower … but all of them embrace technology once they figure it out.”