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Corps turns to social media to find recruits

When Master Sgt. Andrew Korous arrived at a suburban Chicago recruiting station in March 2008, he didn’t know what to expect.

Coming off a stint as a recruiting school instructor, he was assigned as the noncommissioned officer in charge of the struggling recruiting substation in Mount Prospect, Ill. When he arrived, his staff had just seven prospective Marines ready to send to boot camp, no existing relationships with nearby high schools, no lists of students in the area, and nearly all new recruiters because the previous group was fired for poor performance, he said.

Struggling to turn things around, Korous turned to old-fashioned recruiting principles, but also found help from a new source for leads suggested by a prospective Marine: Facebook, the popular social networking Web site.

“He was like, ‘Why don’t you just look these people up on Facebook?’” Korous said of the poolee. “And I’m like, ‘What is Facebook? Really, you need to just go away.’”

To say Korous had a change of heart would be an understatement. With some recruiters using Facebook several hours per day, Mount Prospect meets its recruiting mission each month, and the methods his Marines adopted through trial and error are viewed as a model for other recruiters.

Korous, now the operations chief for Recruiting Station Chicago, was one of several Marines to brief a group of career recruiters at the Corps’ first-ever Electronic Prospecting Operational Planning Team Meeting, held March 2-4 in Leesburg, Va. Organized by Recruiting Command, the meeting focused on sharing successes and establishing future guidelines for recruiters across the Corps.

RS Chicago is seen as a test bed for using social networking, particularly Facebook, said Maj. Chris Devine, a recruiting spokesman. Its recruiters have accounts they use regularly for their professional duties, with NCOs in charge required to spot check their private messages regularly to ensure they are representing the Corps well.

“If you do your research online, Facebook is where everyone is at,” Korous told the recruiters. “Your target market that you’re trying to get? They’re all online, and they’re all on Facebook.”

On a national level, recruiting command has developed its Facebook page into a complex operation that has 267,000 fans since it was launched in July 2008, second only to the White House among government Facebook pages. The Corps tracks who interacts with it, times the release of videos and other content on it for maximum exposure and garners thousands of comments on some posts, said Christina Whitlock, who oversees the Corps’ social networking for advertising company J. Walter Thompson.

“It’s really about finding the balance between engaging your community and getting them to fill out the lead form,” she said. “We don’t want to replace the recruiter. We want them to contact the recruiter to ask more.”

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