Ernest Blogging and Vlogging

I recently read John Zappe’s feature on the $33M for an Army recruitment video game. GameSpot reported that $33M was spent over 10 years (year-by-year budget summary is below in Chart 1).

Taking a deeper dive into the story, I learned that the military combined spent about $700 million on recruitment advertising during the President Bush years. $33M amounts to 4.7% of the $700M, doesn’t see so bad now. But the real question become’s what was the ROI on the $33M of our taxpayer dollars? It’s great that GameSpot was about to get the expenditure info through the Freedom of Information Act request, but when will the RIO start to be reported?

Video games are being use by organizations as another tool to generate candidate engagement. In addition, recruitment video games can test candidate’s skills, critical thinking and technical skills.

Mitre Corp. uses video games as a recruitment strategy, so does Google. For many organizations the budget for a video game is prohibitive, but using some of those “test” budget dollars could be a great way to explore recruitment video games as a way to attract candidates. There are many “video game designers” in college or that have recently graduated, consider a video game internship project for one these students.

Other tools in your tool box (like video, blogging, job boards, SEO, SEM, etc) require a better understanding a company’s recruitment goals and branding. However, a video game just needs to be remotely related to your business, so give a young video game developer the opportunity to be creative.

Chart1: America’s Army year-by-year budget summary

2000–$3,500,000

2001–$5,600,000

2002–$1,862,985

2003–$2,600,000

2004–$3,866,482

2005–$1,288,552

2006–$4,050,748

2007–$2,788,137

2008–$3,887,450

2009–$3,395,702

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