Recruiting in the TC
by
COM/RA
Krax Tarnisar/ISD Relentless
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Recently in #tiecorps, the Flight Officer announced that Gamma Squadron was being closed. The gist of the comments ran something like “it’s the SOV. Who cares about the SOV? Even people there don’t care about the SOV.” Now many of these comments were intended to be jokes, but I think they point to a larger, more serious problem within the TIE Corps: a growing fragmentation. This trend has been around for some time, but it’s now getting to the point where it needs to be addressed openly and corrected before more damage is done to our club.
I’m sure many of you are thinking, “Krax is out of his mind again.” But stop for a moment and think. When was the last time you encouraged a recruit to join a unit that was not your own? Say someone who was interested in joining the Emperor’s Hammer contacted you. Over the course of the conversation, you came to realize that this person wouldn’t fit in with your Squadron or Wing for whatever reason. Do you direct him or her to a unit you know will be good, even going so far as to contact that unit’s commander and arrange an introduction, or just generally say “join the TC” and walk away?
Whether people like it or not, the future of this club lies in those new recruits. People graduate from high school or college. They develop new interests and leave the TC behind. Those are facts that cannot be changed. Depending on veterans and treating new recruits as useless or roster padding does more harm to this club than most realize.
Now before people with tons of OVs come running after me, let me stress that I’m speaking in general terms here. There are fine veterans in the TC, as well as recruits who turn out to be a waste of the bandwidth it took to add them to the database. But by focusing on those extremes, we lose sight of the bigger picture. It’s that bigger picture that I’m addressing.
Unit spirit, or esprit de corps, is a fine thing. No organization can exist without it for long, especially an organization like the TC that claims to be a simulation of a military organization. But it is possible to carry this pride to extremes, to a point where it ceases to be pride in one’s unit and becomes a mentality where only people from one’s unit are considered ‘acceptable’ and other units are by extension worthless. In the real military there are checks and balances to prevent this from happening (personnel rotation policies, joint exercises, and so on), but we have no such safeguards here. A narrow identification with one’s Squadron or Wing is very common, and it hurts us all.
A quick glance at the Recruiting Center confirms this theory. Most of the threads there consist of chest-thumping about a particular unit, and many are marred with cross-postings from other units. Again, to head off the legions of finger-pointers, I admit that I have done this from time to time myself. However, I no longer do so, and officers on board the Relentless have been ordered to cease such activities as well. Why? Because it doesn’t accomplish a thing and, more importantly, it doesn’t help recruits who are trying to find a unit that suits them.
In addition to the chest-thumping and excessive unit pride, a fixation on numbers has crept into the system that hurts us all. While focusing on one’s own unit, it’s easy to get swept up in the drive to have a full Squadron or Wing. I’m focusing mostly on the Battlegroups here, because that’s where I’m posted and it’s the area I know. This leads to a “recruiting mania” with a sole focus on one’s own ship. It can also lead to a mentality where inactivity is tolerated simply to maintain a large roster. Again, notice that no fingers are being pointed. It’s natural to want to keep a marginal or non-performer around when the focus is on having X number of pilots in the Wing. But what does this do to new recruits, who come in full of fire and energy? I think it sends a very clear message: don’t worry about being active. No matter what we may say, we’re not going to AWOL you if all you do is sit there and keep the roster full.
This is a complex problem that isn’t going to fix itself or go away overnight. We need to change the way we think about recruits and veterans, as well as the basic unit with which we identify. We also need to open our minds to the concept of inter-Wing transfers, making it ok for a FL from one Wing to make CMDR in another Wing, for example. But first I’ll start with the identification issue.
Coming up through the ranks, it’s easy to look at oneself as being a member of Thunder Squadron, for example, or later Wing IX or Wing VIII. But once a person reaches the level of Wing Commander, a change in thinking needs to take place. At WC the focus changes somewhat, because now you have to deal with things beyond the level of a Squadron. You need to consider the actions of your CMDRs, and you must be evaluating each of them closely. Your main concern should be seeing that your CMDRs are the best you can find, no matter if they came up “through the ranks” in your Wing or not. You also should be looking at other Wings to see how they do things, and see if there’s anything you can learn from how they conduct their affairs. No Wing is perfect, and to think that yours is may be the easiest trap to fall into.
It’s at COM level that things really need to change. While you’re responsible for your ship and its tenant Wing, you also need to be ready to look at the overall situation in the Battlegroups. Communication at this level tends in my experience to be very poor, and that does nothing to help our situation. COMs should be looking to make the BG a balanced and effective organization, not just focusing on their ships with no regard for what happens anywhere else. This includes sharing policy information (how recruits are oriented, arranging transfers for people who might be better suited for another ship) as well as recommending and accepting ‘outsiders’ for command positions on their ships.
This last point is, I think, crucial to improving conditions in the BG. Say a CMDR position comes open on the Colossus, and there is a FL on the Challenge who is ready and willing to assume that responsibility. The COM of the Challenge should be willing to recommend this FL for the job, and the COM of the Colossus should likewise be willing to give the Challenge FL fair and honest consideration. At first this may not be easy, as the ‘no outsiders’ mentality is deeply ingrained. Over time, though, it will generate fresh thinking and new ideas throughout the Battlegroups. It will, if fairly practiced, also lead to a better system of evaluating officers. At first some may use this as a way to get rid of problem people, but fair and aggressive evaluations will put a halt to such practices.
All this builds up to my last, and perhaps most important, point: we need to change the way we look at, and think about, recruits and recruiting. It’s been said many times that the number of people looking to join the TC is falling. I also tend to think that the number of people who stay in the TC more than six months is dropping off as well. There are, I think, other reasons for this, but they’re better presented in another article at a future date. For now I’d like to focus on what we can do to make the BG more attractive to recruits, and how we can keep them here.
Recruits are an asset that the TC cannot afford to dismiss. Time spent working with a new SL is certainly not “time wasted.” To think so is to close your mind to the future of this club. There will always be “duds,” just like there will always be veterans who are content to rest on their supposed laurels and do nothing. The trick is to determine if a recruit is really not interested or just needs a different setting in which to thrive. In my various assignments on the Relentless, I’ve found working with new SLs to be a very rewarding experience. Many of them are now on their way to CMDR postings, and those who couldn’t make the grade were weeded out very quickly. And those who don’t seek command opportunities are turning into very skilled pilots and do their best to keep their Squadrons’ morale high.
Instead of recruiting on a simple Wing or ship level, we should consider cooperative recruiting. By this I mean recruiting as a Battlegroup, or linking ships by game platform. COMs could coordinate such efforts so that the Challenge and Colossus, for example, would be recruiting together. Both ships have different ‘personalities’, and by working together they could reach a broader spectrum of recruits. This would also give those recruits enough information, without trash talking, to make an intelligent decision if they choose to request a unit assignment. Perhaps the overall number of pilots in one Wing or another would drop, but the focus should be on the average strength in the Battlegroups. It makes for more even competitions, and makes it more likely that new cadets will end up in units that better suit their personalities. And in the end that’s what it all should be about.
We also need to broaden our thought focus. “It’s only the SOV” or “it’s only the ASF” should never be an acceptable answer to a problem like falling numbers. What happens there affects us all, whether we want to admit it or not. Sure, we’re Mu Squadron, or Wing X, or the ISD Relentless. But we’re also all part of the TC. We can never afford to lose sight of that basic fact. We should be willing to help people find a unit that’s right for them, even if it means our individual numbers will suffer.
This isn’t the only solution, nor do I pretend that what I’m proposing here is perfect. But this is an issue that must be discussed openly and without malice if we want our club to thrive. If we sit around holding our collective breath waiting for Lucas Arts to release new flight sim, we’ll most likely suffocate. And simply converting to XWA isn’t an answer, either. We need to look at how we recruit, and how we treat those recruits, if we’re to continue to thrive. There’s a term I’ve encountered when dealing with war veterans groups: a “last bottle club.” In short, it means that these groups don’t take new members, and when the last members share the last bottle of booze the organization dies. If we don’t want to be a “last bottle club” we need to look seriously at these issues, as well as some others.