WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- It may be tiny, but the New Zealand Army is Net ready.
This week, the New Zealand Army launched what it says is the first online recruiting service for the military anywhere in the world.
Instead of putting pen to a sheaf of papers, potential New Zealand soldiers can now give the army all their details in a secure, online application. The completed forms are then fed into a database, allowing swift assessment of candidates, the army says.
"I've got here right now all the paper forms that we used to have and there were 15 of them," said Major Mike Shatford, director of recruiting for the New Zealand Army. "We were making potential candidates jump over hurdles to get into an organization. And the reality now is that for many young people a military career is not either a first or second or third choice."
The process of filling out all the paperwork and having it dealt with used to take four to six weeks. "The form would go off somewhere and it would go off into the ether and there would be about 30-odd transactions as it trooped its way around the various places. It would eventually get back to us and we'd be waiting for a stamp of a certain color to say yes, proceed," Shatford said.
Now the army expects initial applications to be processed in a maximum of 14 days, and a minimum of one.
The army realized it had to sharpen up its recruiting act to maintain its intake of about 1,100 full- and part-time personnel each year. "One of the things we're in danger of being portrayed as is being technologically slow, not up with it," Shatford said. "The people we are trying to attract now are Web-savvy. They've grown up with this sort of technology and for a lot of people they expect to be able to do this."
In recent times, Western military organizations have struggled to attract recruits, Shatford said. "I've watched the Australians, the British and the U.S. struggle. I don't think a little country like ours ... can afford to wait for it to happen to us."
New Zealand's Army has just over 4,500 full-time soldiers and 2,100 in the part-time force.
"The reality we've found now is that you lose good candidates if you're too slow," Shatford said.
He wants the online application to account for 50 percent of the 3,500 formal applications each year.
"If we can offer a way that is faster, that is simpler, that is better and make sure we capture the information straight up, then it's going to be better for us," Shatford said.
