Europeia Needs Mandatory Recruitment
An Op-Ed by Maowi
The views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of the EBC as a whole.
Manual recruitment is a thankless task.
You send hundreds, maybe thousands of telegrams every week. Of those, a huge part - often well over half - never reach their target at all, due to site members blocking recruitment telegrams in their settings or to the intended recipients already having received a Europeian recruitment telegram recently. And many of those that do make it to a new nation's inbox stay there, unopened, are deleted, or are read and somehow fail to convince the recipient to move to Europeia with all due haste. But you look through your telegram's recruitment and delivery report, fondly scroll through the list of recruits - and never hear from (most of) them at all.
It can feel frustrating to dedicate your time to a task built upon thoughtless repetition, only for it to feel like it makes no difference to the region. Why should you continue churning out such huge numbers of recruitment telegrams? And your numbers slowly decline.
But you only have to scroll through Europeian citizenship applications to see how essential recruitment is for the region. A huge proportion of residents that come to the forum and seek citizenship find the region through a manual recruitment telegram sent by one such recruiter in their cycle of refreshing, pasting, and sending. And even among those who don't, every World Assembly member who then endorses the delegate magnifies our voice in the World Assembly and improves regional security as a whole. Admittedly, recruitment using stamps or the NationStates application program interface (API) helps the effort hugely, but thanks to its swiftness in a hypercompetitive environment, manual recruitment remains vital for the functioning of the region.
Such an important task cannot lie solely in the hands of a few dedicated individuals. We cannot rely on one or two people to push our weekly recruitment numbers to consistently high levels - because when those one or two people inevitably stop recruiting in such vast quantities either due to burning out from the tiresomeness of the work or due to some external factor, the ministry collapses. There are several ways of addressing this issue. Snowball interviewed Founder and Deputy Chief of State HEM on mandatory recruitment for the Europeian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC); according to HEM, in Europeia's early days, "recruiting was seen as you keeping the region alive, and was a social and later legal requirement for advancement" - so perhaps a long-term method of improving the situation is to gradually and collectively make the effort to move towards a culture in which participation in recruitment is almost a given. In fact, that has of late been appearing to be a not-too-distant reality. But a measure which, at the very least on the face of it, seems attractive is that of mandatory recruitment for government officials.
Europeia currently has seventeen distinct members serving as ministers, councillors of state, senators, first minister, chief of state, or a combination of these. Were each of these mandated by law to send at least 50 recruitment telegrams each week, an additional 850 telegrams would be sent every week on top of the work done by recruiters already in the Ministry of Recruitment. This would, of course, be a huge boost for Europeian recruitment. It would ensure a bare minimum of new blood coming into the region - enough, probably, to compensate for those nations leaving the region or ceasing to exist - and allow, during weeks in which the more prolific recruiters have the time, for much more significant gains in membership. The effect of this would not only be the obvious increase in telegrams sent and therefore in population, but also, in spreading the burden out between several recruiters instead of loading it onto a few, a reduction in pressure on those few and a lowering of the chances of burnout; in other words, there would be short- and long-term gains.
HEM told the EBC that it was precisely this feeling of a certain unevenness of workload that led to the initial introduction of mandatory recruitment over eleven years ago: "it was back in an age before any automated recruitment. So there were no stamps, no legal API scripts, nothing like that. So every nation we got was from manual recruitment.
"There was a sense among some members that they were carrying all the weight without getting any help. So it was decided that if you were going to hold high office in the region, part of our [sic] job also had to be doing a small amount of recruitment."
And the policy was a success. "When passed, the measure was actually fairly popular. Only a few citizens regularly opposed the measure, and being "tough on recruitment" quickly became a frequent policy position." In fact, "it really was embedded into Europeia's sense of nationalism that you should recruit if in office." Europeia has not even come close to losing this strength of regional pride, patriotism, and dogged determination to endure. So why was such an effective policy ever abandoned, even though it fit so well into Europeia's cultural identity? The answer lies not within Europeia, but without it. "The downfall of the policy really stemmed from the introduction of stamps and API scripts. It was proposed that the policy should move from mandatory recruitment, to mandatory service of some kind, a more broad requirement since recruitment wasn't quite as important as previously. Unfortunately, the mandatory service program was much more complicated to execute and so it was shuttered pretty quickly," said HEM. And Europeia has not had mandatory manual recruitment since.
Of course, Europeia is not the same region as it was so long ago and it would be folly to take it for granted that reintroducing mandatory recruitment would be successful. What with recent worries about uncompetitive elections and lack of staff for executive government, the last thing we need is for potential candidates to be put off or discouraged by an intimidating block of text telling them they will have to invest time into recruiting manually. The high offices need to seem, in the current political climate, as accessible as reasonably possible. Moreover, even in those days, there were a couple of inconvenient incidents related to compulsory recruitment: in 2008, both the president and the vice president were simultaneously temporarily removed from office due to failure to recruit for a third week that term, and in 2012, then-Minister of Interior Aexnidaral had to suspend President Common-Sense Politics. These events did of course cause otherwise unnecessary hassle in the governance of the region. But sending 50 telegrams, even for new nations with the highest possible telegram flood limit, should take a maximum of fifteen minutes. Surely fifteen minutes every week is not too much to ask? If you do not have this short time to spare, would you really have time to comfortably and securely take on the role of a minister, or of a senator? And could a high executive leader, in good faith, claim to be able to be sufficiently active for their role and yet repeatedly fail to spend fifteen minutes per week recruiting? Of course, certain weeks just get impossibly hectic at times, but there are ways of crafting policy that would allow for such instances without tolerating consistent neglect of recruitment duties (for example, in the days of mandatory recruitment, officials had three strikes per term). And it is also true that it can be fairly complicated, absent a guiding hand, to work out how exactly to set up and carry out manual recruitment. But this is where cultural change has to come into play. Every active citizen should be registered as a recruiter and should have been briefed on the "how-to"s of recruitment, so that whenever they have a chance, a snippet of time, they can dive straight into recruiting, whether it's 50 telegrams or 300 telegrams.
In order to grow in size as a NationStates region, as a community, and as a government, Europeia needs mandatory recruitment. Perhaps then, our elections will be bursting at the seams with candidates, with debate, and with engagement once more, and recruitment will return to its status as a duty and not a chore.
