Targeted Recruitment: SEALs

The Navy SEALs are more interested in endurance athletes than in linebackers. An excerpt from the Outside article:

Making BUD/S easier so that more men could pass (the SEALs don't take women) simply wasn't an option. "Compromising quality risks mission failure, or American lives, or both," Captain Herbert, the commanding officer of the training center, explained. "That would be just immoral." The obvious solution was finding better recruits. When Smith started looking behind the numbers at BUD/S and discovered that triathletes were graduating at a rate of better than 40 percent, he had an idea of where to find them. "If you look at who our guys are and the things they do on the weekends—triathlons, climbing, open-ocean swims—they get out there," he explained. Smith, who runs a SEAL mountain-bike team and once competed in events like the Eco-Challenge and the X Games as a Salomon-sponsored athlete, decided to take advantage of that fact by simply advertising it.

Over the past year and a half, he or members of his staff of 28, supplemented by SEALs with backgrounds in the relevant sports, have started showing up at endurance events, sometimes competing, sometimes just manning information tables. "It's about the right information conveyed by the right messenger, in this case an athlete talking to another athlete, who also happens to be a SEAL," Smith says.