A U.S. government-backed recruiting ad exploited what officials said was an obvious crossover in interests.
This led to a rapid intake of job applications that will likely fulfill a key role that has been criticized over the past few years for being at the center of disastrous diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices.
‘We’ve leaned into that community.’
On April 10, the Department of Transportation put out a call for applicants to consider transitioning to a career in one of the most prioritized roles the federal government has to offer: air traffic controllers.
The one-minute ad targeted adult gamers by focusing on their attention to detail, multitasking, and simply put, their ability to take in a vast amount of data through a screen.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revealed on Friday there was an obvious crossover in interest between gamers and air traffic controllers.
“We polled 250 random students at our academy, and only three of them were not gamers. Like, there must be a correlation between gaming and people wanting to become air traffic controllers,” Duffy said at the Semafor World Economy event in Washington, D.C. “So we’ve leaned into that community.”
The recruitment push turned out to be shockingly successful, and after just seven hours, the recruitment portal was almost ready to be shut down.
“We went live last night at midnight — and as of 7:00 this morning, we had almost 6,000 applicants. We are going to shut down the application process at 8,000.”
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Duffy told the audience, “If we’re not there right now, for sure we’ll be there by noon,” at which point there will not be a need for any more applications.
As Return previously reported, Duffy met his goal to recruit at least 2,000 new air traffic controllers last September by bringing in 2,026. This came from a group of 10,000 applications, with more than 8,300 being referred to aptitude testing.
On Friday, Duffy spoke more about the correlation between the gamer mindset and what it takes to be an air traffic controller.
“If you think just what these gamers are doing on screens, and they’re talking, and there’s a lot of things going on. They’re used to that, and that’s actually what you’re doing, in a tower, in a facility,” Duffy continued. “They’ve become well-suited, from the games they’ve played, to actually have a great life [and] job that pays well and can support their families.”
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John Moore/Getty Images
The transportation secretary did stress that the applicants have to be qualified and will go through an assessment process. However, “We’ve had a flood of people, young people coming in that want to be air traffic controllers … this has been wildly successful.”
The department will still endeavor for its ongoing goal of hiring at least 8,900 new air traffic controllers through 2028.
An audit from 2025 by the Office of Inspector General stated that the FAA employs about 13,000 air traffic controllers in over 300 facilities across the U.S. Nearly 10,600 of those are “certified professional controllers.”
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Department of transportation, Diversity equity inclusion, Return, Us government, Gamers, Gaming, Video games, Air traffic control, Tech
