Absurdly Exclusive Recruiting Standards

"I see you're interested in joining us. First you'll need to fill out our application booklet in triplicate. We'll also need some blood samples and a complete physical. We'll interview your entire family and anyone you've ever dated, and while we're doing that we'll run a complete workup on your credit history. You'll also need to submit a thirty page thesis on the meaning of the word 'the'. If your criminal background check is clean, we can then get you into our psychological evaluation chamber, where we submerge you in butter, in the dark, for three days and monitor your stress levels. Assuming you pass without permanent brain damage, we'll put your name on a list for an interview."

— Corporate Director (EVE Online), Ctrl+Alt+Del

Elite organizations demand high standards from their potential recruits. Regardless of whether they're military, police, governmental, criminal, or something even stranger, they only take the creme de la creme: the graduates with the highest marks, the highest scores on standardized tests, and the top interview performance... but some groups go even further than that.

For these hardcore few organizations, it's not enough to narrow down the thousands of prospective recruits to a hundred elite candidates. Instead, these groups are so choosy that they may screen this shortlist even finer, until they have only a handful of new members at a time, or in extreme cases, one new recruit per annum.

Exactly why varies: often it's a case of the group being so perfectionist that it cannot tolerate anyone but the highest of achievers. In other cases, the recruits they're looking for have a rare talent that few among the prospective entrants can master to their satisfaction. In some cases, the activity performed by the organization is so high-stakes that only the best will do (astronaut missions, special forces). In a few nastier cases, it's due to Blue Blood class elitism (or even outright racism) at the heart of the organization.

In many cases, there will often be some kind of Incomprehensible Entrance Exam or Training from Hell complete with an Ultimate Final Exam to help weed out lesser candidates... and assuming that the organization really is the best of the best, making it through the tests and becoming a member grants the newest member access to expensive training and resources that make them even more spectacular.

One might wonder how the hell an organization like this can possibly remain operational with so few new recruits joining, especially in the case of military groups that have to replenish members killed in battle. Of course, assuming that this isn't already an Oddly Small Organization that has few members by design, don't be surprised if the group ends up suffering a spate of Lowered Recruiting Standards in moments of dire emergency.

Taken to its Logical Extreme, this trope may give way to the Terminally Exclusive Club, in which literally nobody is qualified to join and the organization in question is in serious danger of dying out.

Compare and contrast Renowned Selective Mentor, in which an individual mentor rather than a group is famous for being extremely selective in choosing apprentices. Contrast Limited Advancement Opportunities, in which it's difficult to get promoted rather than recruited.

---

Examples

Film — Animated

• In NIMONA (2023), the Institute guarding the Citadel City is an elite group of knights that draws its membership solely from noble families, all of them descended from the fighting force established by the legendary hero Gloreth to protect the kingdom from the monsters lurking beyond the wall. As such, controversy ensues when Ballister Boldheart - a commoner - is allowed to undergo the trials and become a knight of the Institute, facing discrimination not only from within the Institute but also from without, with numerous citizens claiming that his ascent is "not what Gloreth wanted." In the face of Ballister's success, the Queen decides to dissolve the Institute's restrictions on membership... only to be assassinated in such a way that Ballister ends up getting the blame. The culprit is none other than the Institute's Director. Later in the film, it's revealed that Gloreth herself was just a peasant girl who actually befriended one of the so-called monsters before circumstances drove them apart, drawing the validity of the Institute's purpose and membership even deeper into question.

Film — Live-Action

• Fight Club: Exploited by Tyler when recruiting men into Project Mayhem. Applicants must wait on Tyler's porch for three days without food, shelter or encouragement to be accepted. In the meantime, Tyler keeps insisting that the organization won't let them join due to their high standards ("If the applicant is young, tell them they're too young. Old, 'too old,' fat, 'too fat.'") One prospective member is screamed at for being "too blonde." For the most part, it just makes them more determined to follow Tyler.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, the Kingsmen seem to have their elite agents fixed at a specific number, and the only way to join is by dead man's boots. When Lancelot is killed in action early in the film, the possible replacements can be counted on one hand and the failing applicants are sent home — no second chances, no lesser role with the possibility of working your way up. Quite apart from demanding the very best from their agents, the Kingsmen are also extremely elitist and only recruit from Blue Blood — one of the reasons why Galahad's attempts to bring in new agents from the working class are looked on with condescension by Arthur and the other traditionalists.
• In Men in Black, the eponymous organization brings in a huge group of potential recruits from the Green Berets and Navy SEALS, plus NYPD detective James Edwards. Z makes it abundantly clear that they're looking for the best of the best of the best, but out of the entire class, only Edwards is able to pass the Incomprehensible Entrance Exam, having the practicality to use the coffee table for the written exam and the observational skills to realize that the "hostile" aliens on the shooting range are actually just minding their own business; everyone else is neuralized.

Literature

• Beast Tamer: The hero's party fire their support member Rein in the belief that he's too weak for the job, but when they try and replace him, however, they learn that his ability to contract with multiple animals is something that other beast tamers think is outright impossible and even unheard of. Nevertheless, Arios refuses to lower his standards. After reencountering Rein, who has since Took a Level in Badass by forming contracts with two different Ultimate Species, Arios adds that as a new requirement for the position. No one he interviews qualifies.
• Lensman: The titular Lensmen are a downplayed example. Despite the discussion at the beginning of Galactic Patrol of how stringent the selection and training process is, "ordinary" Lensmen are more The Chosen Many. Gray Lensmen are a straight example, being a highly select group of Lensmen that no one is considered qualified to give orders to — not even other Gray Lensmen. Finally, there are the Second-Stage Lensmen whose numbers can be counted on the fingers of one human hand.
• The Magicians:
  • Because of the borderline insane requirements for safely working magic, Brakebills has a notoriously complicated entrance exam designed to weed out anyone who doesn't have what it takes... and the fact that the students might be taking the exam without even being aware that magic exists isn't considered grounds for leniency. As such, out of an entire class of potential students, only Quentin and Penny pass, with all others — including Julia — having their memories of the day erased.
  • In The Magician King, Julia belatedly realizes she had her memories wiped and begins learning magic illegally, eventually leading her to delve into the underground network of hedge-witch safehouses and fight clubs. The group that finally accepts her as a member, the Free Trader Beowulf Group, doesn't open its door to her until she has become the undisputed champion of the entire safehouse community and learned secrets that other hedge-witches haven't even dreamed of. Once again, there's a logic to this decision, as the FTB isn't a fight club, but a top-secret research group demanding magical mastery from its members.
  • Ultimately deconstructed in The Magicians comics series, in which Dean Fogg decides that the aggressive standards of Brakebills has let too many promising young talents slip through their fingers. So, in a combined relaxing of standards and peace gesture to the hedge-witch community, he allows a group of Blue Collar Warlocks to attend Brakebills.
• Invoked in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Red-Headed League": A new social club that caters to redheaded men is set up in London, but rejects every applicant save for the client of the story. It turns out to have been a scheme by a criminal to get the client out of his house so he can dig towards the safe of the nearby bank.

Live-Action TV

• In the Red Dwarf episode "Holoship," the eponymous ship has had a full crew complement since it was launched, so applicants can only be accepted via dead man's boots: they have to defeat an existing crewmember in a test of their intellect and skills. Trouble is, everyone on the ship is a genius-level intellect with years of experience in the Space Corps, and there's no lesser positions, as all non-officer roles seem to be filled by the ship's computer. As such, Rimmer has to cheat via a mind-patch just to get through the first few minutes of the test... and the mind-patch was composed of the two best minds aboard Red Dwarf, indicating that even the intellectual cream of the ship pre-radiation leak would have found the test insanely difficult on their own.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy operates this way, at least during peacetime. In the episode "Coming of Age" Wesley Crusher is one of only four prospective entrants allowed to take the final exam for entrance into Starfleet Academy, and of those four, only one of them would get in that year; Wesley failed to get in despite having served as an acting ensign on the federation's flagship (not to mention having been specifically picked for greatness by a mysterious traveling figure). Wesley doesn't get another chance to sit the exam for over two years, despite serving as the Enterprise's pilot during this time. Wesley also blows his second chance at sitting the exam when he misses the rendez-vous with the Earth-bound ship that would have taken him there to save Riker and Troi's lives. For his selflessness and heroics, Picard grants him the full rank of ensign, which he carries when he finally enters the academy the following year.
  • Averted during Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Due to the Dominion War, Nog is accepted and fast-tracked through Starfleet Academy.

Tabletop Games

• Genius: The Transgression: One of the 1e Fellowships was inspired by scholarship programs with ridiculously narrow standards. To join it, you have to be a Genius of African-American or African-Canadian descent who specializes in entomology. Surprisingly, it gets a lot more applicants than you might expect from the description. To the optimistic, this means there are a lot of black mad scientists with a love for bugs; to the pessimistic, it means some people will do anything for grant money.
• Vampire: The Masquerade:
  • Among the more exclusive vampire clans is the Tzimisce: having been hit hard by their own upstart Childer during the First Anarch Revolt, modern Tzimisce refuse to indulge in the mass-Embraces staged by other Sabbat clans even in emergencies, instead relying on their vast armies of fleshcrafted ghouls. As such, the Tzimice Embrace is comparatively rare, and the selection criteria is based heavily in the clan's notorious Blue-and-Orange Morality — though they tend to like recruits of an intellectual bent, especially ones already isolated from humanity in some way.
  • The Cappadocians only Embraced individuals who could abide by the clan stereotype of the solemn, ascetic, death-obsessed scholar — not an easy thing to find in the Dark Ages. More to the point, this model was enforced by the Feast of Folly, in which anyone who couldn't live up to the standards of Cappadocius was sealed inside Kaymakli and left there for all eternity. The only point in which the clan relaxed their standards was with the venal necromancer Augustus Giovanni, who was a controversial choice even within the Cappadocians; Augustus repaid their generosity by diablerizing Cappadocius, hunting the Cappadocians to extinction, and replacing the Clan of Death with the Giovanni Clan. The Cappadocians that survived the Feast of Folly would eventually escape, greatly altered by their time in the Underworld, now calling themselves the Harbingers of Skulls.
• Warhammer 40,000: Deliberately utilized by several factions, normally relating to their elite soldiers.
  • The Space Marines generally have very exacting standards, and it's noted that with some Chapters, only a small handful of selected applicants actually become full-fledged members. Part of this is due to the surgical augmentations used to develop them into "proper" Space Marines, which occasionally results in an applicant rejecting their new organs (often fatally). The rest of it is due to the selection process itself, which might include things like live fire tests or proving themselves by killing a dangerous target or enemy. In-universe, these exacting standards are sometimes criticized as being so time-consuming that it's comparatively easy for a small Chapter to just die out because they can't replenish their ranks. However, those among the failed aspirants who survive their failure tend to form the backbone of the chapter's support and logistics structure, so the waste is a little less dramatic than it seems at first glance.
  • As an example, the Space Wolves recruit from their homeworld's constantly warring iron age tribes, when young warriors fall in battle after slaying many of their enemies the Space Wolves might revive them and bring them to their citadel for training.
  • Mad Scientist extraordinaire Fabius Bile is on record as trying to make the Astartes creation process even harder for his fellow Chaos Space Marines.
    Those loyal to the shrunken corpse on Terra still cling to their own processes by which perhaps one in a hundred neophytes may survive to become a battle brother. The methods I have developed over the last millennia are more stringent, for we must be pure in our hatred and hard of heart, body and soul. Fewer than one in every thousand survive, and I strive each day to lengthen these odds still further.
  • Normal Space Marine exclusivity is taken even further in case of the Grey Knights: not only must they all be psykers, but have to be stable enough to resist the daemons they must fight, and they have to endure a Training from Hell extreme even by Imperial standards. The initial test alone features the most promising child psykers to travel from the landing pad of their ship to the Fortress across a frozen wasteland, but whatever comes after that is pure torture, often literally. Some sources claim that only one in a million shows the Incorruptible Pure Pureness required to become a Grey Knight, and all agree it's one in a thousand at most.
  • The Commissariat generally recruits from orphans, especially those of Loyalist martyrs. However, to actually become a Commissar means meeting the exacting standards for the position: at the Schola Progenium, recruits are encouraged to work together to show how Mankind working together is strong... but are then ordered to execute any of their fellows who aren't quite up to snuff, to teach them that orders are sacrosanct and that mercy isn't offered to anyone, even old friends — hence why so few officers of this rank can be found on the front lines. As such, this is one of the major reasons why Commissars are so infamous both in and out of universe for being willing to kill anyone they view as lacking zeal.
  • The Officio Assassinorum: they take recruits from the elite students of the Schola Progenium, and only from those who show too much killing potential to become Commissars or Inquisitors. Training begins with the journey to their Assassinorum Temple, during which they're pitted against each other in the hold of the ship in competition for a limited supply of food and air, all while they're subjected to random extremes of gravity and temperature. By the end of the journey, recruit population has been reduced to a tenth of their numbers, if they're lucky — and it's not unknown for the survivors to be executed anyway if they haven't impressed their instructors during the journey. The training only gets even deadlier from there, often whittling down the students to one or two graduates... but considering that the assassins that emerge include unimaginably precise Cold Snipers, shapeshifting infiltrators with a gift for the Kill and Replace, berserk Human Weapons capable of destroying entire armies, and terrifying Brown Note Beings that shut down enemy psykers through presence alone, the Officio Assassinorum definitely makes this trope work.

Video Games

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Cryo Legionnaires are taken from the ranks of the Peacekeepers (the Allies' basic infantry, essentially SWAT teams with military-grade training), taking only the best of the best, and then those best of the best are further tested in arctic conditions for years until they can be deployed. However, Futuretech wants only the kind of Sociopathic Soldier who can freeze enemies helpless and then deliberately jump into them to kill them, so the physical aspect might not be as important as the mental.
  Though prospective Cryo Legionnaires represent the top one percent of fittest, strongest men from across Europe and the United States, of these, only two percent of these applicants successfully complete FutureTech's classified training program. Those ultimately taken into the ranks of the Cryo Legionnaires must demonstrate not just the peak of physical fitness and dexterity, but also a specific psychological profile that FutureTech claims is optimally suited to the rigors that these men will face defending the Allies' and all the world's freedoms.
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars: Meanwhile has the GDI Commando. To quote the InOps file on them
    GDI's elite commando is truly an "army of one". Backed by 50 years of tradition and trained in a grueling program that has a 22% fatality rate and a 97% drop-out rate for the survivors (even after starting with the very best of the best in all branches of service).
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is set at Hope's Peak Academy, an elite school whose graduates go on to be the most successful and influential figures in society. To get in, one must be of high school age and be universally regarded to be an "ultimate," the very best in your field or hobby — a difficult task to be sure. Other than that, students can earn enrollment through a lottery to accept an ordinary student as the "ultimate lucky student" as part of a study on luck, or attend an expensive "reserve course" for students determined to be not-quite ultimate but who want the opportunities associated with the Hope's Peak name.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, the Psijic Order is the oldest monastic order in Tamriel, founded during the ancient times by an Aldmeri sect that rejected the transition to Aedra worship from ancestor worship, known to them as the "Old Way" or "Elder Way." By the time of the games, they are better known as a reclusive order of immensely powerful magic users, who have Sufficiently Analyzed Magic to the point where they can utilize magic in ways (and on a scale) unmatched by any other extant group in Tamriel. Many magically adept prospective students seek to join the Order from all over Tamriel, but very few are ever accepted. It is said that the Psijics use a "complex, ritualized method" for selecting initiates that is "not understood by the common man." In the roughly 500 years between Artaeum's reappearance in the 2nd Era until 3E 430, only 17 initiates were taken on by the Order. However, from 3E 430 to 3E 432, leading up to the Oblivion Crisis, the Order accepted an unheard of 30 initiates.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • The Sith Academy on Korriban. It's already hard enough to get accepted into the entrance exam given the comparative rarity of Force sensitivity, but in keeping with the Sith Order's tendency towards social Darwinism, Headmaster Uthar Wynn is accepting only one new student, with all others being forced to retake the test next year... assuming they survive the battle for prestige, which often pits them against unforgiving Sith masters, ancient Force ghosts, creatures corrupted by the Dark Side of the Force, servants gone renegade, and occasionally, fellow students. And somehow, this academy is still managing to keep Darth Malak supplied with Dark Jedi in the middle of a war.
  • The Genoharadan is even more exclusive — not just because they're after the best of the best, but because they're a secret society aiding the Republic from behind the scenes (supposedly). The one potential recruit you meet is Calo Nord, a legendary Psycho for Hire so dangerous that the Bounty Hunters' Guild cancelled a contract on his life... but even he wasn't ready for an offer of membership and died without ever learning of the Genoharadan's existence — hence why you get the offer in his stead. And before you can join, you have to prove your worth by assassinating three of the toughest targets in the galaxy: a sadistic Egomaniac Hunter known for killing Krayt Dragons, a Shapeshifting Trickster turned Serial Killer, and a well-connected con artist responsible for the theft of millions of credits. And then it turns out that the three targets were the Genoharadan's Overseers, and you were being strung along just so you could help your contact stage a coup d'etat.
• Deconstructed in Portal 2: initially, Aperture Science accepted only the very best humanity had to offer as test subjects — Olympic athletes, war heroes, astronauts — and was in the habit of turning away anyone who didn't meet CEO Cave Johnson's standards, including the disabled. As such, it's indicated that Aperture's test subject population was small enough to fit into a single limousine... and worse still, Aperture was even more contemptuous of things like safety standards than they are in the present, ultimately resulting in the "disappearance" of their entire crop of subjects, Cave Johnson being Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee, Black Mesa eclipsing them in terms of success, and Aperture nearly ending up bankrupt. Consequently, Aperture is forced to seriously lower its employment standards in order to make ends meet.

Real Life

• The Royal Marines Young Officer training course; widely regarded as one of the most brutal training routines in the world, only one in fifty students will make it all the way to graduation. In this case, it's justified as it's not just about training people to become members of an elite unit, but the officers of an elite unit.
• The French tactical police force (AKA the GIGN) is so harsh in its selection and training — which features everything from bomb disposal to arctic survival — that only about 7-8 % of applicants make it all the way to the end of the course.
• Air Force Pararescue's training has a 90% dropout rate from an average class size of a hundred airmen. In this case, the brutal training regimen is justified because the Pararescue teams are the people who actually have to rescue other special forces units — who aren't exactly known for their light duties, to put it mildly.
• Strike teams like the SAS are famous for this: their selection process alone clears out 20% of the applicants and over the course of the near-mythical Training from Hell that follows, all but 5-10% of the class are eliminated.
• During the Second Sino-Japanese War and early parts of World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service's recruiting standards were very high, with entire batches of hundreds of pilot candidates dropping out and leaving only a few dozen to a few hundred graduating. This resulted in the force being composed of elite veterans with hundreds of flight hours under their belts. Unfortunately, this qualitative method didn't do so well once these veterans were killed in action, captured, or went missing over the Pacific, with their replacements being New Meat pilots with much less training and flight time under their belts.
• The Rockettes require members to be between 5'5" and 5'10 1/2" tall, with the taller dancers at the center gradually going out to the shorter dancers on the ends. If a woman falls outside that height range, she can't even audition, as one actress who performed with them as a guest lampshaded because she was too tall.
• It's getting to be like this in technical recruitment, with many recruiters demaning ten years' experience in a system that's only been around for five years, new graduates with a decade's paid employment, and insistance on Wibble Flop 14.6.5.667 and refusing your experience of Wibble Flop 14.6.5.666. Many in the tech sector believe this is so that they can offer an enticing salary/benefits in the job description, and then "negotiate" down to the amount they actually want to pay as a "compromise" for the best candidates not fitting the impossible requirements.

---