The home and away season may be coming to an end, but for recruiters the hard work is just getting started.

Essendon’s team of recruiters have been hard at work since last year’s draft, attempting to discover who will be the next young gun to join the Bomber family.

The team has set the bar high after the successes of last year, where the Bombers welcomed the likes of Darcy Parish, Aaron Francis, Michael Hartley and Mason Redman in the National Draft, and Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti a few days later in the Rookie Draft.

The process begins shortly after the start of the year, where the team begins sifting through countless amounts of vision, data and other stats in order to create a starting point.

Theyl travel to every corner of the country to watch as many games of footy as they can, keeping an eye out for emerging talent. 

“Whatever the circumstances are, recruiting teams spend a huge amount of hours going to watch all of the talent. Most weekends our recruiters would see upwards of four games a weekend,” General Manger of Football Operations Rob Kerr told Bomber Radio.

“The recruiting team do a lot of work at the start of the year to build a big talent pool and, for the rest of the year, it’s about refining that talent pool and putting an order to it then overlaying what our needs are.

“They not only watch games live, they pour through vision, they look at all the GPS data, they look at the testing data."

The need for foresight and looking into the future is one of the most important parts of the job according to Kerr as well as finding the right balance on a number of different levels. 

“Adrian’s (Dodoro) constantly checking in and having list management meetings to get a feeling from the coaches, myself and others to what we think we need to build a well balanced list," Kerr said.

“That’s one of the challenges. To make sure that you’ve got a really well balanced list.

“That’s not just in terms of playing talent, that’s in terms of player payments and the like as well.”

As important as the players’ overall talent is, there is a large portion of work done meeting the family and assessing the physical and mental abilities of the player.

“It’s a really important piece of the puzzle to go and meet families, you find with experience that the old saying ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ holds,” Kerr said.

“It’s great to get a bit of an insight into what the family is like.

“Then you’ve got the psychological make-up of the athlete and whether you feel as though he’s going to have the capacity to cope with the demands of the game, have the real hunger to learn and develop his skills, and just simply want to be the best.

“You recruit the mind as much as anything.”