A recruiting sergeant is a British or American soldier of the rank of sergeant

Sergeant

Sergeant is a rank used in some form by most militaries, police forces, and other uniformed organizations around the world. Its origins are the Latin serviens, "one who serves", through the French term Sergent....

 who is tasked to enlist recruits. The term originated in the British army of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The playwright George Farquhar

George Farquhar

George Farquhar was an Irish dramatist. He is noted for his contributions to late Restoration comedy, particularly for his plays The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem .-Early life:...

 served as an infantry officer, and the characters in his play The Recruiting Officer

The Recruiting Officer

The Recruiting Officer is a 1706 play by the Irish writer George Farquhar, which follows the social and sexual exploits of two officers, the womanising Plume and the cowardly Brazen, in the town of Shrewsbury to recruit soldiers...

 (1706) are drawn from life.
The unscrupulous methods used by some to trick the innocent have been the subject of several traditional songs composed by their victims as a warning to others, popular examples being the Irish traditional

Folk music of Ireland

The folk music of Ireland is the generic term for music that has been created in various genres in Ireland.-History:...

 song Arthur McBride

Arthur McBride

"Arthur McBride" is an Irish folk song. It was first collected around 1840 in Limerick, Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce; also in Donegal by George Petrie. Several versions are found in Scotland, Suffolk and Devon - the tunes differing slightly...

 and the Scots Twa Recruiting Sergeants.

A recruit would be given the Kings shilling as a mark of the contract made.

The term has passed into the English language to mean any set of circumstances which recruits or fails to recruit volunteers to the army. See Daily Telegraph headline
The CIA is al-Qaeda's best recruiting sergeant

See also

• Press gang
  Impressment
  Impressment, colloquially, "the Press", was the act of taking men into a navy by force and without notice. It was used by the Royal Navy, beginning in 1664 and during the 18th and early 19th centuries, in wartime, as a means of crewing warships, although legal sanction for the practice goes back to...
  
  Officially sanctioned gangs who once kidnapped people to serve in the military or navy, usually by force and without notice.