Enlistment shortfalls lead Army to overhaul recruiting
WASHINGTON — The Army is launching a sweeping overhaul of its recruiting to focus more on young people who have spent time in college or are job hunting early in their careers, as it scrambles to reverse years of enlistment shortfalls.
A major part of that is the formation of a new professional force of recruiters instead of relying on soldiers randomly assigned to the task.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said some of the changes will begin in the next 90 days but a wholesale transformation will take years.
“We have not been recruiting very well for many more years than one would think from just looking at the headlines in the last 18 months,” Wormuth said, adding that the Army hasn’t met its annual goal for new enlistment contracts since 2014.
Last year, the Army fell 15,000 short of its enlistment goal of 60,000 while competing with higher-paying companies in a tight job market and trying to overcome two years of the coronavirus pandemic, which shut down access to schools and public events. In the fiscal year that ended Saturday, the Army brought in a bit more than 50,000 recruits, falling short of the publicly stated “stretch goal” of 65,000.
Army officials, however, said that number still allows the service to meet its required total strength of 452,000. They said the Army also signed up an additional 4,600 recruits for future contracts, in an effort to build back the pool of delayedentry recruits, which had eroded. Those recruits will go to basic training over the next year.
On Tuesday, Wormuth told reporters in a briefing that the Army has not yet decided what the new fiscal year’s recruiting goal will be, but said it would likely be less than 65,000. The lower number, she said, also reflects the fact that the size of the Army has been shrinking from the 485,000 level during the peaks of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
In testimony before Congress during his confirmation hearing, Gen. Randy George, who is now chief of staff of the Army, called recruiting ” the No. 1 challenge that we face and the one thing that we have to be focused on.” And he said the service must better tailor its messaging and marketing.
The Navy and the Air Force also fell short of their recruitment goals for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, but leaders said both did better than predictions earlier this year. The Marine Corps and the tiny Space Force have said they would meet their enlistment targets.
Marine leaders, including Brig. Gen. Walker Field, who heads the Corps’ eastern recruiting region, have said one key to their success is choosing the right recruiters and encouraging successful ones to stay on. The Marines are also repositioning recruiting stations to areas where populations have grown.
The Army’s recruiting increase this year is considered a short-term victory made possible by a number of new and upgraded programs and benefits. But Wormuth said it will take systemic changes in how the Army approaches the labor market and sells the service as a career to turn things around.
At the same time, she said the Army must concentrate on the things it can change since there are many things it cannot, such as lack of fitness among youths and unwillingness to serve.
While recruiters have long relied heavily on high school seniors or graduates to fill the ranks, Wormuth said they need to reach beyond that pool and seek applicants on job sites like ZipRecruiter, Indeed or Glassdoor.
“The vast majority of people who are out there making employment decisions are people who have more than a high school education,” Wormuth said. “We need to figure out how to talk to that much broader labor market.”
She said as more students go to college, high school graduates now make up just 15% to 20% of the labor market. And the Army gets about half of its recruits from that shrinking population.
“We are not abandoning the high school market by any means,” Wormuth said, but by 2028 she wants the Army to have one-third of its recruits to have more than a high school diploma, rather than the current one-fifth.
Part of that is showcasing the Army’s higher-tech jobs with computers, satellites and artificial intelligence to lure those who may still think of the service as just infantry troops.
The other major change is the transition to a professional recruiting workforce. Rather than using soldiers who are “voluntold” to take on a special assignment as recruiters, the Army is establishing a new permanent and specialized enlistment workforce.