Newly Graduated Army Data Experts Could Help the Service Reverse Its Recruiting Slump

The first of the Army's talent acquisition technicians graduated Thursday, the products of a new warrant officer program seen as the second major phase in a recruiting overhaul aimed at overcoming a historic slump in enlistment.

The new career field is in its infancy and is still being hammered out, but it will broadly serve as a liaison between recruiting efforts on the ground and the upper echelons of the service, which make the major decisions on where to allocate funding for recruiting and advertising tactics.

Those specialists will focus on data analytics, marketing and understanding how the service can capitalize on broader labor trends -- as the Army lacks any serious efforts on targeted marketing or targeted recruiting. Instead, the service has relied heavily on generally outdated, broad television-style advertisements and recruiting campaigns that don't reach any particular demographics or region, methods that have not been fruitful in nearly a decade.

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"The Army is ultimately a brand, just like any other company," Col. Christine Rice, who oversees the new career field's development, told reporters. "We have to analyze the market out there to identify demographics and what those people are into and what motivates them. That's the type of thing we're looking at diving deeper into."

The Army graduated 25 warrant officers into the new job and hopes to bolster them with about 100 more soldiers. But the scope of the role could grow, depending on whether Army planners see the early days of the field as a successful investment.

The new talent acquisition role comes after the Army's implementation of the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses, its first major attempt at curtailing recruiting woes, has become a key tool to address recruiting shortfalls. In those pre-basic training courses, the service takes applicants who are out of compliance with academic or body fat standards and gets them up to standards before boot camp.

The service can graduate some 23,500 applicants through those courses and into basic training who otherwise would not have qualified for service -- more than enough for the Army to make up its recruiting deficit. Last year, it came up 10,000 soldiers short of its goal of bringing in 65,000 new active-duty troops.

In a response to a question from Military.com at a press event in May, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the Army's projections show it will meet its recruiting goal of 55,000 active-duty soldiers this year, but noted those projections aren't completely solid.

"There's never certainty when it comes to recruiting," Austin said. "All [services] projected they're going to meet their year-end goal; I feel really good about it."

A major challenge of the Army recruiting slump has been finding ways to communicate with Gen Z, a problem worsened by a ban on federal dollars being used for advertising on TikTok, where young Americans spend the bulk of their viewing time.

For example, the Army's 3rd Recruiting Brigade, which covers the Midwest, underperforms when it comes to recruiting women. In 2022, women made up only 14% of that brigade's recruits, an underrepresentation, as female troops make up about 18% of the service as a whole, according to Army data.

In all other regions of the country, women made up at least 17% of the recruiting pool. The 2nd Recruiting Brigade, which covers much of the South, had the largest cohort of new female recruits -- women made up 22% of its recruiting pool.

A Military.com investigation found that the recruiting slump is almost entirely attributable to men being unwilling or ineligible to don the uniform. Since 2013, male enlistments have dropped 35%, from 58,000 male enlistees in 2013 to 37,700 in 2023.

Meanwhile, female recruitment has stayed relatively flat, hovering around 10,000 recruits each year.

But that data is not as clearly articulated behind the scenes, and almost never acted upon, Army staff with direct knowledge of recruiting and marketing efforts have explained to Military.com. The publication also reviewed five years of marketing materials from the service and found no consistent effort to tailor its advertising to specific demographics or regions.

Instead the Army has leaned into old school-style television ads, most notably ads in sports that decrease in popularity with each generation. Gen. Randy George, the service's top officer, urged an $11 million deal with the United Football League -- despite recommendations from his own marketing staff that the move was ill advised due to low viewership.

"I think what we need to do for our formation is target those demographics where we're struggling so we can learn from them, the gaps that we need to fill in as an Army," Rice said.

Related: The Army's Recruiting Problem Is Male