Recruiting Strategies to Support the Army's All-Volunteer Force

This report describes research conducted to improve the Army's ability to use recruiting resources and enlistment eligibility policies effectively to meet enlisted accession requirements under good, average, and bad recruiting conditions. We consider the cost of meeting accession requirements when an optimal mix of television advertising and enlistment incentives is feasible (the baseline strategy) or when an incentive-centric strategy — which favors incentives over other resources due to incentives' faster rate of increasing recruits — is required.

The results for the alternative scenarios assessed — which increase the number of recruiters, enlistment eligibility, or Entry Delayed Entry Program (EDEP) level from their levels in our baseline strategy — indicate that, under good recruiting conditions, optimizing the mix of television advertising and enlistment bonuses minimized total cost, whereas increasing the number of recruiters, enlistment eligibility, or youth recruited during the preceding year (larger EDEP) from their baseline levels raised cost. For average recruiting conditions, increasing recruiters reduced total cost. Under bad recruiting conditions, increasing recruiters or enlistment eligibility each lowered total cost by similar amounts.

An incentive-centric strategy raises total cost relative to optimizing the mix of advertising and bonuses. Given an incentive-centric strategy, under good recruiting conditions, a higher number of recruiters, increased enlistment eligibility, or a larger EDEP each reduced total cost and did so by increasing amounts, respectively. Under average conditions, more recruiters, a larger EDEP, or greater enlistment eligibility each reduced total cost, by increasing amounts, respectively. Under bad conditions, only increasing enlistment eligibility was preferable to the incentive-centric baseline strategy.