Army's Efforts to Ramp Up Recruiting Pay Off

The U.S. Army has already met its recruiting goal for fiscal year 2019, thanks to a reworked effort to attract recruits in large cities the military had been ignoring and through the use of Internet applications.

According to Gen. James McConville, the service's chief of staff, the Army is set to go past the 68,000 active-duty enlistees it had hoped to bring before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, reports Stars and Stripes. The news comes one year after the Army was about 6,500 enlistees short of its 2018 goal, marking the first failure in recruiting numbers since 2005. 

"The Army had to do some soul-searching," acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters at the Pentagon. "We had to look at our entire strategy in how we went to market, and we made some pretty dramatic changes in this process."

But even though the goal has been met, McConville said there was a smaller overall force growth because the goal was smaller. The overall Army will be larger, however, because retention was better than projected.

Part of the problem was that recruiting efforts had still been operating as they did in the 1990s with a focus on television advertising rather than concentrating efforts online.

This year, the recruiting force was bumped up by 700 soldiers, who were trained to find potential recruits on the Internet, and advertising went from television spots to including targeted ads on social media platforms that people in their late teens and early 20s are using. 

The Army also increased efforts in 22 cities, dispatching top leaders to meet with city officials and leaders and pitch the benefits military service can offer young people. 

As a result, cities like New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles marked a 15% increase in enlistment. Other cities, including Orlando and Seattle, did not improve. 

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