In the spring of 1994, the Army Chief of Staff and the Deputy Secretary of Defense asked RAND to examine recent trends in the recruiting market and assess their implications for meeting accession requirements. The request for assistance came about because of indications of increased difficulty in meeting recruiting goals. It consisted of two parts: (1) a quick initial examination of the trends and (2) a longer-term research agenda to study the recruiting outlook in depth. The results of the preliminary examination were briefed in May 1994 and are described in MR-549-A/OSD, Recent Recruiting Trends and Their Implications: Preliminary Analysis and Recommendations (Asch and Orvis, 1994) This report presents results from the longer-term analysis. In it we describe recruiter incentive plans in each service and how they have changed over time. Its findings should interest planners and policymakers concerned with recruiting. Additional results from the longer-term analysis are described in MR-677-A/OSD, Military Recruiting Outlook: Recent Trends in Enlistment Propensity and Conversion of Potential Enlisted Supply (Orvis, Sastry, and McDonald, 1996) and other documents that will be forthcoming as part of this project. This research was conducted within the Manpower and Training Program, part of RAND's Arroyo Center, and within the Forces and Resources Policy Center, part of RAND's National Defense Research Institute. The Arroyo Center and the National Defense Research Institute are both federally funded research and development centers, the first sponsored by the United States Army and the second by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the defense agencies.

Planners and policymakers concerned with recruiting have seen indications of increased difficulty in meeting recruiting goals. To examine this potential problem, the report reviews, in considerable detail, service by service, the evolution of recruiter incentive plans over the last 15 to 20 years, describing how these plans have changed over time. There is a great deal of variation in incentive plans across services, possibly due to such causes as service culture or changes associated with the drawdown. This variety suggests that the services have been struggling over time to find the best incentive plans to fit their needs.

U.S. Army Recruiting Command is faced with the challenge of ensuring that the flow of qualified volunteers is adequate to meet future active-duty accession requirements. This report documents research methods, findings, and policy conclusions from a project analyzing human resource management options for improving recruiting production. It details research designed to develop new insights to help guide future recruiter management policies.

Traditional performance metrics, such as number of contracts signed per month per Army recruiter, do not adequately measure recruiter effort, skill, and productivity. The authors develop a "preferred performance metric" that takes into account the difficulty of recruiting different types of youth in various markets and propose short-term changes to the system that would more accurately assess recruiter effort and skill.