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.

Recruiting an all-volunteer military is a formidable task. To successfully enlist one eligible recruit, the Army must contact approximately 120 young people. The National Research Council explores the various factors that will determine whether the military can realistically expect to recruit an adequate fighting force-one that will meet its upcoming needs. It also assesses the military's expected manpower needs and projects the numbers of youth who are likely to be available over the next 20 years to meet these needs. With clearly written text and useful graphics, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth offers an overview of important issues for military recruiters, touching on a number of important topics including: sex and race, education and aptitude, physical and moral attributes, and military life and working conditions. In addition, the book looks at how a potential recruit would approach the decision to enlist, considering personal, family, and social values, and the options for other employment or college. Building on the need to increase young Americans' "propensity to enlist," this book offers useful recommendations for increasing educational opportunities while in the service and for developing advertising strategies that include concepts of patriotism and duty to country. Of primary value to military policymakers, recruitment officers, and analysts, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth will also interest social scientists and policy makers interested in youth trends.

The study on "Military Recruiting" explores the complexities of military recruitment and presents them in a global economic science context. It is not only a primary scientific study on employer attractiveness of state institutions on the example of the German Federal Armed Forces, offering a comparison with other European armies and the US military, but covers the theme of employer branding from work-life balance to global economic aspects. For the implementation of the results the two levels of internal and external influencing factors that affect the choice of the employer were determined: "instrumental dimension (objective (pre-)knowledge)" and "symbolic dimension (subjective emotions)". A particular intention of this work is to show how scientific research in civil-military context and civilian use may not only complement each other but also constitute an interdependent benefit extension. The core study covers not only "The attractiveness of the Bundeswehr as an employer in the light of the public good problem" and the recruitment in the military context, but also recruiting in general. Under this approach the Bundeswehr is exemplified as a state institution in the research focus of the recruitment of public employers. The analytic approach, the found correlations and implications may serve as a basis for public employers and government as well as for private companies. For this purpose, individual topics were embedded as self-contained subject areas (see Table of Contents and List of Figures) in the overall context. Beyond that, general government and policy-making aspects such as the problem of provision of public goods and geopolitical issues like the establishment of global public goods has been addressed with the understanding of the attached security concerns to sufficient degree.

For the first time since the creation of the Special Forces branch in 1987, the Army authorized the creation of a new branch, the Cyber branch. With this, the Army joined the ranks of other organizations in this rapidly expanding arena. The Army found itself in a situation where it needed to quickly fill the positions required of this new branch. To accomplish this goal, the Army developed a recruitment strategy based on the Army human resource management model. The purpose of our research is to evaluate the effectiveness of that model to recruit Cyber Operations Officers and to examine the effects of its continued use. To perform this evaluation, we conduct an operational assessment that included identifying and assessing measures of performance (MOPs) and measures of effectiveness (MOEs) based on data collected from Army institutions, a survey of the Cyber Branch population, and the Person-Event Data Environment database. Our research also examined recruitment strategies and practices in other selected organizations to identify practical recommendations for improvements to current Army practices. The results of this research suggest that while the Army was generally successful in accomplishing the identified tasks of its recruitment strategy, there were inconsistencies in its application. Additionally, through analysis of the survey data we were able to identify attributes that had the most impact on achieving desired effects. Finally, we found that the Army did not recruit in accordance with best practices for the cyber workforce and that it did not use available tools to measure aptitude in its recruitment and the selection process. We identify some practical implications and provide recommendations for further research in this fast-paced operational environment. I. INTRODUCTION * A. BACKGROUND-CYBER BRANCH * 1. Creation of the Cyber Branch/17 Career Management Field * 2. Recruiting the Cyber Operations Officer (17A) * B. PROBLEM STATEMENT * C. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY * 1. Research Questions * 2. Potential Benefits and Limitations of the Study * II. LITERATURE REVIEW * A. ORGANIZATIONAL THEORIES AND FRAMEWORK FOR HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND RECRUITING * 1. HRM Definitions * 2. HRM Constructs: Soft and Hard * 3. HRM Models * 4. Analytic View of HRM Models * 5. HRM Models in Practice * 6. Assessing Effectiveness of HRM Models * 7. Recruitment Strategies: Recruitment and Selection * B. REVIEW OF HRM FOR RECRUITING IN SIMILAR ORGANIZATIONS * 1. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) * 2. The Federal Civilian Workforce * 3. Non-government Civilian Organizations * 4. DOD and the U.S. Army * 5. The Military Human Resource Model * 6. The Army Human Resource Model * 7. Specialty Recruitment in the Army * C. THE RECRUITMENT OF CYBER OPERATIONS OFFICERS (17A) * 1. DOD Cyber Workforce Strategy * 2. Critical Element #1: Assessing Cyber Aptitude * 3. Critical Element #2: Transition Opportunities * 4. Critical Element #3: Advertising DOD Cyberspace Workforce Opportunities * 5. Army Recruitment of Cyber Operations Officers * III. METHODOLOGY * A. RESEARCH GOALS * 1. Quantitative Approach * 2. Qualitative Approach * B. DATA COLLECTION * 1. PDE Data * 2. Cyber Operations Survey Data * 3. Data Collected from Army Institutions * 4. Army Recruitment Strategy for Cyber Operations Officers * 5. Measures of Effectiveness * 6. Data Collected from Other Government and Nongovernment Organizations * C. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS * D. SUMMARY * IV. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH FINDINGS

One group that has been hit the hardest by high rates of unemployment over the course of the recession and accompanying weak labor market has been veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Young veterans are completing their military service only to enter a job market where young people aged 34 and under are experiencing the highest rates of unemployment of any age group. HR professionals are uniquely positioned to help both active military personnel and veterans maintain or regain their foothold in the labor market. This SHRM report presents the highlights of the "Military Veterans: Transitioning Skills to the New Economy" conference and analyzes research data on employing military personnel and recruiting veterans.

The viability of the All Volunteer Force (AVF) depends, in large measure, on the Department of Defense's (DOD) ability to successfully recruit several hundred thousand qualified individuals each year to fill over 1,400 occupational specialties. Since the March 2003 involvement of U.S. military forces in Iraq, attracting sufficient numbers of high-quality recruits to military service has proven to be one of the greatest personnel challenges faced by DOD since the inception of the AVF. The active Army, the Army Reserve, and the Navy Reserve, for example, failed to meet their fiscal year 2005 recruiting goals. Recruitment of high-quality personnel is a tough proposition, made even more challenging in the current environment when the nation is engaged in combat operations. To exacerbate the recruitment challenges further, DOD estimates that over half of the youth in the U.S. population between the ages of 16 and 21 do not meet the minimum requirements to enter military service. Moreover, additional factors such as the shrinking numbers of new recruits in delayed entry programs and the Army Army's use of stop loss, which delays servicemembers from leaving active duty, indicate that the components may experience continued recruiting challenges as they attempt to meet their personnel requirements. To help overcome recruiting challenges, the military services during the past several years have assigned roughly 20,000 recruiters to manage their recruiting programs and achieve their accession goals.