The whole CF recruiting system is broken, as we all know. I agree with all the statements on holding people's feet to the fire for not making mission when there is such a dire need for recruits to be walking through the door and start getting trained.
The US army example that started this topic is a bad example although it exists in many places. The army here does not train their recruiters to the same degree as those in other branches of service. In the Marines, recruiters have to attend a seven week school in San Diego in order to go to recruiting duty. It is a job that is taken very seriously. The school is basically a big sales course and they teach you about human psychology etc...The Marines sell the Marine Corps; the Army gives you money to join.
The CF needs a similar approach, once the processing structure is fixed. One big problem that I see with the CF recruiting is this concept that certain levels of processing needs to be centralized. If the bottle neck is at Borden, then decentralize the process and regionalize it. Commanders need to be looking at the effect on the ground from all of this backlog.
Quotas are a good idea. It gives recruiters a goal to work toward. Recruiting performance needs to be linked to career progression. Having said that, the tools to achieve this also need to be at the disposal of the recruiter. It makes no sense to set career linked recruiting goals and then tie the recruiter's hands behind his back. The Commanders need to empower the recruiter and set them up for success. If he fails, then he was not using all the tools at his disposal etc. There are always exceptions to this depending on region etc...
Now, someone pointed out how some regions you can recruit easily while other regions, one will experience difficulty. I agree, but recruiting goals should not be set regionally. Every Marine recruiter is required to produce two contracts a month. That means, he has to find two people who meet all the elegibility criteria, pass the tests, medical etc...and sign a contract saying they will enter into the Marines for four years etc...every month. This is regardless of your geographic region.
An example of this is Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas vice Aroostook County, Maine. In Dallas, the applicants are lined up at the door and all the recruiter does, is select the most qualified applicant who shows up. In Aroostook County, the recruiter has to continuously comb the region for applicants. They are far and few between but they are there somewhere. The minimum quota for both recruiters is still two contracts a month. At the end of the year, both recruiters will have an annual percentage rating assigned to him based on the number of overall contracts he wrote. If he fell short in one month but was able to make it up the next, then his APR will not be adversly affected. There is still a lot more to it than that but this is just the basics of how recruiting at the pointy end is done.
The CF just needs to put a team together and come down to the US and see how processing is done and how recruiting in the Marines is done and then go back and adapt those components of our system that best fits the CF to correct the present problems.
As for the US Army recruiters, the army believes in the concept of more is better regardless of quality. In the Marines, we are always taught to do more with less, as a result, we end up with better quality over all.
PJ D-Dog
