Developing a National Recruiting Difficulty Index

📖 The Scoop

The U.S. Army has long recognized that the recruiting environment has a significant impact on its ability to recruit. Successfully achieving a mission goal is tremendously more difficult when the national unemployment rate is lower rather than higher. Additionally, when casualty rates increase or operational difficulties mount, recruiting difficulty worsens. The RAND Arroyo Center has built a forecasting model that provides a measure of the recruiting difficulty with up to a 24-month horizon. The recruiting difficulty index model consists of seven equations. Three of the equations are for outcomes reflecting recruiting difficulty, and four equations are related to the recruiting process and reflect decisions made by the Army in an ongoing effort to meet recruiting targets. The model's structure is as follows. First, the exogenous variables can affect all seven outcome variables. Second, the policy response variables-quick-ship bonuses, Military Occupational Specialty bonuses, duty recruiters, and conduct waivers-can be entered as explanatory variables in the equations indicating recruiting difficulty (in terms of the percentage difference between graduate-alpha contracts and mission, average months in the Delayed Entry Program [DEP], and training seat fill rate). Third, the criterion of mean-squared prediction error is used when estimating the model in deciding which variables to include as explanatory variables in each equation and whether lagged values of the dependent variables should be included in the explanatory variables (and, if so, how many lags). The resulting seven-equation model forecasts whether the Army is likely to face a difficult or easy recruiting environment.

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