Recruiting the New, Retaining Our Best - Armed Forces Personnel Challenge

Figures released by the MOD show that the Armed Forces continue to reduce in size year on year, with the total number of new recruits being less than those leaving. Official MOD statistics  show that between 1 Jul 2018 and 1 Jul 2019 a total of 13,250 people joined the Armed Forces, while 14,880 left.

The reaction in many quarters was to blame Capita for recruitment chaos, and to attack campaigns such as the ‘Snowflake’ recruiting campaign launched in January 2019 to significant interest, and criticism. The prevailing view seems to be that Capita as recruiters have failed, and if this is fixed, then the problem goes away.

The statistics though suggest that it may not be as clear cut as this – its clear that in fact recruiting figures are considerably up this year, with a 13.4% increase in applicants joining over the last 12 months. This seems to support the view that the ‘Snowflake’ campaign has been a significant success in generating new recruits.

Similarly, when looking at the overall strength of the Armed Forces total strength, the challenges appear to be perhaps more complex than envisaged. Taking data for the last 3 years, the Naval Service is 0.9% larger than it was in 2016, the RAF 0.2% bigger. Drilling a bit further down shows that the RN has gained this through more regular service personnel, while the RAF has expanded primarily on the back of reservist and ‘other’ (e.g FTRS) posts, but the regular force is unchanged in size.

The Army is where the most significant challenges are being felt, with the regular army being 1.8% smaller than it was three years ago, and there has been a marked decrease in ‘other’ roles (-3.4%) – presumably in part covering the closure of sites in Germany and consolidation in the UK reducing the need for local personnel.

The real gap though isn’t the headline personnel, but the numbers of ‘Full Time Trained Strength’ personnel – e.g. those who are trained to do their job to the right level in each rank. Overall there is a 7.6% deficit of people against headcount, with the Army in particular running a deficit of 9.6% against its trained requirements. This is challenging and will need particular care to fix.

Taken from MOD figures

The numbers of personnel leaving has held steady (an increase of 20 people over the previous year), of which the biggest reason for leaving is the so-called ‘VO’ or ‘voluntary outflow’ – which is the technical term for people resigning.

Every year thousands of people leave the armed forces as planned, coming to the end of their service careers and retiring or moving onto a new career. The purpose of the recruitment system as intended is to bottom feed new recruits into the system as new entries, who can then work through the career structure, promoting at the right point and in the right number to replace the people leaving in due course.

For the SNCO’s leaving this year, they will be being replaced by people recruited back in the early 2000s and who have been career managed during this period to get to the positions they are in today. In theory this should mean the right people with the right training in the right rank/rate at the right time to keep manning as it should be.

The problem is the voluntary outflow rate which is causing people to walk away. This year 60.9% of leavers (or roughly 8,900 people) left the armed forces ahead of when they should have done. 

Sometimes this may not be a particular issue – for example people in the last year or two of service going slightly earlier than planned, but at other times it can cause real disruption – particularly the NCO’s who may be mid career but choose to go outside leaving critical holes in the personnel structure.

This unplanned departure causes manning problems as career managers struggle to fill gaps in their plots and ensure people are available for different roles. It can lead to those who remain carrying out extra operational tours (e.g. near back to back tours and exercises globally) or it can lead to people having to carry two peoples jobs rather than just one.

Eventually a workforce which is getting tired, or fed up of never seeing their families and not having enough time off will eventually go elsewhere and leave for the outside and prospects of a more reasonable work life balance.

This problem is not new – there has always been, and will always be, a voluntary outflow rate. People will always choose to leave the military much earlier than planned – indeed with the new millennial generation coming through the idea of a job for life is an outdated concept, rather it is a job for the short term to gain experience then a new challenge that matters. The challenge is how to fix this in a constructive manner which minimises the VO rate and maximises opportunities to replenish the pool of people able to do jobs.

Retention has a variety of solutions - not all of them are viable

It feels as if the time has come to take a very long hard look at the suitability of the military career model and ask whether it needs to be adapted to reflect 21^st century career profiles. The current problem is that anyone leaving at mid seniority levels (say NCO or Major) cannot easily be replaced for another 10-15 years as it takes this long to grow new entrants to fill their jobs.

The question is whether it is better to instead look at graduated entry points, for example allowing people with relevant professional training (e.g. engineers) to enter laterally in various ranks to fill gaps where they are, rather than bearing gaps and making ends meet.

This suggestion usually causes howls of outrage – the sheer audacity of anyone suggesting that the military does anything other than bottom fed recruiting is ridiculous. How could you recruit an SNCO and with barely any training put them in the job?

To this the answer is simple – the Armed Forces have a long history of looking differently at problems in a crisis and promoting people in a hurry to the right level. During WW1 and WW2 when the Army underwent enormous growth, people with no military experience quickly found themselves in relatively senior roles, often in areas they had no prior expertise in – based on the needs at the time.

The Volunteer Reserve offers a similar model – today it is possible to join as a reservist and with a fairly limited amount of time committed, promote to SNCO or SO2. If you count the total amount of days worked over the 10yr period, the average reservist SO2 has probably spent less than a year of this actually in uniform doing their military job. Yet they can be mobilised and act as part of the system.

Perhaps the answer is to open up recruitment at different levels using the reservist model – continue with the new entry for people with no credible experience, but each year open up opportunities in suitable areas for technical or trade qualified roles where industry may be able to help.

For example, were the RN engineering branches short by 20 Petty Office billets, could lateral entry at Petty Officer work for professionally qualified people? Recruit openly, then do a short conversion course (say 6-8 weeks) on the basics of military bearing, leadership and how the system works and then let them go and be engineers at sea.

Is it the same as bringing an old fashioned SNCO through the system – no, it is not. But it does get qualified and trained people into the system with the right skills that matter to fill gaps.

The longer the military cling to the idea that only direct entrants know how to do the job, the more they turn off the pools of talent out there with experience that could be of use. Not everyone wants to join at 21/22, and in turn when they do want to join, they don’t want the paycut or to be junior again and spend years working back to where they already are. Why not in niche cases (e.g. not an infantry unit) offer up direct entry to solve personnel challenges?

In a similar vein, why not create direct entry SO2 roles for people in industry who want a career change and want to serve, but don’t want to come in as a junior officer? By bringing in fresh ideas and talent at all levels, there would be a regular influx of people who could help shake the system a little and ensure it remains fresh and able to adapt to new challenges. Currently there is no easy means of bringing talent in, or making use of it within a uniformed context, and in a system where rank is everything, this can be counterproductive.

Is it better to instead take a risk and put people into various joint or common appointments which are less about technical knowledge and more about office skills and working in a larger organisation. This may help generate a genuine culture of free thinking and challenge, rather than relying on people who’ve not been in civvy street in decades trying to act as if they were cool and with the new management speak.

Additionally to solve this challenge, much more effort needs to be placed on retention and not recruitment. Getting people through the door is only part of the solution. The real challenge is how to keep them there long term.

Job challenge is a key driver

Part of this perhaps is about shifting the culture goalposts that sees the military career structure (particularly for officers) as being a means of employing thousands of people in order to generate a future CDS/1^st Sea Lord in 30 years time, and everyone else who isn’t in this stream gets sidelined.

This may sound harsh, but speaking to many ex military, there is a strong sense that the career structure is built around a system of generating senior officers and creating a ‘neglected middle’ of officers who are seen as being written off. The Armed Forces are exceptionally good at squandering talent due to someone having a poor early career report.

The rise in the group of officers at SO2/SO1 who may have done reasonably well, but never had the posting opportunity to show their real talents and potential or those who through no fault of their own failed to deliver, coupled with an antiquated and frankly demoralising promotion system intended to actively disincentivise risk taking or challenge in favour of the status quo, means too much good talent is actively wasted.

Similarly the concept of a ‘bottom third’ mentality referring to courses like ACSC where people compete for a ‘top third’ pass means there is a constant sense of people being made to feel inferior. In a high achieving organisation there will always be some that stand out from their peers, but to grade in such a way where, without metrics like sales data, you make clear to some people that no matter how good they are, they are poor in relation to their peers and as such will only get the worst jobs going seems a superb way to encourage people to quit.

Moving away from the toxic culture of ‘bottom thirds’ or the ‘passed over officer’ would help – make people compete actively for jobs on merits, not the words of an OJAR written two or three years ago by a CO with whom you had a clash of opinions.

Similarly make career management a professional role filled by civil servants for the long term, not a short term ‘broadening post’ that enables someone to do favours for their friends. The current system of posting people in on an ad hoc basis to manage career branches rather than develop a proper strategic work force management capability built around HR professionals, not not particularly gifted amateurs is long overdue. How many good people have been lost to the system as a result of a poor decision by an appointer who let their heart overrule their head? Workforce management and talent management is something that needs a long term investment of people and time, and shouldn’t be seen as something done on an occasional basis.

Finally to improve retention real effort needs to be focused on why people leave and try to fix it at a co-ordinated central level and not delegated down to unit CO’s to worry about. It is rare for CO’s to have the power to change much that can encourage someone to stay – while they may be able to move people around internally, they cannot alter housing issues, they cannot fix people being sent on repeat tours, they cannot look at the pay and allowances package etc.

Not easily done on Civvy Street

Recruitment rightly gets a significant amount of attention because without it the life blood of the military would soon dry up. But retention feels as if it is an issue that is parked at a local level , yet the solutions are often more complex and require tri-service action to fix. There is no one simple solution to retention that would allow people to tick a box and go ‘job done retention fixed’ but there are a variety of issues that overlap and interlink which need to be looked at properly in a co-ordinated manner, sometimes across Government as a whole and not left to unit level to fix.

Solving these problems will take years to do properly, and in many ways is akin to painting the Forth Bridge – each time you’ve got one problem fixed, its time to start fixing a new one again that’s come up elsewhere. There also needs to be an acceptance that many of the reasons why people leave cannot easily be countered – family pressures, changes in real life or just the sense of losing the desire to stay cannot be countered easily, but the things that contribute to the negativity can, with good work be mitigated.

It is welcoming to see that rather than shy away from this debate, there has been healthy engagement online over the recruitment and retention challenge in recent days with many senior officers willing to engage constructively about this sort of issue. This sense of engagement is to be strongly welcomed as a sign of changing times, and recognition that more needs to be done to improve the retention of people.

There is a long way to go, and a lot of difficult decisions need to be taken, some of which may sit uneasily with serving personnel. For example, changing the way recruitment is done, or making it easier to re-enter the system for former service members. But hopefully the momentum is building to support the case for real change, and to really make tangible improvements for people which will improve retention in the medium term.

The answer to these challenges isn’t necessarily ‘fire capita’, but instead to look carefully across a whole raft of issues, problems and challenges and work out how to do things differently to fix them. Perhaps the time has come to bring in some external new recruits into a properly empowered 3* led organisation called ‘Defence Retention’ and give them the ability, and power to force change through across the armed forces as a whole? Sometimes disruptors can make things happen in a way that the status quo cannot.