Transformation: Evolving the business of Navy Recruiting

Photo By Petty Officer 3rd Class Elijah Newton | 190920-N-FS414-0001 MILLINGTON, Tenn. (September 20, 2019) Some people are extroverts. Some people are organizers. Some people do well with numbers, while others do well with customer service. Matching the right person with the right skills to the right job is something the Navy does well, and in line with this, Navy recruiting is transforming the way it does business by aligning its recruiters with their strengths. (U.S. Navy illustration by MCSA Elijah Newton/Released)  

MILLINGTON, TN, UNITED STATES

09.04.2019

Story by Petty Officer 3rd Class Preston Jarrett 

Commander, Navy Recruiting Command

By Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Preston Jarrett, Navy Recruiting Command Public Affairs

MILLINGTON, Tenn. – Some people are extroverts. Some people are organizers. Some people do well with numbers, while others do well with customer service. Matching the right person with the right skills to the right job is something the Navy does well, and in line with this, Navy recruiting is transforming the way it does business by aligning its recruiters with their strengths.

Under the legacy model of recruiting, recruiters were required to cover a broad list of jobs and responsibilities that didn’t always match their strengths. The overwhelming stress they experienced from this jack-of-all-trades assignment motivated their leadership to develop a more effective way to achieve mission.

Transforming:

Senior experts in the field came up with a concept to categorize and split recruiters’ tasks into three separate recruiting disciplines; talent scouts, assessing, and onboarding. Under the old NRD (Navy Recruiting District) construct, recruiters had to focus on and be experts in all of the aspects of the three disciplines, but under the new concept recruiters refine their focus to only the details of the discipline they work under. Once an NRD has transformed into the new model, it is rebranded from an NRD to a Navy Talent Acquisition Group (NTAG).

“What we’ve seen unequivocally is increased job satisfaction from our recruiters,” said Capt. Christian Stover, former director of field operations for Navy Recruiting Command. “We’ve seen improved production outputs, mission accomplishment, contribution to the mission and a sense of teamwork.”

It wasn’t enough to just get better at what we were doing, said Stover.

“We had to deliberately increase the quality of life of our recruiters. We still had increasing mission requirements, so to do more with less in an environment of diminishing resources, we needed to do something different to meet those requirements.”
Navy Recruiting Command, comprised of some of the highest ranked personnel involved with recruiting, eventually decided on a model to simplify the recruiting process and divide the workload in a more manageable fashion, said Stover. This also allows recruiters’ strengths and skillsets to be matched to one of the three disciplines that best fits. This places the right recruiter in the right job for the mission.

“The primary theory of our transformation effort is to leverage the efficiencies and talent match of our recruiters,” said Stover. “In our legacy recruiting model, a recruiter had to be great at everything in order to be defined as a successful recruiter, but that’s not realistic. Some of them have different talent matches, so under our functional specialization model, we’re able to match those talents to what recruiters are required to do.”

Changing Curriculum:

NRD Portland was the first to undergo the transformation into becoming an NTAG, but the need for revision became apparent after implementing the new procedures, said Stover.

“There were sound principles that we believed would work, but there were some second and third-order effects that could not have been envisioned or in execution did not deliver the results we anticipated,” said Stover. “Once the field began executing under the model, we were given responses back from the lessons learned and developed the system we now are operating under, which is our transformation 2.0 model.”

Both new and senior recruiters are trained at Navy Recruiting Orientation Unit (NORU), and Stover attributes the system’s prosperity to NORU’s consistently evolving approach to education.

“They’re absolutely critical and essential to our transformation success because they drive the curriculum that trains our new transformation model to those students and our career recruiters,” said Stover. “They oversee our RTI (Recruit Tactics Instructor) program. These are cadre career recruiters that are embedded in our transformation organizations. They provide our recruiters on-site, on-the-job training at the highest levels. They’re able to take lessons learned in execution from the field back to the schoolhouse at NORU to develop new curriculum and ensure that we stay relevant with current practices.”

As is common with long-term changes, persistence has been an important part of making the transition work. Though the conversion was initially met with difficulties, Stover said it proved to be ultimately rewarding.

“There have been some highs and lows throughout our journey, and it takes time and leadership to truly appreciate and understand that success may not be seen immediately,” said Stover. “It would’ve been easy to say ‘OK, let’s go back to the way we used to do business,’ but our organization stayed the course, saw the vision and ensured that we had the tools and resources available to make this journey successful.”

Improving Lives:

Stover said that with dedication and time, the change has significantly improved morale and work performance.

“We ask recruiters anonymously on surveys of their thoughts, and they have come back with real answers such as: ‘Transformation saved my marriage’; ‘I can actually have dinner with my family’; ‘I have control of my schedule’; ‘I can actually go to school’; ‘I couldn’t wait to leave recruiting until we transformed,’” said Stover. “These are real responses from real recruiters who absolutely defined that their quality of life has improved.”

With an overall positive outcome, Stover said that recruiting leadership will continue to assimilate information from the field and develop the transformation process.

“The future of transformation is very bright,” said Stover. “I will say that even within the last six months, we have met an exponential curve of production output. It was a slow start, to be honest, but as the field has bought into the program, and as the culture has changed, the field is executing at levels that we have never seen before.”

Since Portland, eight more NRDs have transformed into NTAGs: Nashville, New Orleans, Northern Plains (Minneapolis), Ohio River Valley, Pacific Northwest (Seattle), Pittsburgh, Rocky Mountain (Denver) and Houston. With increases seen in recruiters’ happiness and working efficiency, transformation has shown to be a fruitful endeavor. NRDs will eventually become obsolete as specialized and more organized methods of recruiting become the Navy-wide standard.

Navy Recruiting Command consists of a command headquarters, three Navy Recruiting Regions, 17 Navy Recruiting Districts and nine Navy Talent Acquisition Groups that serve more than 1,330 recruiting stations across the world. Their combined goal is to attract the highest quality candidates to assure the ongoing success of America’s Navy.

For more news from Commander, Navy Recruiting Command, go to http://www.cnrc.navy.mil. Follow Navy Recruiting on Facebook (www.facebook.com/NavyRecruiting), Twitter (@USNRecruiter) and Instagram (@USNRecruiter).

• Date Taken: 09.04.2019
• Date Posted: 09.06.2019 16:54
• Story ID: 338785
• Location: MILLINGTON, TN, US