ON RECRUITING: A MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF
MARINE CORPS RECRUITERS AND THE MARKET
by
Daniel Sanchez Jr.
March 2018
Thesis Advisor: Chad W. Seagren
Co-Advisor Tom (Sae Young) Ahn
Cite: Sanchez Jr, D., 2018. On recruiting: A multivariate analysis of Marine Corps recruiters and the market.
ABSTRACT
“Changes to recruiting capacity have strategic implications, as the consequences affect national security.
Maintaining the correct number and quality of recruiters is paramount. Persistent low unemployment rates and
low populations of military-age youth eligible or willing to serve combine as an existential threat to All-Volunteer
Force (AVF) recruiting for the United States Marine Corps (USMC). The USMC should anticipate an increasingly
difficult recruiting environment through the 2020s. This thesis analyzes the recruiting environment with a focus
on the saturation of the market of potential enlistees and recruiters from 2007 to 2017. The data are comprised of
344,469 enlistments in 132 recruiter months and 528 recruiting station years. Three recommendations result from
this study. The quantitative recommendation developed in this thesis is to add approximately three missioned
canvassing recruiters per Recruiting Station, or 144 total, where the marginal cost of the 1,400 potentially gained
contracts is the most economical manpower solution to increase high-quality contracting. The analysis reveals a
quantitative and qualitative information gap and drives the second recommendation of creating an assessment tool.
This tool affords leaders in the Fleet the ability to identify and flag Marines who display innate sales skills
attributes via the recommended Marine On-Line (MOL) Recruiter Referral (R2). The third qualitative and lowcost recommendation is to add enriched as a recruiting duty description across the force. Enriched is a proactive
description of the job of a recruiter and should expand the dialogue of recruiting duty as personally and
professionally enhancing. This slight change in wording may reinvigorate self-selected and intrinsically motivated
recruiting duty volunteers”.