OCTOBER 2, 2024 – Rear Adm. James Waters, Commander, Navy Recruiting Command (NRC) announced that NRC successfully contracted 40,978 active and 7,612 reserve Sailors to join America’s Navy in fiscal year 2024 (FY24). Our FY24 recruitment goals were 40,600 active and 7,419 reserve Sailors.
“This is a tremendous achievement, and it’s all thanks to the relentless dedication, professionalism, and hard work our recruiters have put in over the past year,” said Rear Adm. Waters. “Meeting this mission is no small feat, especially in today’s competitive recruiting environment. Throughout the year, recruiters faced challenges head-on, adapted to new recruiting strategies, and found innovative ways to connect with the next generation of Sailors. Their efforts have made a tangible impact on the future of our Navy, ensuring we remain strong, ready, and capable of defending our nation.”
Navy had its best stretch of recruiting results since 2020, meeting our contracting goals for six consecutive months between April and September of 2024. By continually assessing and adjusting our effectiveness, NRC identified and closed gaps across the recruiting process that maximized production of highly trained and proficient Sailors for the Fleet.
Through the year, NRC made significant changes to improve recruiting performance, to include:
- A Recruiting Operations Center (ROC) functions as our single source of truth, analytic center of excellence, and troubleshooting hub.
- A Daily Operations Brief in the ROC to align leaders on where we are in order to manage day-to-day performance and share best practices.
- The overall goaling methodology was adjusted from monthly to annual in order to remove artificial calendar-based barriers to steady-state performance.
- NRC overhauled the medical waiver process to reduce the average time for reviews and waiver determination to zero to three days.
- An innovation group was created from the best Recruiters across the country to identify and eliminate barriers at speed.
RADM Waters highlighted that “We raised our active-duty enlisted goal by nearly 3,000 from last year and I could not be more proud of our Recruiters for achieving the mission by fighting through every challenge to contract more new Sailors this year than at any time in the last 20 years. In fact, our Recruiters generated such a high rate of improvement that we were not able to ship them all in FY24…but those new Future Sailors will flow to Recruit Training Command this Fall as we take on the FY25 mission.”
To learn about careers, joining the Navy, and the latest incentives, visit https://www.navy.com.
Navy Recruiting Command consists of a command headquarters, two Navy Recruiting Regions, Navy Recruiting Reserve Command, and 26 Navy Talent Acquisition Groups that serve more than 1,000 recruiting stations around the world. Their mission is to attract the highest quality candidates to assure the ongoing success of America’s Navy.
Courtesy Story
Commander, Navy Recruiting Command