thedrifter
07-04-06, 01:42 PM
July 10, 2006
Success story
The innovations that turned the tide for 4th District recruiters
By John Hoellwarth
Times staff writer
There used to be a bar in Philadelphia where you could get drunk and courageous, sign your name in a register and wake up with a hangover as a U.S. Marine. It was called Tun Tavern, and it burned down in 1781.
Recruiting Marines has become increasingly complicated ever since.
Times got particularly rough in January 2005, when recruiters failed — for the first time in almost a decade — to sign up enough recruits to meet monthly contracting goals. Those goals are in place to ensure recruiters have stocked their start pool with enough enlistees to consistently ship enough to boot camp.
As the months went on, the tough recruiting times continued. By June 2005, numbers for 4th Marine Corps District, a sprawling chunk of land that covers major portions of the Northeast, were at an all-time low. Then, Col. Brian Manthe took command.
At the time, the district consistently shipped enough recruits to boot camp, but its recruiters had signed up sufficient numbers of potential Marines to meet its monthly contracting goals only twice in the previous 14 months.
And during that time, the district was sending hundreds of unreplaced recruits from the start pool to recruit training.
“We took a lot of ass-kicking in ’05,” said career recruiter Master Gunnery Sgt. Mark Holman. “Nobody was willing to just write the year off, but it was a lot of bruises, a lot of lessons learned.”
Manthe could tell his Marines needed a fresh start, he said. “Decisive action needed to be taken at the start of the new fiscal year.”
But, with the district’s start pool at only 39 percent, the shortfalls of fiscal ’05 were threatening to elbow their way well into the new fiscal year.
To stop the bleeding, 4th District would have to meet its shipping goals by contracting high school graduates willing to leave for boot camp immediately. That’s because direct shippers don’t deplete the pool. If the district could pull this off, any high school seniors it contracted would serve to resuscitate the on-deck circle.
Easier said than done, but by the end of April, the district had accomplished just that. It had met all its monthly shipping and contracting goals for the fiscal year while increasing the pool population from 39 to 45 percent of the yearly shipping mission.
New ideas
The district changed its luck by changing its culture, said district executive officer Lt. Col. Christopher Cover.
Under Manthe’s command, no good idea goes unexplored and an idea from even the most junior Marine can become an initiative overnight, said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Henry Cooke, the district’s training officer.
Career recruiter Master Gunnery Sgt. Tony Lester said Manthe — in one of his first acts as the district’s commanding officer — brought all the career recruiters together, locked them in a room, explained the difficulties the district was facing and told them “every idea is on the table.”
Manthe’s Marines produced a few out-of-the-box suggestions that quickly became policy. One involved taking a hard look at the people who were already working for the district but weren’t out there beating the streets.
There are 132 enlisted Marines and 56 officers at the district who perform administrative functions and aren’t on the hook to write contracts each month. It was time to find them an extra job.
During the meeting, the career recruiters told Manthe that a white recruiter can visit high schools in a predominantly black neighborhood and do fine, but if the admin Marine at headquarters is black, bringing him along will help the recruiting effort even more.
Fourth District began rotating its clerks out to the recruiting substations to help the Marines there, serving as living proof of success to potential recruits, Lester said.
It worked, and the district began carrying the idea over to its officer selection process, tapping minority staff officers to visit college campuses to work as “proof sources” to applicants who might be on the fence about seeking a commission.
Unlike the enlisted world, the officer community must have a certain number of minorities and women within its ranks, meaning officers need to find applicants based on race and gender quotas. The more they find, the more they can submit to the selection board, allowing the board to be more picky about the quality of the applicants it sends to Officer Candidates School.
“Where we’re making our money is minorities,” said Maj. Donald Moor, the district’s aviation assistant for officer procurement. “The commanding officer said the priority was diversity and so we sat down and asked ourselves how we would accomplish that.”
Fourth District called Marine Corps Recruiting Command and got funding to bring 24 minority officers from the Fleet Marine Force to the district for temporary duty as proof sources.
Moor “blew through” that funding in two months, he said.
“We went back to MCRC and said we’re getting good returns,” Moor said. Recruiting Command doubled the funding, temporarily allowing recruiters to bring another 24 officers into the district.
Under this initiative, 4th District so far this year has increased the number of minority officer applicants it has sent to the selection board by 247 percent.
Training
Fourth District includes 251 facilities spread across more than 211,000 square miles covering 10 states and Washington, D.C.
“We have a diverse area, the urban areas in Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, and a lot of rural areas as well. We have Detroit, Mich., but we also have Paducah, Ky.,” Cover said. “Recruiting techniques that work in some areas don’t work in others.”
On top of that, 4th District has the fewest recruiters in Recruiting Command, “which makes it all the more important for each recruiting station to make mission” because there is “very little flexibility” for one recruiting station to make up for others that may fall short each month, Cover said.
Among eight recruiting stations, there are 86 substations where the district’s 324 recruiters and 12 officer selection officers comb the country’s schools and strip malls for the next generation of Marines, collectively putting an estimated 12,378,804 miles per year on the district’s 521 vehicles.
It falls to Cooke and his contact team to hopscotch from one recruiting station to another, bringing one-week training regimens with him. But ever since Manthe took command, Cooke and his team have been teaching the brass how to think like recruiters.
“Of the executive officers and commanding officers at the district’s recruiting stations, most have no recruiting experience,” Cooke said. “Each month, I provide training to the command group, including the colonel.”
Cooke role-plays with the officers. He’ll pretend to be an angry mother in a mock phone call and insist the colonel explain to his satisfaction why his son decided to join the Corps during wartime.
The point of his training, Cooke said, is to get the brass talking and thinking about the fundamentals of recruiting, ensuring they stay in touch with the difficulties 4th District recruiters face every day.
It’s working
There isn’t a single aspect of 4th District’s recruiting effort that hasn’t been dramatically improved since Manthe took the reins, officials there say. The district has surpassed both its shipping and contracting goals every month this fiscal year, while front-loading these missions so that there is no “huge end-of-the-month rush” to meet the goal as there was in the past, said Maj. Eric Roth, assistant for enlisted recruiting. This allows recruiters to take more time off and avoid getting burned out by what is widely considered the toughest job in the Corps outside combat duty.
As of May 1, the district was 334 contracts ahead of its fiscal 2005 performance and had shipped 20 more recruits to boot camp than it was obligated to deliver.
Of the officer applications that must come from a pool of college graduates, the district’s selection officers forwarded 128 percent to the selection board. Of those that can come from applicants who still must complete their studies before receiving a commission, the district has sent 120 percent to the board.
The district’s prior service recruiters are ahead in all areas year to date. With the fiscal year more than halfway over, the district needs to recruit only 45 more Reserve officers to meet its mission of 103 and only 37 enlisted Marines to meet its mission of 234.
“It’s a big ship, and it takes a while to turn, but now that it’s turned, we’re heading in the right direction,” Cover said.
“Are our people better than anyone else’s? No,” Manthe said. “But we’ve managed to spark this and take it to the next level by embracing ideas for change. If you don’t embrace change, you can’t improve.”
“Nobody gets tired of winning and being treated like a winner, but we’re not resting on our success,” Lester said. “The tough times from last year are still on our minds and we’re not going to forget that.”
Ellie
Success story
The innovations that turned the tide for 4th District recruiters
By John Hoellwarth
Times staff writer
There used to be a bar in Philadelphia where you could get drunk and courageous, sign your name in a register and wake up with a hangover as a U.S. Marine. It was called Tun Tavern, and it burned down in 1781.
Recruiting Marines has become increasingly complicated ever since.
Times got particularly rough in January 2005, when recruiters failed — for the first time in almost a decade — to sign up enough recruits to meet monthly contracting goals. Those goals are in place to ensure recruiters have stocked their start pool with enough enlistees to consistently ship enough to boot camp.
As the months went on, the tough recruiting times continued. By June 2005, numbers for 4th Marine Corps District, a sprawling chunk of land that covers major portions of the Northeast, were at an all-time low. Then, Col. Brian Manthe took command.
At the time, the district consistently shipped enough recruits to boot camp, but its recruiters had signed up sufficient numbers of potential Marines to meet its monthly contracting goals only twice in the previous 14 months.
And during that time, the district was sending hundreds of unreplaced recruits from the start pool to recruit training.
“We took a lot of ass-kicking in ’05,” said career recruiter Master Gunnery Sgt. Mark Holman. “Nobody was willing to just write the year off, but it was a lot of bruises, a lot of lessons learned.”
Manthe could tell his Marines needed a fresh start, he said. “Decisive action needed to be taken at the start of the new fiscal year.”
But, with the district’s start pool at only 39 percent, the shortfalls of fiscal ’05 were threatening to elbow their way well into the new fiscal year.
To stop the bleeding, 4th District would have to meet its shipping goals by contracting high school graduates willing to leave for boot camp immediately. That’s because direct shippers don’t deplete the pool. If the district could pull this off, any high school seniors it contracted would serve to resuscitate the on-deck circle.
Easier said than done, but by the end of April, the district had accomplished just that. It had met all its monthly shipping and contracting goals for the fiscal year while increasing the pool population from 39 to 45 percent of the yearly shipping mission.
New ideas
The district changed its luck by changing its culture, said district executive officer Lt. Col. Christopher Cover.
Under Manthe’s command, no good idea goes unexplored and an idea from even the most junior Marine can become an initiative overnight, said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Henry Cooke, the district’s training officer.
Career recruiter Master Gunnery Sgt. Tony Lester said Manthe — in one of his first acts as the district’s commanding officer — brought all the career recruiters together, locked them in a room, explained the difficulties the district was facing and told them “every idea is on the table.”
Manthe’s Marines produced a few out-of-the-box suggestions that quickly became policy. One involved taking a hard look at the people who were already working for the district but weren’t out there beating the streets.
There are 132 enlisted Marines and 56 officers at the district who perform administrative functions and aren’t on the hook to write contracts each month. It was time to find them an extra job.
During the meeting, the career recruiters told Manthe that a white recruiter can visit high schools in a predominantly black neighborhood and do fine, but if the admin Marine at headquarters is black, bringing him along will help the recruiting effort even more.
Fourth District began rotating its clerks out to the recruiting substations to help the Marines there, serving as living proof of success to potential recruits, Lester said.
It worked, and the district began carrying the idea over to its officer selection process, tapping minority staff officers to visit college campuses to work as “proof sources” to applicants who might be on the fence about seeking a commission.
Unlike the enlisted world, the officer community must have a certain number of minorities and women within its ranks, meaning officers need to find applicants based on race and gender quotas. The more they find, the more they can submit to the selection board, allowing the board to be more picky about the quality of the applicants it sends to Officer Candidates School.
“Where we’re making our money is minorities,” said Maj. Donald Moor, the district’s aviation assistant for officer procurement. “The commanding officer said the priority was diversity and so we sat down and asked ourselves how we would accomplish that.”
Fourth District called Marine Corps Recruiting Command and got funding to bring 24 minority officers from the Fleet Marine Force to the district for temporary duty as proof sources.
Moor “blew through” that funding in two months, he said.
“We went back to MCRC and said we’re getting good returns,” Moor said. Recruiting Command doubled the funding, temporarily allowing recruiters to bring another 24 officers into the district.
Under this initiative, 4th District so far this year has increased the number of minority officer applicants it has sent to the selection board by 247 percent.
Training
Fourth District includes 251 facilities spread across more than 211,000 square miles covering 10 states and Washington, D.C.
“We have a diverse area, the urban areas in Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, and a lot of rural areas as well. We have Detroit, Mich., but we also have Paducah, Ky.,” Cover said. “Recruiting techniques that work in some areas don’t work in others.”
On top of that, 4th District has the fewest recruiters in Recruiting Command, “which makes it all the more important for each recruiting station to make mission” because there is “very little flexibility” for one recruiting station to make up for others that may fall short each month, Cover said.
Among eight recruiting stations, there are 86 substations where the district’s 324 recruiters and 12 officer selection officers comb the country’s schools and strip malls for the next generation of Marines, collectively putting an estimated 12,378,804 miles per year on the district’s 521 vehicles.
It falls to Cooke and his contact team to hopscotch from one recruiting station to another, bringing one-week training regimens with him. But ever since Manthe took command, Cooke and his team have been teaching the brass how to think like recruiters.
“Of the executive officers and commanding officers at the district’s recruiting stations, most have no recruiting experience,” Cooke said. “Each month, I provide training to the command group, including the colonel.”
Cooke role-plays with the officers. He’ll pretend to be an angry mother in a mock phone call and insist the colonel explain to his satisfaction why his son decided to join the Corps during wartime.
The point of his training, Cooke said, is to get the brass talking and thinking about the fundamentals of recruiting, ensuring they stay in touch with the difficulties 4th District recruiters face every day.
It’s working
There isn’t a single aspect of 4th District’s recruiting effort that hasn’t been dramatically improved since Manthe took the reins, officials there say. The district has surpassed both its shipping and contracting goals every month this fiscal year, while front-loading these missions so that there is no “huge end-of-the-month rush” to meet the goal as there was in the past, said Maj. Eric Roth, assistant for enlisted recruiting. This allows recruiters to take more time off and avoid getting burned out by what is widely considered the toughest job in the Corps outside combat duty.
As of May 1, the district was 334 contracts ahead of its fiscal 2005 performance and had shipped 20 more recruits to boot camp than it was obligated to deliver.
Of the officer applications that must come from a pool of college graduates, the district’s selection officers forwarded 128 percent to the selection board. Of those that can come from applicants who still must complete their studies before receiving a commission, the district has sent 120 percent to the board.
The district’s prior service recruiters are ahead in all areas year to date. With the fiscal year more than halfway over, the district needs to recruit only 45 more Reserve officers to meet its mission of 103 and only 37 enlisted Marines to meet its mission of 234.
“It’s a big ship, and it takes a while to turn, but now that it’s turned, we’re heading in the right direction,” Cover said.
“Are our people better than anyone else’s? No,” Manthe said. “But we’ve managed to spark this and take it to the next level by embracing ideas for change. If you don’t embrace change, you can’t improve.”
“Nobody gets tired of winning and being treated like a winner, but we’re not resting on our success,” Lester said. “The tough times from last year are still on our minds and we’re not going to forget that.”
Ellie