This report documents the Integrated Recruiting Resource Model (iRRM), which predicts contract and accession production for both the Regular Army and U.S. Army Reserve and provides optimal resource allocation recommendations for both components. The goal of the iRRM is to help the Army determine the most productive allocation of resources and use of policy levers under the Army’s control in response to changes outside the Army’s control.

An Integrated Model of Recruiting Resources

Optimal Resource Allocation for Regular Army and Army Reserve Recruiting

Avery Calkins, Jeffrey B. Wenger, Jeremy M. Eckhause, Craig A. Bond, Tiffany Berglund, Jack Kroger, Daniel Schwam

ResearchPublished May 28, 2025

The Recruiting Resource Model (RRM) is a multipart statistical and optimization model of the relationship among U.S. Army recruiting resources, the recruiting environment, and Army recruiting production. The model predicts enlistment contracts and accessions and includes an optimizer that provides information on how the Army can allocate its recruiting budget among recruiting resources to maximize accessions and enlistment contracts. The goal of the RRM is to show how the Army can meet its recruiting mission at the lowest cost, given assumptions about the recruiting environment. The RRM can also make recommendations on the allocation of Army spending if the recruiting environment changes.

In this report, the authors present their results from developing a third version of the RRM, the Integrated Recruiting Resource Model (iRRM). The iRRM jointly models contract and accession production for both the Regular Army and the U.S. Army Reserve and includes an optimizer that provides resource allocation recommendations for both components. The iRRM also includes, for the first time in the RRM series, data from fiscal years (FYs) 2019 to 2022, providing the first RRM examination of recruiting after the coronavirus 2019 pandemic and further information on how the evolution of digital advertising and television consumption has affected the return on investment for Army advertising.

Key Findings

  • The Army spends too little on advertising, too much on bonuses, and too little on recruiting overall relative to its mission.
  • Digital advertising (including streaming video) is the most cost-effective resource for generating contracts. The estimate of the effectiveness of cable and broadcast television advertising has dropped to near zero.
  • Recruiters continue to be an important resource, but their measured effectiveness declined in this report’s sample period (FYs 2019–2022) relative to previous iterations of the RRM (which used data from FYs 2012–2018). It is unclear why this occurred or whether it is a permanent change.
  • Bonuses have limited effects on contract production, although they appear to be more effective for the reserve component.
  • Economic conditions remain an important predictor of contract production.
  • The initial findings from the iRRM imply that the Army should reallocate recruiting resources toward digital advertising and away from bonuses. This policy implication is based on the relative cost-effectiveness of different resources.

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Calkins, Avery, Jeffrey B. Wenger, Jeremy M. Eckhause, Craig A. Bond, Tiffany Berglund, Jack Kroger, and Daniel Schwam, An Integrated Model of Recruiting Resources: Optimal Resource Allocation for Regular Army and Army Reserve Recruiting. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2441-1.html.
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This research was conducted within the Personnel, Training, and Health Program of RAND Arroyo Center.

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