The ADF will induct 5800 people into uniform this year but is still falling short of its targets. Photo: ADF.
Defence Minister Richard Marles has admitted that the department has fallen far short of its recruitment targets in recent years despite an increased number of applications.
In an interview on Sydney commercial radio on Wednesday morning (12 March), Mr Marles said he was frustrated at the length of time it was taking to process applicants to become Australian Defence Force (ADF) recruits, and that “very difficult conversations” were being had with recruitment company, Adecco, to reduce the processing time.
Adecco took over the Defence recruitment from Manpower in October 2022 on a reported $20 million a year contract.
In May 2023, the former Defence Jobs recruitment branding was changed to ADF Careers, and the rebranding coincided with the opening of new fixed recruitment centres in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, and the appointment of a three-star officer as the ADF’s Chief of Personnel.
As part of the government’s efforts to improve Defence’s retention rates, it also implemented a new bonus scheme and improved defence housing policies. The $400 million scheme saw defence members offered a $50,000 bonus if they signed on for an additional three years past their initial Return of Service Obligation (ROSO) period.
But recruitment targets have continued to fall short, with the ADF only recruiting 73 per cent of its target in 2022-23, and an Australian National Audit Office report finding Defence had no effective ways of measuring the success of its recruitment campaigns.
Mr Marles said the average processing time for an ADF applicant was currently 268 days, a figure he said was unacceptable and should be less than half that.
“When we came to government, it was actually at 300 days, so it’s come down in the last two and a half years,” he said.
“But also to put it in context, the target that we want to get to is around 125 days or less, but we’re obviously a long way off that and we need to be doing … the process obviously needs to work much more quickly.
“We’ve made it clear to Adecco, who is our contractor here, that we really need to be doing much better in this space.”
Mr Marles said Defence had received 69,000 applications in the past 12 months, a number he said was an increase of 18 per cent over the previous year, and the largest since 2008.
“But,” he said, “… the processing times need to come down.
“And … we’ve been making it really clear to Adecco who do this work for us that it really needs to be much better than it is. I think part of that challenge is making sure that we look at where the bottlenecks are in the actual processing process.
“It is bottlenecks and it’s the fact that the system isn’t as flexible as it needs to be in actually prioritising those areas where we need recruitment,” he added.
“So … you are going to find some areas where, you know, we’ve got a lot of people and … there aren’t that many spots available.
“But where we have priority areas … well we need to be much more flexible in seeing those areas literally prioritised and we get people in.
Mr Marles asked applicants to “hang in there” as there were great careers to be had in Defence.
“The main message here is that we are going to get this processing time down,” he said.
“But I’d also want to make this point – we will, in this financial year, recruit 5800 people – that’s the largest number of recruits that have been done into the ADF since 2008.”
