NRC Meets Shipping Goal in FY20

Photo By Burrell Parmer | JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO, FORT SAM HOUSTON – (Oct. 1, 2020) Left to right: Jese David of San Antonio, Alexander Ortiz of Pflugerville, Texas, and Jacob Teran, of San Antonio, took the oath of enlistment into America’s Navy at Navy Talent Acquisition Group (NTAG) San Antonio headquarters becoming the first enlistees to take the oath under the newly established NTAG. David, a 2018 graduate of Robert E. Lee High School, will serve in the Master-at-Arms career field; Ortiz, a senior attending Weiss High School, will serve in the nuclear propulsion field; and Teran, a 2018 graduate of Brackenridge High School, will become an engineman. The oath was administered by Lt. Michael Wojdyla, of Fence, Wis., officer-in-charge, Talent Acquisition On-Boarding Center Alamo City. NTAG San Antonio's (formerly Navy Recruiting District San Antonio) area of responsibility includes more than 34 Navy Recruiting Stations and Navy Officer Recruiting Stations spread throughout 144,000 square miles of Central and South Texas territory. (U.S. Navy Photo by Burrell Parmer, Navy Recruiting District San Antonio/Released)  

MILLINGTON, TENNESSEE, UNITED STATES

10.01.2020

Courtesy Story

Commander, Navy Recruiting Command

Story by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Zachary S. Eshleman

MILLINGTON, Tenn. – In fiscal year 2020 Navy Recruiters across the Nation were faced with many challenges, such as learning how to prospect during a pandemic. However, they overcame these obstacles and met Navy Recruiting Command’s (NRC) active duty and reserve shipping goals.

“We actually over-shipped this year,” said Cmdr. Thomas McKeon II, the operations officer for NRC. “We exceeded our accession goal for this year which is pretty amazing given the circumstances, and as far as individual jobs, we are over 99% for the vast majority of ratings.”

This was in part because for years prior to the start of the coronavirus pandemic, NRC was already changing how it recruited, modernizing technologies and focusing primarily on digital prospecting.

“A large part of the Navy’s success was because we had already started down the pathway of trying to get into the online realm,” McKeon said. “A fundamental part of the transformation we’ve been doing has been creating whole e-talent divisions for that purpose.”

Since 2016, the Navy has steadily changed each of its 26 Navy Recruiting Districts, rebranding them as Navy Talent Acquisition Groups (NTAGs). This change not only creates the e-talent divisions that have been pivotal during the pandemic, it also assigns recruiters to specific positions that leverage their individual strengths, instead of being required to conduct all recruiter functions as they had under the legacy model.

Now, with recruiters focused exclusively on either sales, assessing or onboarding, they can adjust how they operate, to allow for more creativity and flexibility in how they reach the public and connect with prospects.

All 26 districts had originally been scheduled to transform to this model by 2023. However, Commander, Navy Recruiting Command, Rear Adm. Dennis Velez, accelerated that timeline, in part due to the NTAGs success in the current environment. The remaining districts will all become NTAGs by the end of calendar year 2020.

“For the most part, we already had the processes in place that we needed before the pandemic,” said Neil Higgins, the Region Central transformation officer. “So speeding it up was no problem. We had our director of field operations and chief recruiter going to these districts, and part of their purpose was to provide that e-talent and virtual recruiting training to these transforming districts.”

He also said that having the years of lessons learned as they have been creating NTAGs helped once they accelerated the schedule because they knew exactly what to do and what mistakes to avoid.

With these systems in place, the recruiting enterprise was set up to handle the shift to virtual prospecting during the pandemic. However, Velez made it clear that the Navy’s success ultimately came down to the individual recruiters in the field. Their creativity and ingenuity was what was necessary to put people in the Navy during this pandemic.

“We are the only service that made mission this year; the recruiters should be proud,” said Velez. “This would not have been possible without their tireless efforts over the past year.”

The first line of the mission of NRC is to “leverage an inspirational culture to inform, attract, influence and hire the highest quality candidates from America’s diverse talent pool.” That did not change with the arrival of the pandemic, and NRC rose to the challenge.

At the end of this year, Navy Recruiting Command will consist of a command headquarters, three Navy Recruiting Regions, 26 NTAGs and 64 Talent Acquisition Onboarding Centers (TAOCs) that will serve more than 1000 recruiting stations around the world. Their mission is to attract the highest quality candidates to assure the ongoing success of America’s Navy.

• Date Taken: 10.01.2020
• Date Posted: 10.01.2020 10:52
• Story ID: 379966
• Location: MILLINGTON, TENNESSEE, US