Pentagon Uses AI to Cut Army Hiring to 47 Days

The Pentagon’s Army civilian hiring pilot cut the average wait from 161 days to 47, giving service and agency leaders more authority over who gets hired and how quickly. The Defense Department is rebuilding a workforce it gutted last year, and Michael Cogar, who oversees its civilian personnel policies, presented the faster process as progress.

The apparatus, sped up

The initiative brought together the Army’s Civilian Human Resources Agency, its Military Entrance Processing Command and the Defense Logistics Agency. Automation streamlined each step. AI analysis tools and new workflows cut the time spent on tasks before a job posting from 40 days to six. The selection phase fell from 18 days to four, Cogar said.

HR specialists can now use AI to generate job announcements, vet resumes and present a slate of candidates. Before the pilot, they could spend eight hours a day sifting through disconnected databases and filling out templates by hand. “The HR professional ceases to be a data-entry clerk,” Cogar said, becoming, in his description, “an elite talent scout, a strategic advisor to the brigade commander and an active manager of the candidate experience.”

The pilot’s reach remains unclear. Cogar didn’t say how many people it hired or how the results could scale across the military. Pentagon leaders aim to extend a firm job offer within 30 days of a posting, and Cogar said the pilot shows that target is possible.

Vacancies, readiness and control

Cogar tied slow hiring to national security, saying long waits can leave military jobs vacant. At the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington on Oct. 14, he said commands can take 180 days—or 300 days in an overseas theater—to hire an artificial intelligence specialist, cyber operations engineer or organic industrial-based machinist. “We lose our operational edge,” he said. His argument casts administrative delay as a cost to military readiness, while the undisclosed hiring total leaves the pilot’s practical reach unanswered.

The Pentagon is also rewriting and simplifying hiring authorities so service- and agency-level leaders can tailor them to their needs. Cogar said the department had overhauled 11 direct-hire authority policies, which let agencies fill vacancies in critical fields more quickly. The department delegated hiring authority for certain essential roles to service secretaries and agency directors, who can pass decisions down to manpower teams. Hiring managers now have more leeway over decisions typically handled by HR.

“Using direct hiring authority is not an exception, it is the expectation,” Cogar said. The department mandated that military spouses be considered for open positions and expanded the ability to telework while overseas. Yet those changes still depend on the machinery beneath them. Cogar said an operational requirement can sit in a queue for 45 days waiting for a position description and another 30 days for resume routing. “We can write the most forward-leaning policy in the world, but if an operational requirement sits in a queue for 45 days waiting for a position description and another 30 days for a resume routing, policy means nothing.”

Rewards for the workforce

The department has awarded more than $1 billion in bonuses to more than 90,000 employees it identifies as top performers. Cogar said the prizes averaged over $13,000 apiece and were part of a new effort to reward and retain workers in the past year. Certain civilian leaders and colonels may offer up to 25% of a person’s base pay as a recruitment, relocation or retention incentive without approval from higher headquarters.

Cogar urged Army officials to identify policies and procedures that hinder efforts to build a stronger civilian corps. He called the old administrative system a “bureaucratic fortress to protect ourselves from administrative risk” and said it had created severe operational risk. Slow recruitment and difficulty addressing unacceptable performance, he said, burden high-performing employees, frustrate commanders, drain morale and degrade readiness. “That era is over,” he said. The pilot has shortened a measured process; the department hasn’t disclosed how many hires it produced.