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The Australian Government and prospective Australian Defence Force recruits are ‘feeling the frustration’ of 300 day waiting recruitment times, according to Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.
It's no secret that the country has faced significant Australian Defence Force recruitment challenges for an extended period of time. In early 2023, the Defence Strategic Review, unveiled by the Australian federal government, revealed that Defence recruitment was considered a reoccurring issue across the ADF, APS, and defence industry.
In addition, the document outlined that recruitment was likely to continue to deteriorate without creative and flexible responses and recommended an increase in recruitment speed from application to enlistment to recruitment and the process of recruitment should be achieved in days, not months.
At that time it was revealed that the ADF was 4,308 people (almost seven percent) below its authorised strength – but wanted to bring the wait time down to 100 days or shorter.
Deputy PM and Minister for Defence Marles, speaking to 2GB on March 12, confirmed that the government is actively investigating the recruitment issue to bring wait times down from 300 days.
“We want them (recruits), but… the processing times need to come down. 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,” he said.
“I think part of that challenge is making sure that we look at where the bottlenecks are in the actual processing process… we need to be much more nimble around literally prioritising those areas where there are, where we need to find people
“I wouldn't want people to go away thinking that it's a question about money. We're putting more money into Defence.
“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.
“It is frustrating and I feel the frustration, believe me. There is a great career to be had there… the main message here is that we are going to get this processing time down. But I'd also want to make this point; we will, in this financial year, recruit 5,800 people. So, that's actually people who will end up in the Defence Force. That's the largest number of recruits that have been done into the ADF since 2008.
“We're working with Adecco and it really does need to be a lot better than it is now. And it's not just about keeping the Defence Force at the levels that we've got. It is a good thing that it is growing, but slowly. It's better than it shrinking. But actually we really need to grow the Defence Force significantly and that is our plan through 2040.”
