Some insight from the external:
Reasons behind the infinite delays created by the red-tape"
1. CFRG (the recruiting agency withing the CF), is working fullspin to meet an intake number of about 4400 people a year. For some reason, beyond my pay scale, (actually, this could be explained by the military's short supply of MDs) the medical standards review board only has 2 medical officers, these are the only one with the delegate authority to "fit" people up in the system. Enough said...
2. Security clearance. CSIS ( the sec clear people) his overrun by requests coming from everywhere, my Level II was up for renewal 7 months ago.... Still no answers. Recruits needs at the very least an enhanced rel status and Level II is the standard sec clear for Officers. More waiting....
3. For officers the HR shop in Ottawa is also involved. DMILC's (director of military careers) This is a shop with 1 or 2 people per trade that administers qualified members. For every trade, they must meet once or twice a year (frequency is trade specific) at CFRG HQ in Borden to select candidates within all the applicants. If one applies for a trade that just proceeded with a board, this person must wait at least 6 months before being selected. Even more waiting...
4. Re-enrollee and component transfer. The archive guys, (or the reserve clerks for comp/trans) either at the National Library (5+ year since last day of service) or at DND archives must retrieve information and produce statement of previous services. Hey what a surprise: more delays!!
These are the big 4, note that the medical gets complicated when people have conditions that requires the advice of external specialists.
In addition to all this current fuss about the system, here is a little "backgrounder" on the state of HR in the CF for the last 20 yrs or so...
An historical perspective:
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Up to the late 90's the military had its own medical system of hospitals, with its own specials and the likes. It was able to perform most of its medical on its own and thus didn't rely on the speed of external medical consultant to proceed with its recruiting. When I walked into the recruiting center, I had 1 surgeon, 1 Medical Officer and 1 Medical Assistant waiting for me. I was processed on the spot and the only thing remaining to the CFRG HQ people to do was to "approve" the paperwork. I don't think they can afford this kind of thing these days.
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Also, you have to put things in perspective. The military, in the western world, is only starting to need 'fresh people". In Canada, DND always had more people than they really needed up to a few years ago. There was an Force Reduction Plan (FRP) in the early 80's and another one in the 90's, so the recruiting process when from "recruiting in mass" to "selecting a few".
The culture of the entire recruiting system was most likely affected by these circumstances, just portrait the mindset of a recruiter at that time: "this year the FRP tells us to get ride of 2500 people, so we can't recruit much, in fact we don't need to put EFFORT into recruiting at all, just the voluntary applications are going to be enough". Now the ballgame is totally different, babyboomers are retiring soon, and the new world (dis)order just reminded us (just in case: the 9/11 thing...) that, nations needs military forces to use when diplomacy fails. It's going to take a while before we get to the level of military personnel that we were a decade or so ago.
Facts are there to support these mindsets, as an example the 1994 white paper calls for a reduction of the number of military bases by more than the 3rd of what we used to have. Jee, we even got rid of CF Europe. The recruiting systems was greatly affected by this, here is a table of the before/after the 90's FRP training facilities of the CF
Before FRPs | After
Recruit training: |
CFRS Cornwallis NS
ERFC Saint-Jean, QC |CFLRS Saint-Jean, QC
Officer Training: |
CMR Saint-Jean, QC | CFLRS Saint-Jean
RMC Kingston, ON RMC-CMR Kingston, ON
RRMC (Victoria) BC
CFOCS (C-Fox) Chilliwack BC
And this is just the big picture, I haven't include the closure of "trade schools". Just to give you an example, I was at CTC Gagetown in 1998, I trained as a Phase II - Combat Arms candidate. Before that it used to be given only to infantry candidates, other trade schools had to give their own infantry training because the number of candidates was too high. These days the same course is callled Common Army Phase, which includes most of the land officer trades. Again these are facts illustrating the reduction in training capacity.
All in all, if the system can't train more than a certain amount of people within the same "training block", then recruiting centers despite all the good will they might have DO NOT have the explicit authority to hire people on a waiting list; the hiring must be done at the rate of the training process. So guys like me, that are waiting to get in an engineering trade of the military, might get other offers (and they actually do get other offers...) in the mean time, and at some point, won't have the luxury to "wait" for an answer. Most people have financial obligations to meet.
These are my two cents on the status of the red tape, I hope it gives you a good overview of the reason behind all this delay. Hopefully, at some point, there will be sufficient institutional will and leadership to reverse the steam and start pouring in candidates.
All in all, the process is much more elaborated than it really needs to be. Apart from medical fitness, they isn't much else that should forbid the recruitment of well-motivated young and middle-age individual in the Military.
Don't get me wrong, I think 99% of the people in the recruiting systems do their utmost best with the means they have. I think it's time to change to motto "do more with less" to "you want more, it's going to cost more...".