The Characteristics of Successful Marine Corps Recruiting Stations: Leadership and Information Sharing.

Marine Corps recruiting duty is the toughest peacetime assignment for any Marine. It involves complex internal and external factors dealing with global, national, and local issues completely out of the control of recruiting personnel making it a truly dynamic duty. Furthermore, recruiting is an assignment where performance is based largely on quantitative measures. Marines, at all levels, are under immense pressure to make assigned recruiting goals or be relieved from duty. The objective of this thesis is to describe the characteristics of the successful recruiting stations and define how they could reengineer through information technology. Using appreciative inquiry at the most successful recruiting stations, recruiters, noncommissioned officers in charge, and command group members are interviewed to discover and understand the factors that give life to their stations. The culture of these stations is then characterized to illustrate how they confront pressures to meet assigned goals. The outcome is that successful recruiting stations are designed for high performance and represent prime candidates to implement reengineering. Redesign through information technology offers to reduce the organizational complexity within recruiting stations thereby limiting pathologies and increasing efficiency. Recommendations are offered for further research.