Over the past couple of years, tremendous attention has been paid to the U.S. Army’s failure to meet its recruiting goals. The Army has rightly looked at increasing signing bonuses, enhancing workforce training opportunities and improving military career progression and housing options.

Some debate has arisen over bettering the Army’s social media presence to respond to criticism of the military becoming too “woke” or not “sensitive” enough to social justice concerns of potential new recruits.

But one major aspect of improving Army recruiting clearly needs more attention—how the Army makes the recruiting process too bureaucratic and hampers its own recruitment.

Inefficient Process

Last year, my nephew went through the process of joining the Army. I was struck by how inefficient the Army recruiting process was. My nephew was motivated to become an American soldier, and I am happy he’s now a private in the combat engineers. Signing bonuses, special career progression programs and housing options were not major concerns for my nephew. He wanted to serve in the Army and was ready to ship to basic training immediately.

Yet the Army recruiting process still took him multiple meetings, phone calls, endless paperwork, unanswered questions and months of waiting before getting him to basic training.

With a recruiting shortfall, I was surprised at how difficult and bureaucratic it is to bring a motivated young person into the Army, let alone a potential recruit who may be on the fence about joining the military.

When I joined the Army decades ago, in the pre-mobile phone era, I understood that a certain amount of paperwork and inefficiency just came with life. In the years since then, American industry has rapidly advanced to a new level of efficiency. But I am surprised that the Army still takes a tremendous amount of time and paperwork to bring in an individual to a service that seems stuck in the late 20th century.

Private-Sector Speed

Today, in the modern economy, an individual can walk into pretty much any McDonald’s restaurant almost anywhere in the country on any morning and can often start working the same day. Most modern American technology firms can identify, hire and start a new software engineer—paying them more than a field grade officer—in a matter of days. The Army falls well short of such standards of hiring efficiency.

The Army can learn valuable lessons about human resource productivity from private industry. When unemployment dropped to its lowest levels in years immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic subsided, firms across the nation completely reexamined their hiring processes to make them more efficient. Company after company looked to reduce the amount of paperwork for hiring staff to the bare minimum while maximizing information transparency and shifting much of the job hiring process online.

Today, almost every major business in America, from Amazon to Walmart, can bring in an entry-level employee with increasing speed, with most of the hiring process automated and done over the internet. As fast as the private sector now moves on hiring, it will likely further accelerate in the coming years as companies start applying artificial intelligence technology to their hiring processes.

Today’s young Americans also expect a level of efficiency in the hiring process unheard of when I first joined the Army. While pay, bonuses and benefits all play a role in the Army’s recruiting shortfall, the general inefficiency in the Army’s own hiring process compared to private industry plays a significant role. The slow Army hiring process is simply not keeping up with the modern American economy and expectations of speed among potential new, young recruits.

Look and Learn

The Army is certainly not McDonald’s. The Army clearly has demands regarding physical fitness, criminal background checks and patriotic loyalty that private industry does not have to consider. But the Army nevertheless can still learn from companies like McDonald’s to improve its efficiency in hiring new recruits to address the shortfall in numbers of new soldiers.

American private industry has moved to a hiring process that can largely be done online, with almost no paperwork and without even needing a recruiter. Companies can now measure their hiring in terms of minutes. To recruit the new soldiers the U.S. needs, the Army must also consider striving to match similar efficiency standards and expectations already set in the private sector.

With an all-volunteer Army and an ever more efficient private sector, all the proposed increased signing bonuses, expanded career training opportunities or housing options offered will not fix the Army’s recruiting shortfall if the Army does not also speed up its own process of hiring a new recruit.

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Col. Charles Djou, U.S. Army Reserve, is a former member of Congress who served on both the House Armed Services and Budget committees. He deployed to Afghanistan. He has a master’s in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College and a law degree from the USC Gould School of Law, Los Angeles.