A senior Pentagon official says the department is making progress on speeding up civilian hires as it rebuilds the workforce it gutted last year.
Michael Cogar, who oversees the Defense Department’s civilian personnel policies, says a pilot program has slashed the Army’s average civilian hiring times from 161 days to 47 by introducing artificial intelligence and consolidating steps of the recruiting process.
Pentagon policymakers are also rewriting and simplifying the department’s hiring authorities so service- and agency-level leaders can tailor them to their own needs. The goal, Cogar said, is to prevent the national security risks that can arise when military jobs sit empty.
“When a command takes 180 days, or in our overseas theater, 300 days, to hire an artificial intelligence specialist, a cyber operations engineer or an organic industrial-based machinist, we do not simply just lose a qualified candidate to the private sector. We lose our operational edge,” he said Oct. 14 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington.
Pentagon leaders are aiming for the lofty goal of extending a firm job offer to an applicant within 30 days of its posting. Cogar says the AI-driven time-to-hire pilot is proving that’s possible.
That initiative — run by the Army’s Civilian Human Resources Agency, its Military Entrance Processing Command and the Defense Logistics Agency — used automation to streamline each step of the hiring process. AI analysis tools and new workflows helped cut the time spent on tasks before posting a job from 40 days to six, and shortened the selection phase from 18 days to four, Cogar said.
Instead of spending eight hours a day sifting through disconnected databases and manually filling out templates, he said, HR specialists can use AI to generate job announcements, vet resumes and present a slate of candidates.
“The HR professional ceases to be a data-entry clerk,” Cogar said. “They become an elite talent scout, a strategic advisor to the brigade commander and an active manager of the candidate experience.”
He didn’t say how many people were hired through the pilot or how those results could be scaled across the military.
The department is pairing AI adoption with widespread changes to how it brings in new talent. Cogar said the Pentagon has overhauled 11 direct-hire authority policies, which allow agencies to fill vacancies in critical fields more quickly.
DoD has delegated the ability to make direct hires for certain essential roles to service secretaries and agency directors, who may also push those decisions down to their manpower teams, and gave hiring managers more leeway on decisions typically handled by HR.
“Using direct hiring authority is not an exception, it is the expectation,” Cogar said.
He added the department has also mandated that military spouses be considered for open positions and has expanded the ability to telework while overseas.
But new policies won’t work without process and technology changes to enable them, he said: “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.”
DoD continues to reform how it manages and retains employees as well, including by doling out more than $1 billion in bonuses to the employees it says are its top performers. Cogar said the Pentagon has awarded cash prizes to more than 90,000 people, averaging over $13,000 apiece, in the past year under a new effort to reward and retain the workforce.
Certain civilian leaders and colonels may now also offer up to 25% of a person’s base pay as an incentive for recruitment, relocation or retention, without requiring approval from higher headquarters.
Cogar encouraged Army officials to find and fix the policies and procedures that are preventing them from building a stronger civilian corps.
“We have spent decades building [a] bureaucratic fortress to protect ourselves from administrative risk, and in doing so, we created severe operational risk,” Cogar said. “When policy makes it agonizingly slow to recruit top talent or nearly impossible to address unacceptable performance, it actively penalizes our high-performing workforce, who are forced to carry the extra burden. It frustrates commanders, drains organizational morale, and degrades readiness.”
“That era is over,” he said.
Copyright © 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.