The Army recruitment website has now been nonfunctional for three weeks.
An Army applicant contacted me this morning to let me know that the Army recruitment system was still nonfunctional, weeks after a data breach forced a temporary closure. I was told:
“The whole recruitment system is down. This means that applications cannot be made or moved forward. Candidates are also unable to receive updates on how far their application is through the pipeline. This could cause serious issues to recruitment as one, it could create a massive backlog, and two, interest could be lost due to time constraints.”
My source also told me that he’s currently stuck at the medical stage, as he is in the process of moving from regular to reserve. medical.
“All I need to do is redo my medical. However, I have been unable to move through the medical process because the staff at the recruitment centre cannot access the system.”
When doing so, he and thousands of others are met with the message:
“WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING SOME TECHNICAL ISSUES WITH THE ARMY RECRUITMENT SYSTEM. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS SURROUNDING YOUR APPLICATION OR PROGRESSION THROUGH THE RECRUITING PIPELINE PLEASE CALL THIS NUMBER 0345 600 8080 OR CONTACT YOUR RECRUITER.”
The Register reported last month that the Ministry of Defence suspended online application and support services for the British Army’s Capita-run Defence Recruitment System and after a data breach, with hackers threatening to release application data.
The website was shut down on the 14th of March and remains closed today.
should never have privatised it, and certainly should not have got rid of the recruting offices and the regimental support teams that went with them, mind the way we have been treated by HMG i would not recomend anyone to join, it,s all fine doing the job but afterwards they quick to hang you out for carrying out orders.
I was actually in officer recruiting just before the army migrated over to Capita and with the short time I had with the previous recruiting staff (All civies) I was most impressed with how they went about their jobs, even when they had been relocated to other civy jobs around the camp, if I had any issues they were more than happy to help resolve them for me.
Potential officers attend Westbury for assessment and before capita, if I had any issues , I could call the girls there and sort out things. Medicals/Docs/ travel / etc, that is the benefit of having SME on the job who understand the job backwards and not some numpty sat in a huge office full of open desk telephone operators reading off a script. Now I’ve visited; University officer training corps /Units / Training Camps and even held bespoke training packages for potential officers, and I knew for a fact that the army is failing to recruit the people in the numbers it requires (actually I think that can be said for the past 30 years) I have never experienced an issue with any of my applicants when it comes to getting stuff sorted where I can speak to somebody sat in an army camp, yet I cant say the same for Capita. Here are two examples:
1) Potential officer recruit, at University. applies via the computer. On the medical part of her application she states that as a child she broke her leg. Completely healed, no issues, in fact she runs cross country for her county and now for the University.
Capita reject her, saying her leg would not be strong enough to undertake basic training.
She replies back, that due to the time taking to process her application she had not only joined the local UOTC, she had also joined the reserves passed her basic training.
They replied back, that in order for her to join as an officer, she had to keep a day to day diary for a year before applying again…she walked
2) Another female applicant fills out her paperwork and writes down as a teenager she had acne , Capita reject her. I met this girl at one of our introduction to the army weekends and she was stunning, not a blemish on her face and yet.
Frustrated by Capita we booked ourselves a visit to their recruiting HQ at Upavon, what a joke, the bloke in charge of their telephone control centre had worked previously in a shoe shop , unable to answer any of our questions we left. We weren’t the only ones to complain and a huge meeting was held at Churchill hall Sandhurst where the management stated they would listen. On the podium were the heads of sheds including a soon to be retiring Col who had landed a plumb job in recruiting with….Captia. They weren’t prepared to listen and instead we were all hit with the directive:
“You will make it work”
And here we are today.
Selling off defence estates hasn’t been a huge success either, unless you count moving large quantities of real estate from public to private for peanuts. Anyone here seen and improvement in forces housing standards? (not a retorical question)
For God’s sake what has acne got to do with ability to serve? I get the gas mask thing but really…this isn’t WWI. It is the inner drive and ability that matters.
Most of the younger recruits used to have acne by default…..
i knew a girl who was an brilliant athlete, broke her leg, hardly had the thing healed then she went through Sandhust and then passed Selection not long after that.
Incredible. While the Navy and Air Force have made huge progress in sorting out their deficiencies in recent years, the Army seems to get worse and worse
What is going on do you think? Poor leadership from the top and lots of in-fighting?
The poor soldiers on the ground have put up with poor/inappropriate kit for years, resulting in loss of life or severe disability but the Ajax balls up doesn’t seem to be about money. (although the longer it goes on the bigger the compromises as the money dries up). Do the top brass simply not have a clear user requirement or are they simply looking forward to a plumb job with Serco?
Political Corruption !!!!!!!
Capita has always had the appearance of being a vehicle to move taxpayers money into private funds. Their failure and the 100’s of millions of £’s ‘lost’ when the projects they are involved with fail, should disbar them from any future Government tendering. The fact that it doesn’t creates a stink all of its own.
Ajax is the eventual outcome of the FRES programme. Requirements for the platform were altered constantly by top-down edict and the whole programme was allowed to drag on in a state of relative disarray. These kinds of deficiencies seem to be common in the public sector and I blame a lot of it on a lack of real interest by the relevant Ministers.
Boxer is the outcome of FRES not Ajax, FRES was always meant to be a wheeled vehicle and as such we invested in the development of boxer. Labour cancelled it to save money. Ajax is completely unrelated to FRES.
Surely Capita runs the Navy and Air Force recruiting process too?
I wouldn’t be so quick to make that claim. Having served 25 years in the army and now contracting at Navy Command (in the procurement sphere) you may be surprised to learn that the Navy are looking to the army for best practice. The other services are not all as rosey as you would think.
This is b***s&&& I work for Captain Naval Recruiting and we’re quite happy being as far away from Capita as possible. We presently have a working IT system and are perfectly capable of putting new recruits into training. This cannot be said of the Army, or the Recruiting Partnership Programme as it like to be called.
Is it April 1st ?
Everyday is April the 1st in the wonderful wacky world of the Army.😳
Under Boris evory day is April fool.
Doesn’t matter. They are still hell bent on reducing numbers anyway! Short sighted fools.
This is what happens when you subcontract stuff out to private companies, 8 times out of 10. (the other 2 allows for benefit of doubt)
Privatisations are solely for enabling the rich investers to profit-mine public funds.
Have any of the alledged benefits ever resulted or ended up with the public paying more for getting less?
I have to go to conscription for two years with a small salary. But you -______-
Yes no conscription here. What’s your point?
My misfortunes
If someone loses interest in joining the Armed Forces because the website has been down for 3 weeks and they can’t be bothered to phone a number then im not going to miss them.
My large (19000 employees) company was victim of a cyber attack around xmas 2020 and we are still suffering the consequences….you don’t just turn it off and on again.
Im as nostalgic as anyone about the day i walked in off the street and was guided through the whole joining process by a serving, uniformed Sgt. However it was an inefficient use of resources (doubly so now). Everyone loves to jump up and down on private contractors carrying out tasks that were previously done by HM govt. but they invariably do the job cheaper and more efficiently.
Cheaper, does not mean more efficiently, it means cutting every available corner to reduce costs and invariably provided a far poorer service as a result. Private contractors put in cheap bids to take on roles they have no idea about, making promises they can never fulfil……
Any examples please? All i see here is a website that is down because of a cyber breach. Which would have happened whether it was MOD or civvy run.
Indeed. I have done quite abit of contract work and my experience has been private companies frequently play the numbers. For example being required to meet certain data security standards which they know public bodies rarely have the resources to actually check on. Most of the time it goes unnoticed but occasionally they slip up. I have to laugh that it takes longer today to join up than it did 40 years ago. Apparently that’s efficency.
For many years Capita has run a rubbish recruiting service, not just now – I hear it has always taken them nearly a year to recruit someone.
Rumour has it that AFRP is under threat (already pushed back to 2025) because the RAF and Navy want nothing to do with it, whilst the Army are pushing for it.
You’re 100% right here… the Army need a replacement for the Recruitment Partnership Programme. Once you outsource a capability you can never recover it. The Army now has a ‘Hobson Choice’ and must continue with an outsourced solution. If anyone had any sense they’d create a ‘not for profit’ organisation resources by veterans, based on the RN or RAF model.