The Marine Corps’ Recruiting Crisis: Enlistment Quotas and Burnout

Matthew Partyka was built for the infantry, not sales.

The young, blue-eyed Marine sergeant was a quiet introvert, almost sphinx-like, with a soft smile. He thrived in the brotherhood of combat units.

Then the Corps made him a recruiter, leaving Partyka with no choice: When the Corps calls, Marines answer.

“It was the worst possible job for Matthew,” his mother, Maureen Partyka, said.

The former high school wrestler and military history buff had joined the Marines for its toughness and prestige. Chatting up high schoolers to draw them into the service was anathema to him. He had deployed to Syria, but recruiting was a different kind of pressure. Endless cold calls, the long hours at job fairs and high school events, and the constant pressure to deliver two recruits monthly were overwhelming for him.

Partyka struggled to sign new Marines and fell short of his quota, a failure that other Marines say can end a career.

Less than a year into the job, in July 2022, he died by suicide. His parents said the job’s strain, combined with a romantic implosion, took an unbearable toll. “It was a perfect storm,” Maureen told Business Insider. “If it had been one or the other, he might have survived it. But not both.”

Partyka’s story speaks to a side of Marine recruiting rarely seen beyond the Corps.

From the outside, the Marines are a rare bright spot in a military that has struggled to fill the ranks. It’s the only branch to regularly meet its enlistment goals, while others have faced critical headlines and harsh congressional hearings for falling thousands of recruits short.

“We have such a public saying that we ‘meet mission’ always, but no one ever asks how, what it took to do that,” a sergeant working in the Great Plains told Business Insider. “And they need to, because it takes a lot of sacrifice and headaches and failed relationships to make that happen.”

Business Insider, in an extensive investigation, found that Marine Corps recruiters face such intense pressure to meet enlistment quotas that some admitted to forging documents and cutting other corners to satisfy what one called an exhausting “numbers game.”

Business Insider obtained documents from a Marine Corps investigation into one recruiting sector that found widespread rule-breaking and fraud. We also obtained two Marine Corps Inspector General reports detailing the firings and investigations of two regional recruiting leaders, which show how the pressure to find enlistees took a toll on higher-ups as well. Business Insider is the first to reveal these government reviews.

Business Insider’s investigation, which also drew on other Marine Corps data and interviews with nearly four dozen recruiters and officials, found that Marine Corps recruiters face an unusual degree of depression, emotional stress, and elevated risks of divorce, with 15 apparent suicides between 2015 and 2024.

Recruiting challenges were more pronounced in certain regions, particularly at the height of the pandemic. The Marine Corps has made some improvements since then, our reporting found, but problems with recruiting persist in the Corps today.

In a statement to Business Insider, the Marine Corps said that the overwhelming majority of recruiters complete their tours successfully, though 6% are dropped from the job each year, and assigned missions are “challenging but attainable.”

“We are not yet where we ultimately want to be,” the service said. “But trends are undeniably moving in the right direction.”

The current administration is intensely focused on recruiting numbers, which the Pentagon says is off to a strong start for the new fiscal year. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched a new Pentagon Recruitment Task Force aimed at boosting interest in military service and streamlining enlistment.

It is unclear what impact the effort will have on the welfare of recruiters, who remain under heavy pressure.

“You’re basically burning Marines in order to put more Marines in,” the Great Plains sergeant said. “That is what recruiting is.”

Business Insider’s findings and interviews with scores of people involved — including some who admitted to falsifying records — will be laid out in a series of stories over the next week.

‘We sell a transformation’

Marine recruiters blanket the US in their distinct uniforms — crisp khaki shirts with ribbons, gleaming shoes, and bright blue trousers with red “bloodstripes.” They spend long hours away from family to build relationships with teachers and parents, show up at parades and job fairs, and run the Corps’ famous pull-up bar at local festivals, daring kids to test their mettle.

Most days are a grind of “smile and dial,” involving dozens of calls and chats selling patriotism and a sense of belonging to young people who, as a whole, are less interested in military service than ever. Some recruiters wander department stores close to midnight, hoping to find one bored aisle-stocker who might be tempted by the promise of purpose in such an elite club.

Marine Corps Recruiting Command (MCRC) spokespeople say that the Corps’ success in meeting its enlistment goals is evidence of the branch’s mystique and appeal. The exclusivity and challenge of the military’s fiercest force draw many applicants.

“We don’t sell a transaction,” said one senior official. “We sell a transformation.”

Other services may offer hefty signing bonuses and promises of adventure abroad, or tout health benefits and the GI Bill. Marines say newcomers join for something else: In what many of them see as an ever-softening world, the Corps remains hard — a tight-knit tribe offering a sense of belonging.

The Corps’ 3,603 recruiters can struggle, however, to find enough people drawn to this challenge to meet their year-round quotas of enlisting two people a month. Many recruiters said missing that target repeatedly can torpedo the promotions required to achieve a 20-year retirement pension, a coveted source of financial stability.

“It’s a constant mental breakdown,” said one former recruiter, who explained that while breaks and holidays are allowed, recruiters often don’t stop working. “You can’t take a break; as soon as you do, you fall behind. There’s no coming back up.”

A Marine Corps spokesperson disputed the idea that quota shortfalls are career-ending. And those facing extenuating circumstances, such as specific family needs or certain promotions, can be relieved on good terms — unlike the kind of punitive relief that would result from misconduct, they said.

“We hold our recruiters accountable, and frankly, we relieve a lot of recruiters every year for failure to make mission,” Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said in a conference address in April. “That doesn’t necessarily end their career. It doesn’t help it, but it doesn’t necessarily end it. But we’re going to put somebody in there who can get the job done.”

Getting fired may not be immediately career-ending, but it’s still a black mark, said Nicholas McCulloch, a retired “career recruiter” — someone who manages and trains other recruiters.

“We are a cutthroat ‘get promoted or get out’ organization,” he said.

Recruiting duty, along with service as a drill instructor, often serves as a proving ground to enter the Corps’ senior enlisted ranks, McCulloch said — and the high retention rates seen among recruiters, according to data provided by MCRC, underscore that. “That’s how we’ve always been, and it works well for us.”

A tough and rewarding job

Some recruiters described the job as tough but rewarding, and said experiences could vary based on geography. “It really is one of the few places in the Marine Corps where you can tangibly say, ‘I made an impact,'” said McCulloch. “If you’re making mission, life is really good on recruiting duty.”

Others said unrelenting pressure can break marriages and shatter spirits, which has been reflected in Department of Defense studies.

Recruiters are at elevated risk of mental health problems, according to a 2019 Marine Corps study on “special duty assignments,” stressful jobs that keep Marines away from home for long stretches. The study said 60% of recruiters receive a mental health diagnosis at some point in their career, compared to about 22% of those who never served on special duty. They were also nearly four times as likely as other Marines to be diagnosed with PTSD, and three times as likely to become divorced.

Marine Corps spokespeople told Business Insider the service has made changes in recent years to improve recruiter welfare. The commandant started personally selecting leaders responsible for national regions, added more virtual mental health providers, and created a new course to better prepare families for the challenge. The service also began seeking more volunteers for the job, with new bonuses and location preferences, and added mental health screenings.

Those incentives seem to be paying off — since 2024, the share of Marine recruiters who volunteered for the job has doubled to nearly 60%.

The military’s annual surveys on recruiter welfare, launched after military-wide recruiter suicides and misconduct issues in the 1980s, have noted persistent hardships with the job, especially for Marine recruiters.

A 2016 edition of the study found recruiters to be working harder and longer than at any time in the previous 15 years. It warned that “the extreme negative levels of health and well-being among Marine Corps recruiters, [and] the rise in family and relationship problems at home, not only threaten mission effectiveness but are indicative of current or impending force preservation concerns.”

Those challenges may have peaked during the COVID pandemic, as recruiters grappled with sudden lockdowns and the introduction of a new medical database tracking applicants’ health histories. According to 2022 welfare data provided by MCRC, 86% of Marine recruiters reported difficulty in meeting their monthly goals, and 91% worked more than 60 hours a week. Most reported daily burnout and frequent mental distress.

More recent 2024 survey data provided by MCRC showed some improvement. Half of Marine recruiters said in the 2024 survey that they felt like they could hit their monthly goals, though three-quarters felt their goal was difficult. The number of recruiters who reported working over 60 hours a week dropped from 91% in 2022 to 82% in 2024.

“It’s hard not to be stressful because the Marines wanted to always succeed,” retired Col. Jeffery Morgan, now the executive deputy of MCRC, told Business Insider at MCRC headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. “Our job is to help them succeed in every way we can and providing the support network to get through that.”

The numbers game: ‘You’re running for mayor’

The Corps has refined a formula to find more than 30,000 new members annually. Days are tightly scripted: Make the calls, send the texts, work social media, meet in person — follow the plan, and you’ll theoretically score two recruits a month.

Every interaction, from unanswered calls to a flicker of interest in a text, must be logged in a cumbersome data entry system. If a recruiter falls short of quota, supervisors will comb records for insights on where more effort could have been made or how a hesitant teen might have been persuaded.

Recruiters described the system as inefficient, and some said it drove them to pad data to look productive. Cold calls to teenagers and their parents rarely work in an era when most young people live online, yet recruiters are still expected to make them on a daily basis.

The most effective strategy is community exposure, recruiters said.

“Every day you’re running for mayor,” said Will, a veteran who recruited in the Midwest between 2015 and 2018, who spoke on condition that Business Insider would not use his last name. Any free time was spent meeting teachers, guidance counselors, and principals, or seeing what football teams would let him lead a workout or two.

Marine recruiters are compulsive about fostering community relationships, he said. Any waitress or cashier who looked to be under 25 received a business card. An older man who stopped him in uniform to chat may not be eligible to serve, but the interaction could spark interest for a grandson.

Each month on the job felt like a mini-deployment, Will said, with quotas resetting monthly. He said staying in a constant performance mindset contributed to his divorce and fueled a spiral into alcohol and drugs. The fear of missing his mission triggered panic attacks. “Recruiting will take whatever depression, anxiety, self-doubt you have and magnify it,” he said of his experience.

Schools are legally required to provide military recruiters with student phone lists, though those lists usually contain parents’ numbers. Many parents answer calls angrily and refuse to put recruiters in touch with their children. Recruiters also comb social media — a practice that some told Business Insider feels uncomfortable and risks blurring boundaries with the teenagers they’re trying to reach.

Most reachouts end in rejection, and few prospects make it to in-person appointments or qualify for service. Recruiters say it’s a myth that joining the military is easy — one they fight daily.

With every promising lead that falls through, the job becomes an emotional roller coaster for some. Two recruiters described an unsanctioned process known as “build a bear,” the effort required to get a low-scoring applicant to pass the entrance exam through tutoring or other means, often out of desperation for numbers.

Recruiters also expressed frustration about a program called Genesis, rolled out in 2022, that flags potential recruits’ old injuries or diagnoses. While it helps raise the bar on applicant quality and has become more streamlined, overriding flags is often still a burdensome process.

Cycles of desperation and rejection take a toll that’s not uncommon in sales jobs, said Mark Leary, a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Most people’s brains aren’t wired to easily distinguish between rejection from core social groups and being hung up on by a potential recruit’s parents.

For recruiters who unwittingly call irate parents or are ghosted by teens, such resistance can create cycles of dread tough to overcome. “It would be really hard to make yourself push through that again and again and again,” Leary said. “Each of those calls would be anxiety-producing.”

The cost of never quitting

The Corps, long the military’s smallest service until the Space Force arrived in 2019, has fostered a culture of scrappiness and grit for which the service is famed. “Tenacity” is so ingrained an ideal, for admin clerks and infantry grunts alike, that the moniker Marines say German soldiers bestowed in World War I, “devil dog,” is still used regularly.

Such dedication held true for Partyka, the recruiter who died by suicide in 2022. Quitting was never an option, a friend recalled in a video recorded after his funeral.

Before his death, Partyka was hospitalized in Lansing, Michigan, after revealing the depth of his struggles to his fellow recruiters in late May. His parents said the Marines quickly moved him to a nearby hospital and later a government facility for an evaluation. He had struggled with depression and drinking prior to becoming a recruiter in 2021, while grappling with the fallout from a hard divorce.

“They breathe down your neck,” one friend later told investigators, describing how recruiters were routinely pushed to the edge, according to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service report on Partyka’s death.

When Partyka was released from the hospital two weeks later, a manager attempted to pull him off the job, the NCIS report said. A higher-ranking leader ultimately blocked the move, one of Partyka’s supervisors told Business Insider on the condition of anonymity.

The supervisor recalled the official’s response: “I understand he’s having a hard time, but we really need to make mission. So you gotta recruit as best you can. Do what you can with him.” Another Marine with the unit at the time confirmed the imperative to get Partyka back to work. Partyka returned in a support role.

Partyka’s supervisor said that during his tenure, other recruiters expressed at least five or six “real” suicidal ideations, all heavily scrutinized at higher levels to ascertain whether Marines were purposefully seeking relief from recruiting duty. Such attempts to quit are possible, he said, but the cases he recalled were uniformly troubling and prompted him to question the screening process for recruiting duty.

An MCRC spokesman did not comment on the supervisor’s account, citing the Corps’ policy of not disclosing individual medical histories.

“Small unit leaders everywhere are expected and empowered to monitor the well-being of their personnel, and every suicidal ideation is taken seriously and referred to medical authorities,” the spokesperson said. “Commanders follow the guidance of medical professionals, with the Marine’s health and safety as the top priority.”

The directive to order Partyka back to recruiting, even in a less demanding support role, still haunts the supervisor. He suffers nightmares and has PTSD and depression as a result of recruiting duty, according to his therapist, who spoke with Business Insider.

Fear and moral distress

In a nondescript brick office building in Baltimore, Maj. Patrick McConnell runs the city’s Marine recruiting hub — a headquarters for several nearby outposts. He embodies the archetypal officer: tall, lean, and openly protective of his junior Marines.

Recruiters thrive when trusted, and “will not respond to simply just getting the screws tightened into them,” he told Business Insider from his office adorned with photos from old units. He called fears of being fired for “pulling zeros” — failing to enlist recruits — largely unfounded, saying most reliefs he’s overseen stemmed from misconduct. (A pair of McConnell’s recruiters told Business Insider they enjoy their jobs and haven’t seen the strain others described.)

The work “cannot break them,” McConnell said with conviction at one point during a two-hour interview. But poor leadership can, he added.

Inspector General reports obtained by Business Insider shed light on some examples of problematic leadership. The reports detail the firings in 2021 and 2023 of two commanders. In one case, a commander urged recruiters to send applicants to processing who failed drug tests, telling them, “Send your kids down, even if they’re hot” — which a subordinate interpreted as “do whatever it takes to make mission,” according to the documents.

In the other case, witnesses described a commander as saying recruiters should be used like “French whores,” the documents said. This commander “created a hostile work environment where his comments and behavior not only fostered distrust, but actively encouraged leadership through fear and intimidation,” according to a memo sent from the Corps’ Western Recruiting Region to the head of Marine Corps Recruiting Command.

Under such leaders, stress flourishes. In Fort Worth, former recruiter Jim Newby said his stomach dropped every time his boss called — never to check in, only to demand numbers. Recruiting duty shattered his confidence, and he left the Corps in 2024.

Some recruiters said the pressure led them to commit fraudulent enlistment, which involves shortcuts such as faking signatures or documents, like high school diplomas, to push through applicants. Recruiters call this “arts and crafts” and said they agonized over it, knowing the consequences if caught.

A push to operate in the black

Toward the end of every month, recruiters with no prospects can grow desperate, driving some to cross ethical lines. “If we don’t fraud, we don’t make mission. And that’s just kind of the way things are,” a recruiter working in the Southwest said.

“The Marine Corps does not condone or allow fraud by Marines or by applicants seeking to enter the Marine Corps,” the service told Business Insider. “Those who violate ethical regulations or law are held to account.”

The Southwest recruiter recalled a particularly brutal Christmas season when he feared he would lose his job. As his family opened presents on Christmas morning, he held back tears, deep in a hole of desperation and fearing he’d again fail to contract anyone into the Corps.

He’d started the job strong, earning an award for early success. Then one month, he missed his goal — and the spiral from there was quick. Rejection from young people and parents hits harder when you’re already behind. Phone calls became easier when lubricated with alcohol, he said.

Recruiting is a tumultuous experience, he said. There’s no better feeling than seeing a kid graduate from boot camp. But when an applicant reneges on a contract, or when angry parents roadblock an already failing recruiter, the lows feel insurmountable.

He was sensitive and empathetic when he arrived at the job, his wife told Business Insider on a video call. Over the following year, she said, her husband became irritable and despondent, and has only recently managed to start feeling better after coming to terms with his circumstances.

“I love the Marine Corps, and I love our history of not failing and persevering through harsh conditions,” he said. But the strain on some can feel unbearable.

“Marines are prideful, and I think they don’t like to fail or lose,” he said. “And they will fucking sacrifice a lot before they do that. I think that’s kind of one of the fundamental issues with recruiting duty.”