On-demand Recruiting Data

Turning Data Into Marines: RecruitVision’s Analytics Overhaul 

Marine Corps Reserve recruiters live or die by quarterly quotas, yet most still juggle Excel sheets and gut instinct. RecruitVision—five business-analytics seniors—saw an opening: build the Corps’ first district-level visualization platform that predicts applicant flow, flags shortfalls, and arms recruiters with insight, not hunches.

What Was at Stake 

The USMCR’s end-strength has slipped three years in a row. Congress is watching, and the Commandant wants answers. Bad data isn’t a paperwork problem—it’s a readiness deficit.

From Grant to Dashboard 

A Student Innovation Fund award covered airfare to Quantico, enabling 48 hours of ride-alongs with G-3 Plans & Research. That face-time cracked open access to raw enlistment datasets dating back a decade. Within eight weeks, the team shipped an HTML5 dashboard that surfaces recruiter-level conversion rates and auto-generates heat-maps for under-performing ZIP codes.

Meet the Builders

• Ben Hartley—product owner and Marine reservist—kept the tool grounded in recruiter reality.

• Gunjan Sah & Michela Guidali wrangled messy personnel data into tidy Snowflake tables.

• Saleep Shrestha wrote the predictive model that now flags shortfalls six weeks sooner than legacy reports.

Impact 

Early pilots helped one district reverse a 12 percent deficit in just one cycle. Headquarters is now scoping a Corps-wide rollout.

Advice to Future Students

 “Your sponsor’s pain points are buried in spreadsheets,” Ben says. “Dig, clean, and show them what they’ve been missing.”