Army recruitment reliant on Totaljobs site

THE Army is relying on a £139 joblistings website advert for recruitment, with its £173million digital system still offline more than a month after it was forced to shut down because of a suspected data breach.

Visitors to the Army’s recruitment website are being directed to Totaljobs, a commercial job-listing site.

Existing applicants, meanwhile, are unable to check on their progress online and are instead being told to call the National Recruiting Centre or contact their recruiter directly.

Applicants, including former soldiers trying to join the reserves, have complained of hearing nothing about the state of their applications since the site went down several weeks ago.

In March, an apparent data breach among applicants led Capita and the Army to take its entire recruitment website offline and shut down its Defence Recruiting System (DRS) while an investigation took place.

Capita insisted that DRS was not breached. They said the investigation, commissioned by Defence Digital, which manages IT and cyber defences for the Armed Forces and is conducted by a third party, found no files were accessed.

Instead, the compromised data are thought to be the log-in details of applicants stolen during attacks on their personal computers, not DRS servers.

While the website is now back online, the DRS system remains closed. Capita said it expected it to be back in service by the end of May.

One user of the recruitment system told the UK Defence Journal that his son’s attempts to join the Army had taken over a year, while his own application to enlist in the Reserves had gone silent.

“I applied for the Reserves over six months ago and heard nothing once the website went down. Only now have they sent a letter apologising and telling me to pay for an eye test before they progress my application,” he said.

Another told the site that their application was stuck at the medical stage, with recruitment staff unable to access the system and progress his case.

According to a report by MPS, the Ministry of Defence spent £113million on DRS, while Capita spent a further £60million “to bespoke the system to meet the services’ recruitment processes and criteria”.

Recruitment for the 2021/22 period is reportedly at 98 per cent of the target.