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What is Recruitment?
Recruitment is the base facility in Arknights where one Recruitment Permit gets you one operator. Unlike Headhunting, which costs Orundum or Originite Prime, Permits come from daily missions and login rewards, so Recruitment works as a free gacha.
Each recruitment offers five random tags. You pick up to three of them and set a time between 1:00:00 and 9:00:00. The tags you combine decide whether you can lock in 4★, 5★ or even 6★ operators, which is why players have studied Recruitment so closely.
How to use the calculator
- Select the same five tags that appear on your in-game Recruitment screen.
- "Recommended combinations" lists every combination that cannot give a 3★. It is ranked by how rare the guaranteed result is: 6★, then the 1★ Robot, 5★ and 4★. Ties go to combinations that can also give a higher rarity such as 5★, then to combinations with fewer tags to select. The top one is the best pick.
- Select those tags in the game and start the recruitment with the time shown (usually 9:00:00).
- Your tags are saved in the URL, so you can share the link to show the same result.
Combinations under "Combinations that include 3★" do not guarantee 4★. When nothing good comes up, refresh the tags with the Office's contact points, or recruit for 9:00:00 to get 3★ or better.
How guarantees work
The result is drawn from operators that have every tag you selected and whose rarity is allowed by the recruitment time. If your tags leave only 4★ or higher operators, 4★ or better is guaranteed. If only one operator is left, you get that operator.
The game data sets these rarities for each recruitment time:
- 1:00:00 to 3:50:00: 1★ to 4★
- 4:00:00 to 7:30:00: 2★ to 5★
- 7:40:00 to 9:00:00: 3★ to 5★
- 6★ is only possible when Top Operator is selected
The calculator evaluates normal combinations at 9:00:00 and combinations with Robot at 3:50:00 or shorter.
When Top Operator or Senior Operator appears
According to the in-game Recruitment details, selecting Top Operator with a 9-hour recruitment always gives a 6★, and selecting Senior Operator without Top Operator for 9 hours always gives a 5★. Both tags are rare, so do not start a short recruitment by mistake.
Adding a tag such as Sniper or Survival to Top Operator narrows down which 6★ you can get. Check the candidates in the calculator before adding a tag.
Tags worth remembering
With the current data, these eight tags guarantee 4★ or better on their own:
- Specialist
- Crowd-Control
- Nuker
- Support
- Debuff
- Fast-Redeploy
- Shift
- Summon
Some two-tag combinations that guarantee a 5★:
- Defender + Survival: Vulcan
- Melee + Debuff: Waai Fu
- Ranged + Defense: Beeswax
- Caster + Healing: Nightmare
- Supporter + Debuff: Pramanix, Shamare
- Vanguard + Support: Zima, Elysium
- Defender + DPS: Vulcan, Liskarm, Asbestos
There are many more, and new operators can change them. Checking each set of tags in the calculator is more reliable than memorizing them.
Getting a 1★ Robot
1★ Robots such as Lancet-2 and Castle-3 are only available from Recruitment. 1★ operators can only appear at 3:50:00 or shorter, so selecting Robot with 3:50:00 or less guarantees a 1★ Robot. At 9:00:00, 1★ is excluded and no Robot can appear.
Guarantees can still fail
Players report that tags other than Top Operator and Senior Operator can occasionally be dropped from the result. A loading screen tip also says longer recruitments are more likely to pick operators that match the tags, so recruiting for the full 9:00:00 is the usual approach.
Recruitment-only operators
Operators marked "Recruitment only" in the list below cannot be obtained from Headhunting. They are the 1★ Robots, the 2★ Starter operators, Adnachiel, Estelle, Purestream, Indra and Vulcan.
About the data
The recruitable operators are the 158 listed in the Recruitment details of the Japanese server's game data, as of October 28, 2026. Tags for each operator combine their class, position, qualification and affixes from the character data. The Chinese server gets new operators earlier, so its candidates may differ.
Recruitment tools and references
Many players and guide sites have published Recruitment calculators and research over the years. This page and its calculator are based on the following.
- Arknights Recruitment Calculator - Aceship
- Recruitment - Arknights Wiki
- Arknights Toolbox (multilingual tools including a Recruitment calculator)
- Recruitment - Arknights Japanese Wiki (Japanese)
- Recruitment tag search tool - AppMedia (Japanese)
- Recruitment guide - AppMedia (Japanese)
- Recruitment - PRTS (Chinese)
- ArknightsAssets/ArknightsGamedata - GitHub (game data)
- Kengxxiao/ArknightsGameData - GitHub (Chinese server game data)
- Arknights official website