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Over the years, various games have featured quite diverse recruitment mechanisms and I have no problem with coming up with more of my own as well. =) I'm mostly talking about soldiers here but the same applies to scientists and engineers, assuming they have an individual skill level at all. 1. Soldiers as wares This is the bare-bones minimalistic approach that was used in X-Com 1+2 and the Xenonauts alpha builds. You buy nondescript "Soldier, 7 pieces" for a constant price. The obvious advantage: it's easy to code and there is no real point in imposing a limit. It's not very exciting, though, and leads to the annoying "hire & fire" routine from X-Com where you would hire 20 soldiers and only keep the 2 whose stats didn't suck completely. So while basically the easiest system to operate for the player, it leads to a boring chore of weeding out the most useless candidates. No fun. 2. The recruitment pool That is how X-Com Apocalypse, Jagged Alliance, UFO-ET, and many other games handled it. The player is offered a selection of personnel and can see their stats before hiring them. 2a. The infinite pool The visible size of the pool is limited to maybe 10 soldiers. Whenever you recruit one, another soldier with random stats is added instantly. There is no advantage over 1. . The player would just hire / fire until he gets all "good" soldiers, making all the effort spent in creating a more advanced recruiting system pointless . 2b. The limited pool If the pool is only refilled / added to every day. (or whatever time frame) The player has to manage these limited (manpower) resources. Instead of buidling a small team with only the most excellent recruits, he might opt to use the training system and hire some of the clumsy recruits, too. That makes the game's training system more valuable and allows the player some leeway in his team-building strategy. Beats the drudgery of hire / fire any day.

I understand not wanting to make something too micromanagementy, and though I don't think training or the lack thereof is going to be the difference between a good game and a bad game, my personal view is that having a training system of some sort would be beneficial, but it would need to be more than a single course that improves a new recruit to corporal with a small bonus. If there is going to be a training system at all then make it a training system. If there isn't going to be a system then take it out completely. As Gazz is continually emphasising having a training system that allows some micromanagement but doesn't enforce such, i.e the player can ignore training completely or it has an "auto" setting where the system takes care of it all, is probably the best way to go. So that those who want to get right into it and tailor their soldiers to their own idea of what will make a good squad can do so, those who don't care can let the system do it for them, and those that want a challenge can train no-one and go through the game with basic soldiers who only improve through doing things - something for everyone.

5. Using your staff One problem of all X-Com derivate games is that the player is very lonely, fighting a one-man war against the alien invasion. There is never any kind of staff to do anything useful for the player. Recruiting would offer a chance to... show a little support. In a basic implementation you'd have one personnel officer and could task him with finding better recruits for you. Let's say you can tell him to find "good" or "only the best" recruits. (that could be expanded to scientists / engineers if they have any personal stats at all) When given the order, he disappears from the screen and x days later (depending on the difficulty of the task), he returns with a number of good (or a smaller number of "best") recruits who have been added to the recruitment pool. That would help creating the impression that the player has a staff to begin with and that these people are actually doing something useful. It is important that this is not just some automatic feature but that the player "delegates" a task and has a degree of control over what he asks for. It would also be a nice touch if those soldiers would be recruited automatically without going through the pool. (provided there is sufficient cash) Probably at a higher price, too. Some kind of ahh... incentive. =) Effectively, this would supply a small number of good recruits at a very slow pace. Enough to counter the occasional death but not enough for human wave tactics with universal soldier types.

4. Bottom of the barrel This is an alternative to the absolute limit on new recruits, replacing it with a system of dimnishing returns. Every day that passes, the "recruit quality" value increases by 1. It is capped at +5. Everytime you hire a recruit, RQ is reduced by 1. This is capped at -10. Whenever new recruits are hired or added to the pool, RQ is added to their stats. (all numbers used here are completely arbitrary, of course) If you fight successfully, with your soldiers keeping their heads down and covering each other, you won't be needing a lot of replacements. Word gets out and your outfit "starts attracting higher quality recruits". However, if you're in the habit of hiring 10 recruits every day as cannon fodder, you're only getting those that are too slow or stupid to find important reasons to be elsewhere. You end up scraping the bottom of the barrel.