White House Exit Lines : Job Hunters Find Administration Resume Is No Ticket to Success

There it is on your resume, that magic phrase: The White House.

The Reagan Administration is winding down. You have served as the assistant undersecretary to the public liaison of the deputy secretary of the White House advance unit, or some such thing. Now it is time to hunt for a new job, and the world is at your feet.

Or is it?

There may be megabuck bidding wars over the likes of Treasury Secretary James Baker, Labor Secretary Ann McLaughlin, Budget Director James Miller and all the attorneys, especially the ones who have been messing around with the tax code, when they depart the White House or executive branch.

But hundreds of others--rather than finding the world at their feet--are finding that the very feet that walked daily past the Oval Office are now pounding the pavement in a more frustrating job search than they had anticipated.

“Just having White House stamped on your resume is no guarantee,” said Robert Tuttle, director of White House personnel. “Somebody sees ‘White House,’ that isn’t going to do it. They want to see what you did at the White House. They want to see that you have some skills that will help that corporation.”

Ronald Walker, a former Nixon appointee who now works at Korn Ferry International, an executive search firm here, agreed.

“Young people attracted to the political process right out of school who got on the fast track at the White House and are now making $70,000 tell me they want a $150,000 job and they don’t want to leave Washington. I say, ‘Hey, good luck,’ ” said Walker.

Looming Disappointment

Walker says that he has been receiving about 40 calls a week from White House people looking for jobs, and that some of them are in for disappointment. Landing those $150,000 jobs is going to be virtually impossible “for anyone more or less outside of the mainstream of business. Coming out of the Department of Commerce is easier to translate into the private sector than being from (the departments of) Agriculture, Interior, Housing and Human Services and certainly Labor,” he said.

“No matter what responsibility you had, what budget oversight or amount of people you were in charge of, that can be very heady on paper but it does not translate into the private sector and does not fly with shareholders. Without any hands-on experience in the business community, they’re not going to accept pure government experience.”

Not that the White House employees don’t try. One former White House aide who now works for a large Washington firm said that inflated resumes are floating into the firm from the White House in bunches. “I get resumes from secretaries that would have you believe they were making policy,” the former aide said. “Mid-level people at the White House are a dime a dozen in Washington and overpaid. Secretaries are making $30,000. They’re not going to get that in the private sector. Most of them will end up going to another city.”

Research bears this out. In a detailed study of presidential appointees between 1964 and 1984, professor of government Calvin Mackenzie of the National Academy of Public Administration found that after they had completed their White House service--the average time served was calculated at just over two years--many were surprised to learn that the private sector was not impressed.

“Contrary to the conventional wisdom that getting your ticket punched in government is a sure way to get a high-paying job on the outside, a lot of people who stayed to the end of the Carter Administration were unemployed for a while,” Mackenzie said, “especially from the Education Department and social service agencies, where there is no real private sector analogue. There were certainly a number of people in the study who were surprised to find they could not convert to a high-paying private sector job.

“We talked to one assistant secretary at Housing and Urban Development in the Carter Administration who had started up a public relations firm for the housing industry. He said, ‘I have one client,’ and it was something like the National Cabinet Makers Assn. He said, ‘When I was at HUD one of my responsibilities was to set standards for sizes of appliances and cabinets in federally subsidized housing. Now I make sure those standards don’t change so they don’t have to change their cabinet size.’

“It’s a very limited slice of life, things you don’t think about.”

The three biggest employment growth sectors in Washington are congressional staffs, think tanks and trade associations, Mackenzie said.

“In the end,” Mackenzie said, “you’re seeing people go back across the street to those places.”

Robert B. Sims left his job as assistant secretary for public affairs at the Pentagon last September to become the vice president for communications at the National Geographic Society, which is headquartered here.

A Tough Market

“I routinely hear from people who are transitioning and looking for work in areas I might know something about. There are jobs out there,” Sims said. Yet, he admitted, “It’s a very tough job market for young people, lower level staff people. We’re not hiring.”

Donald Dotson, the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, left at the end of his term last December to join the law firm of Keck, Mahin and Cate.

“I was chief labor counsel for a major steel company before I joined the Administration, so I never had a problem having job offers. But I think there are many who don’t come with that kind of background,” Dotson said. “It has been my impression that some people may have overestimated the value of this kind of experience or service. I think most employers are looking for substance rather than the fact that you were associated with one administration or the other or had done something not relevant to the work to be done.”

Some executive level jobs just do not transfer well into the private sector. The White House advance team, for example, is made up of men and women who travel to sites before the President or First Lady visits, arranging everything from Mrs. Reagan’s grapefruit and toast breakfasts to transportation to the color of curtains and flowers behind speakers’ podiums. Some, like Walker of the executive search firm, do quite well while others reportedly branch out into things like fast food businesses in Florida.

“People who work in advance, I suggest to them, ‘Look, you need to go out and get something on your resume that will really help you work in the private sector,’ ” said Tuttle, the White House personnel director.

Even a job with as lofty a title as “deputy assistant to the President and chief of staff to the First Lady” did not result in a job offer that suited James Rosebush, who left in early 1986. After talking to several Washington firms and not finding the right niche, Rosebush started his own consulting company and recently completed a tour promoting his coffee table book on First Ladies.

“A lot of people have the misconception that just because you walk through the hallowed halls of the White House you’re going to be worth a lot of money,” Rosebush said. “I find it has a lot to do with what you did before you came. I worked in corporate strategy before I came and that’s what I went back to.”

“I don’t think that gigantic salaries and lofty positions are necessarily the case just because you come from the White House,” said former Anaheim schoolteacher Wendy Weber Toler, who has worked for the last 4 1/2 years as a deputy press secretary in Mrs. Reagan’s office. She is uncertain what she will do after the term ends.

Choosing to Stay

A new trend that has crystallized with this Administration is the tendency to stay in Washington, rather move back to the home state.

“When I first came to Washington in 1969 the adage was the Democrats come to town and stay and Republicans come and leave. That’s changed,” Walker said.

Louis Cordia, director of the executive branch liaison for the Heritage Foundation--Washington’s most influential conservative think tank--concurred.

“A surprisingly higher percentage will stay in town than depart. Surprisingly because Ronald Reagan’s people who I thought would go home are staying in town,” said Cordia, who gets 50 calls a week from people looking to leave the Administration. “I would have guessed that probably one-quarter of Reagan appointees would have stayed in town, given their anti-government philosophy, whereas 60% to 70% are staying in Washington-related jobs.”

Cordia, who helps place White House conservatives in private sector jobs, said that he currently has 125 vacancies at the executive level in companies and firms that he is trying to match up with the right White House conservatives. Dealing mostly with high-level executive branch staffers, the upbeat Cordia says, “placement to the private sector has been easy.”

Yet as time winds down, “the atmosphere is one of scrambling,” said John Trattner, who left the State Department to become a writer and consultant in 1982. Stories have been published locally expressing alarm at the number of job vacancies in the executive branch, vacancies that many feel are difficult to fill with less than a year left in the Administration.

Because of the extensive background checks required and Senate confirmation, it takes an average of 150 to 180 days to fill the top-level executive branch jobs, according to Tuttle, the White House personel director. He denies that there is a crisis or a turnover rate out of the ordinary. Of 284 positions requiring Senate confirmation in the Cabinet agencies, 53 are vacant, Tuttle said.

That 19% vacancy rate is not far above the comparable figure of 12% in February of 1987, and is lower than the comparable figure of 20% in February of 1985.

“What’s so unusual is we don’t have the vacancies now that even we anticipated we would have at this time in the Administration,” Tuttle said. Refering to Mackenzie’s landmark study of appointees, which calculated the average time served at just over two years, Reagan appointees have served a longer average time of about 31 months, according to White House records, Tuttle said.

“I think it would be ideal if there were zero vacancies,” Tuttle said. “I sort of don’t like it when somebody’s left and somebody hasn’t been confirmed. But it looks like it’s been about the same for the last few years.”

There is a strong current of feeling that anyone who has not left the administration yet should stay on through the end. But of course, many will not. The smartest ones may have left after the 1986 mid-term elections, one former White House official said.

“The greater the amount of time remaining in the Administration, the more valuable you are to the people who might want to hire you to try to influence the Administration,” Mackenzie said. “The reason (former White House deputy chief of staff) Mike Deaver got out when he did was that it was better for trading on his connections.”

People who have worked typically long hours for the government may not have a sense of guilt about leaving toward the end.

“I recognize that my departure created a problem,” said Richard Willard, who worked seven years in legal matters for the White House and Justice Department before leaving last month to become a partner at the Washington law firm of Steptoe and Johnson. “But I don’t ever think that anyone is irreplaceable and I don’t think I was irreplaceable. So there is some regret but not an enormous amount.”

Tuttle denied that it was difficult to find qualified people to serve for the last months of the last year of the Administration, a traditional wind-down period that typically produces little new policy or legislation. While some observers have fretted about the hiring of people who have been passed over for previous White House openings, Tuttle takes a more upbeat view.

“When we have done a search (for a previous job) and we’re down to three or four names and then do a memo for the President, we list the final candidates,” Tuttle said. “So when a (subsequent) vacancy comes up the first thing we do is go back to that list. There hasn’t been a vacancy where we haven’t had good people lining up to serve. We have more good people than we have positions. For a while we were getting 30 to 40 resumes a week, unsolicited. Now it’s down to 20 a week.”

One successful former White House employee expressed a more typical opinion of those hired very late, saying, “I don’t think there’s a rocket scientist among them. But the key people are good people, and you don’t need rocket scientists in the last year.”

That is because of the traditional last-year slowdown of activity. When stories are published about the Reagans’ inquiry into who will pay their moving expenses and whom they can hire for household help in California, everyone senses the end is very near.

“People continue to work hard but they can see there’s no advantage to a long-range plan when the Administration is about to end,” said Sims, the former Pentagon employee. “Military people who are nonpolitical and concerned about their budgets begin to pay more attention to the wishes of those in Congress and less to the Administration because they’re preparing for the transition, looking out for their organizational interests. There is more of a caution, a general slowdown in expectations and accomplishments, more getting ready for the next Administration.”

Cordia of the Heritage Foundation says there is “constant turnover, period,” but foresees “in the spring and in the summer an ever so slight surge of departures. If it looks like a Republican is going to win the election you’ll have a tremendous dip in departures, because people will want to try to stay on. If it looks like a Democrat is going to win you’ll see a mass exodus.”