Government Tries to Put Glitz Into Job Pitches
Throughout the school year, John Mondragon and his colleagues fan out to college campuses around the country, looking for soon-to-be graduates to take jobs with the federal government.
Their pitch would seem to be attractive: competitive salaries, excellent benefits, job security and rewarding work helping people -- in short, a lot of the things many students say they want in a first job.
But although candidates form long lines for corporate recruiters at other job fair booths, they often pass by Mondragon and his government colleagues. He explains it this way: “The private sector has more flash and technology” and applicants “are attracted to the glitz.”
In the eyes of many young people entering the workforce, the federal government is severely glitz-deprived. Whereas the business world and nonprofits seem to offer the allure of challenges and opportunities, government agencies are perceived as mired in red tape and boredom.
“At almost any career fair I’ve been to, the government booths are the ones where the recruiters are generally just sitting there,” said Bob Richard, associate director of the careers office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Sometimes they stand in front of the booth and try to flag people down.”
Although many federal officials contend that the image is inaccurate, they know they have a growing problem. More than half of the country’s 1.9 million civil servants will be eligible for retirement in the next few years.
In a 2004 survey of young Americans by the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government, which encourages public-sector employment, 16% described working for the federal government as “very appealing.”
That means a lot of jobs will be hard to fill -- a prospect that concerns recruiters and hiring managers.
“I can tell you that the federal government in general finds it more difficult to attract some of the younger applicants when we’re competing with private-sector companies,” said Mondragon, director of human resources at the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office.
The challenge is to make the government an “employer of choice, not an employer of last choice,” said Carl DeMaio, president of the Performance Institute, a Washington think tank that examines issues of government management.
To entice prospective employees, the government is looking outside for assistance. The Partnership for Public Service, a Washington nonprofit founded in 2002 to encourage Americans to work for the government, has started several initiatives to help federal agencies.
In conjunction with the government’s Office of Personnel Management, it runs “Call to Serve,” a network of 552 colleges, 62 federal agencies and 11 partner organizations to recruit young people to government work. This fall it is testing different recruitment strategies at five universities in the U.S.
During the last year, the partnership joined with three agencies -- Federal Student Aid, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Nuclear Security Administration -- to assess and revise their recruiting and hiring processes. From rewording job announcements to redesigning agency websites, the project, dubbed “Extreme Hiring Makeover,” ignored no detail.
The three agencies, which have begun implementing the procedures, volunteered for the makeover.
“We are shaping the future in national defense and nonproliferation,” said Linton Brooks, administrator of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. “Young people out of college should be excited by that. We are giving people very important responsibilities relatively early in the careers. But the traditional job announcements don’t convey that.”
Even if a particular listing intrigues potential candidates, the application process may deter them. Applying for a position at Federal Student Aid used to take 114 steps. The “extreme makeover” cut that to 53.
It’s a different, and much simpler, story in the private sector.
“Let’s say you want to work for sales and trading or corporate finance with Goldman Sachs,” said Samer Hamadeh, co-founder of Vault.com, an online career information service. “You only apply once, and [the human resources department] facilitates that for you.”
Although www.usajobs.com is intended to be a clearinghouse for government job vacancies, where applicants can store their information and use it to apply for multiple job listings, not all federal departments are technologically up to speed. “Some agencies are still using paper,” Hamadeh said.
Another key difference is the length of time between submitting an application and receiving a response. College seniors applying to an investment bank, such as Goldman Sachs, may get a reply in as little as two weeks from the time they complete the online application -- a quick turnaround, given that the process normally includes as many as three in-person interviews. At some companies, an applicant can come out of an interview with an immediate offer, sealed with just a handshake.
By contrast, federal job applicants may not get a response for six months to a year.
The reputation of government work is discouraging as well. Students “can’t stand how bureaucratic and change-resistant it is,” DeMaio said. “They are looking for challenge, recognition and reward. Government agencies must change the work culture and environment.”
Adam Piotrowski, a Stanford University graduate student in engineering, would agree with that assessment.
“Working for the government is a drag if you’re a highly motivated, self-starting individual. It’s like working in gray-scale TV,” said Piotrowski, who spent six months in Los Angeles last year as an intern for a federal agency that he described only as involved in “government military operations.”
“Everything is just drab -- from the single-ply toilet paper to the 1970s office furniture -- versus the private sector’s yellow-brick-road companies that have exciting dynamics and motivated people because you have to build products or else the money stops coming in.”
If agencies are able to overcome the first hurdle -- recruiting and hiring -- and want to keep employees for longer than a few years, they also must change incentives, experts say.
“Private-sector firms have used performance-based pay systems for the last five to 10 years,” said Morgan Kinghorn, president of the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent nonpartisan organization chartered by Congress to help government efficiency and accountability. “If you are a really good performer in the private sector, your move up will be differentiated from others’. In most public-sector places, everyone moves up.”
Other incentives that should be considered are extra training, flexible work hours, support for graduate-school programs and assistance with repayment of student loans, said Roger Campbell, director of human capital strategy for Monster Government Solutions, a subsidiary of the recruitment firm Monster Worldwide Inc. His company worked on the “Extreme Hiring Makeover” project.
Such offerings, he said, would help retain young employees, who -- unlike their parents -- would probably have six to 10 jobs in their lifetimes.
Agencies are taking that advice to heart. Upon completion of its makeover, the National Nuclear Security Administration started a “Future Leaders” program for college graduates. The 30 members of the inaugural class were offered student loan repayments, signing bonuses and relocation assistance.
One problem, said Donald F. Kettl, director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, is that students who want to go into public service have more options.
“A lot of students have become more committed to trying to do good,” Kettl said. “But government is seen as a large, imposing bureaucracy, and students think that the nonprofit sector may be more interesting.”
Academia is another popular choice for students, DeMaio said.
“If you are a scientist, you have a choice of going into academia, a nonprofit organization or you can work for the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Interior,” he said.
Brooks, of the Department of Energy, said the government could offer what nonprofits, universities and think tanks could not -- a seat at the table.
“It depends,” Brooks said, “on whether you want to be in the room when the decision is made or you want to write the paper that the decision-makers read.”
