Uncle Sam Wants You!
As retirement beckons senior staff, federal agencies are using branding and slogans to attract Generation Y's top talent.
By Patrick Harden
Branding and corporate slogans, staples of America's business-marketing strategies but seldom seen in the non-military public sector, are among the latest initiatives in the federal government's competitive recruiting campaign -- and proponents say they're working.
"Having an employment brand is a very important foundation for developing your recruitment strategy," says Gail Lovelace, the General Services Administration's chief people officer. "Brand your agency, who you are and what you offer," she recommends.
The Internal Revenue Service's Robert Buggs, chief human capital officer, agrees. His agency uses slogans such as "Come work for the world's largest accounting firm" or join the IRS because "It all adds up." The promotional efforts were developed for the IRS to "represent the best brands for us" when selling the agency to prospective employees, Buggs explains.
Lovelace, Buggs and their colleagues across the federal government are expanding their recruiting arsenals and polishing their agencies' images in a quest to reach out and attract the best educated and most accomplished young people.
Driven by a need to build bench strength as the pace of retirement eligibility increases -- at the IRS, for example, more than half the executive cadre could retire by 2010 -- agencies are exploring new ways to show a public-service job can be as interesting and competitive as a similar position in the private sector.
The potential employment pool is there, but tapping it is the challenge.
A survey released in December 2006
shows 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29, known as Generation Y, are interested in working for the federal government, as are 30 percent of what are deemed "Government-Go-Gets," or G-3s, those scientists, engineers, computer systems analysts and others who might be targets for federal recruiters because of their particular skills.
But the survey, prepared by the Washington-based Gallup Organization for the Council for Excellence in Government, also shows there is "a serious mismatch between what people want in a job and their perception of what government offers." Both Generation Y and G-3 groups give the government a high rating for benefits and job security, but a low rating for innovation and creativity. And belief in an organization's goals and its impact on the public policy ranked behind growth potential and intellectual stretch as important workplace values.
The same survey also determined managers currently working in the private or nonprofit sectors have little interest in switching to government service.
Council president Patricia McGinnis found some survey results surprising. "I thought mission match would be possibly the No. 1 issue -- believing in the purpose of your work," she says. "That had been quite a strong asset for government, but we learned it has been overtaken by this whole notion of intellectual stretch and growth potential."
To determine just what respondents mean by intellectual stretch, the council organized focus groups during the spring and is now analyzing those findings prior to staging summit conferences to explore specific recruiting strategies. Results will be shared with the Washington-based Chief Human Capital Officers Council, a panel of agency top human resource executives, which was briefed on the original survey findings.
Better government marketing is likely to be among key goals. "The skill set of marketing is not present in much of government. It is simply not a high-priority skill," McGinnis says, noting federal human resource leaders "are going to have to get better at this, or they're going to have to use outside help and also look at some of the best practices in the private sector."
Putting a "Spin on the Job"
Robert Tobias, director of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy at American University in Washington, argues agencies must strive to define "who I am and what I want, and how to identify people who are interested in doing what I want done."
A former president of the influential National Treasury Employees Union, Tobias says agencies "have to put a spin on the job" if they are to brand what they do and winnow recruiting pools to find the right candidates.
The IRS and the GSA are among the leaders in these areas, Tobias says. "They have innovative ideas, casting the work in a way that is attractive to prospects."
At those two agencies, recruiters are successfully branding their organizations as influential places to work with space for individual growth.
"We are not a sexy agency like the State Department or NASA or one of those, so we find it important not to just talk about the name of the organization, but [talk about] what we do," says the GSA's Lovelace. "We talk about how we influence what goes on in government and what kind of opportunities there [are] for people who are interested in working for us."
The GSA promotes its wide range of occupations and, vital for young people coming out of college who might not have settled on a career goal, the availability of internship and developmental programs. These are win-win initiatives, Lovelace says.
"One of the benefits we have is that [interns] can come here and rotate through different types of occupations to try to figure out what they want to do, and the GSA benefits because we get a well-rounded person who has knowledge of the different occupations -- and that makes them better when they land in a particular spot," she says.
The GSA has about 12,000 employees, of which 28 percent will be eligible to retire in the next three years. To find the right replacement candidates, the GSA advertises in professional publications, canvasses colleges and universities, and promotes its slogan, "You can do that here."
"That is our recruitment theme, because we actually believe you can do that [job] here," Lovelace says. At the IRS, the agency commits about $2 million annually for recruitment advertising and has developed a recruiter cadre to promote the agency at college job fairs and to foster relations with faculty members and graduate-student pools.
The agency spends its money "everywhere," says Buggs. "We're in newspapers, we use trade magazines that target our mission-critical occupations, we use television, we have pop-up Internet ads [and] we're at sporting events."
Noisy, smelly NASCAR racing circuits might seem an unlikely environment for the IRS, but the agency has advertised there and in baseball World Series programs "to get the brand in the public eye."
The spectator demographics for many of these sporting events "really do yield a product for us -- that is, candidates who might meet our needs at any level," says Buggs.
To brand the agency, the IRS promotes its culture and the job it performs. "We sell the diversity of the organization, which includes hiring the disabled. We sell learning within the world's largest accounting firm and being able to take [that skill] anywhere," Buggs says. "We have been successful in talking about the various lines of business, the teamwork and providing true opportunities for growth."
IRS recruiters also argue that, in terms of authority, independence and the opportunity for development, the private sector simply can't compete with the government.
The IRS may lack the glamour of the CIA or the FBI and it may carry the baggage of being a tax-collecting agency, but Buggs says it still attracts good candidates. "Once we have candidates or applicants inquiring in a career fair, we've pretty much hooked them. If they're truly interested in doing accounting work or auditing, or learning and honing their trade, where else might they get that kind of opportunity in such a large organization?"
Diverse Recruiting
While the agency has a successful two-year internship program for candidates with undergraduate and graduate degrees, plus opportunities for mid-career people, it doesn't restrict recruiting to universities, the commercial world or Wall Street; it also looks for retirees who can work part-time to train new employees so current agents and supervisors can remain on the job.
"We look to hire a diverse mix of workers, from all walks of life," Buggs says, noting a greater effort is being made to bring in underrepresented groups, such as Hispanics and those with disabilities.
While most federal agencies have flexibility in recruitment campaigns, candidate assessment and hiring processes, much heavy lifting is still done by the Office of Personnel Management, which has ultimate responsibility for ensuring the future of the government workforce.
Working closely with the CHCO Council's subcommittee on hiring and succession planning, the government's main human resource agency meets the challenge with, among other programs, federal career job fairs, the Presidential Management Fellows program and a major media campaign that highlights "diverse and exciting opportunities," says the OPM's John Salamone.
Eight 30-second commercials feature federal employees
-- not actors -- showcasing what they do and why the job is interesting and important. Running in 17 markets across the country, the commercials are prompting a flood of inquiries.
Another successful initiative is the PMF program, which currently concentrates on candidates with graduate degrees in information technology, accounting and business, engineering, math and science, health and medical sciences and human resources.
"We really need to focus on these areas," says Salamone, executive director of the CHCO Council. But the PMF program also maintains pressure to attract candidates with "traditional degrees" in public administration and policy, law and international affairs.
Information sent to some 4,000 graduate programs yielded 3,726 applicants for the PMF 2007 class -- up 24 percent from the previous year -- of which 792 candidates were deemed finalists and could be offered fellowships by various agencies. Likely placement for 2007 is 400.
Despite the Gallup survey finding of Generation Y's disconnect with government service, the government hired nearly 25,500 in this age group in 2006, about 30 percent of all hires.
"Once we can attract and recruit [members of] the younger generation, our hope is they'll stick around and contribute to the mission of their agency and believe their work is important," Salamone says.
Patrick Harden is the former Washington bureau chief for LRP Publications, which publishes Human Resource ExecutiveŽ.
June 16, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications
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