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December 11, 2006
For federal recruiters, Andrea Fischer-Colwill is good news. Laid off in 2002 from a marketing job and suffering what she dubbed a “quarter-life crisis,” the twenty-something yearned for a mission. “I was supposed to go change the world,” she said, “and here I [was] hawking software.”
Now Fischer-Colwill is budget analyst at the Treasury Department, and loving it.
About 60 percent of federal employees will be eligible to retire in the next 10 years, and the government estimates that 290,000 of those will actually leave in just the next five years. As agency managers struggle to replace them amid an increasingly fierce competition for talent, agencies suffer a handicap: a widely held perception that government is stodgy and change-averse — in short, no place for young idealists.
But according to a new Gallup Organization poll, there’s good news to report. Generation Y Americans — those between 18 and 29 years old — are surprisingly open to working for the government: One in three say they would consider federal work, the survey found.
That is a far higher percentage than other age groups, where only one-fifth of 30- to 41-year-olds, a quarter of 42- to 59-year-olds and one-seventh of those 60 and above would consider becoming feds.
That’s good news to government recruiters, Office of Personnel Management Director Linda Springer said at a Dec. 5 panel discussion about the survey: “Even if we got a very modest percentage” of the estimated 46 million Generation Y workers, she said, “we would do very well at reloading those positions.”
Perceptions
But the Gallup survey, which was sponsored by the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government, indicates that finding qualified replacements requires altering widespread beliefs about government work.
In the first of a series of planned studies of Americans’ perceptions of federal jobs, Gallup focused on three groups that agencies want to tap: Generation Y, midcareer managers, and professionals in science and engineering, law and public policy, and social service. Among all the groups, views of federal work are dim.
Though 30 percent of professionals said they would consider federal jobs, just 17 percent of the managers would. That’s a huge problem because agencies need to hire midlevel officials to fill a yawning gap between junior and senior employees, federal hiring analysts said.
Gallup researchers said the low interest among managers reflects the fact that many are already well-established in their careers and accustomed to a certain level of compensation. Stronger interest in government work among the other groups could be attributable to a heightened appreciation for public service following the Sept. 11 attacks, Gallup Managing Partner Warren Wright said.
But Linda Brooks Rix, co-chief executive officer of Avue Technologies Corp., which sells human resources technology to agencies, said Generation Y’s unusually high interest in government results from the “tech wreck” of 2001 and 2002. Widespread layoffs among younger workers caused them to put added value on job security, an area where government work compares well with the private sector, she said.
Unfortunately, potential hires, including Generation Y, think federal jobs fall short of the private sector in almost all other key areas, including compensation and ability to attract top employees and to provide a sense of mission.
“There is a significant disconnect between what targeted workers value in a job and the perception of what government offers,” said Council President Patricia McGinnis.
While all of the groups surveyed place high value on intellectual challenges, just 3 percent of respondents think government work offers more ability to innovate and exercise creativity than private employment.
Selling federal jobs
Federal employees and their advocates say most of those results reflect misperceptions. With a focus on service instead of profit, government jobs often offer more innovation and a stronger sense of mission than do jobs in the private sector, said John Palguta, who studies federal hiring as vice president for policy at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. And superior benefits and job security make government pay more competitive over time than most people realize, Palguta said.
But agencies need to better communicate that message, experts said.
“The challenge is how we improve the perception,” said Springer. “The perception is reality in a lot of this.”
Springer said the survey results reinforce steps OPM is already taking through a hiring strategy launched last spring. OPM is pushing agencies to speed up hiring and offer more flexible schedules. It is also actively promoting federal jobs, in part through the government’s first televised recruiting campaign, with commercials showing workers at various agencies, followed by the slogan, “What did you do at your job today?”
OPM officials say much of their work involves helping departments recruit for themselves.
But critics argue the agency’s effort is too centralized. While the recent commercials point applicants to a main federal recruiting site, USAJOBS at www.usajobs.gov, 95 percent of target audiences told Gallup they would go straight to agency Web sites to explore jobs.
“Applicants are attracted to the organizations that specialize in the area the applicant intends to pursue as a career,” said Rix. “This means . . . agencies need to have custom-branded Web sites that speak to the specific opportunities.”
Too much information on USAJOBS means applicants give up before learning about opportunities that would interest them, Rix said.
“There is no such thing as one federal government,” she added. “There are only agencies that have multiple missions . . . Trying to homogenize recruitment for the federal government is a waste of time and a waste of money.”
Pointing to survey results showing that perceptions of individual agencies vary widely, Gallup Senior Research Director Darby Miller Steiger also said agencies should increase efforts to market their own brands. Many Americans know little about the National Science Foundation, for example, but are interested when they learn about it, indicating NSF would benefit from raising its profile.
But the Social Security Administration, whose work people understand but say they are not very interested in, may need to work harder to alter perceptions, Steiger said.
Palguta pointed to the Energy Department’s recent branding effort as a potential model for other agencies. After research showed many Americans had little knowledge of Energy’s mission, the department promoted itself as the lead agency for nuclear nonproliferation and energy security.
Stanley Paul, general manager of the government systems division at CareerBuilder.com, an online recruiter, said federal recruiting suffers from two dysfunctional groups.
“You’ve got government that doesn’t brand themselves and people that don’t understand government service,” he said.
Beyond branding
But agencies’ trouble finding candidates are not solely perception-based, federal employees and outside observers note.
“The federal government must sharpen its competitive edge,” not just in terms of marketing, but by “offering high-performing work environments that value innovation and creativity and provide opportunities for growth,” the report states.
Targeted employees remain concerned that government does not reward exceptional performance, said Steiger.
And despite efforts to streamline hiring, delays continue to drive off applicants, observers said.
“If your goal is to bring in the best and brightest, they are going to have other options; they are not going to wait around through a process that is very bureaucratic and that doesn’t make sense to them,” Palguta said.
Adrienne Spahr is a Government Accountability Office official who co-chairs Young Government Leaders, an organization of federal employees in their twenties and thirties. She said that while younger feds she knows like their jobs, many potential employees are discouraged by the hiring process.
“Unless they make the application process faster, they are going to lose people,” she said.
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