To learn what is right and wrong about federal recruiting, listen to young people.
James Hedrick , in the government for two months, came to the Housing and Urban Development Department because it strives to improve the nation's communities.
April Torikai , hired by the State Department seven months ago, saw long-term opportunities to grow professionally in jobs that support U.S. diplomacy overseas.
Sonya Phillips moved 18 months ago from Tennessee to join the Government Accountability Office here because its work meshed with her education and experience in state government.
Katie Santo , a graduate student at George Washington University, hopes to find a job in government where she "can make a difference."
In all their cases, job decisions were not based on salary but on a sense of public service and other factors, such as training and opportunities for professional development offered by their agencies, they said.
Some of the perks of federal employment -- Hedrick's gym membership for $20 a month or time out of the office to help Hurricane Katrina victims -- also make the government a worthy employer, in their view.
The four offered their perspectives on federal recruitment practices at a summit yesterday sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group working with the Office of Personnel Management to promote government service to college students.
But they also recounted some frustrations with their job searches.
Hedrick, a presidential management fellow at HUD, found it difficult to follow up with agencies after a job fair. "The problem was finding someone to talk to," he said. Many college graduates, facing deadlines to start repaying student loans, want to know when they will start work and what kind of training they will receive, he said.
Torikai's first encounter with the government came after she was accepted as an intern and then waited five months for a security clearance. While waiting, she said, some one-on-one contact with a program official "would have calmed my nerves" about the internship.
In contrast, Phillips said, the GAO "did a good job of staying in contact" while she was being hired and showed an interest in her as a professional to keep for the long term.
Santo said college friends who were recruited by companies knew before graduation that they had landed their jobs. Most had completed internships that were a stepping stone to their jobs, she said.
Santo's sense that companies use internships more effectively to evaluate talent is supported by a survey conducted by the Partnership for Public Service. Max Stier , the group's president and chief executive, told federal officials gathered for the summit at the Ronald Reagan Building that only 15 percent of federal interns are hired where they had their internship, while the proportion in the private sector is 35 percent.
Contrary to popular impressions, the government stacks up fairly well against the private sector when college students are asked about their employment interests, he said.
But the partnership's survey also found that most students don't know what types of jobs exist in the government, don't know how to find federal jobs and don't know how to apply for them, he said.
Most college graduates, Stier said, are willing to wait only four weeks to hear back on their job applications. That survey finding suggests that agencies need to give students more detailed job information and streamline their hiring procedures, he said.
Dan Blair , deputy director at the OPM, told the summit that the government is stepping up recruitment efforts. The office has launched a television advertising campaign in about a dozen cities and plans to hold "federal career days" at Louisiana State University, Ohio State University, New Mexico State University and Carnegie Mellon University aimed at attracting students in medicine, engineering and foreign languages into the government, he said.
Bush administration officials are starting to focus on how to speed up federal hiring -- the OPM yesterday posted a "hiring makeover tool kit" on its Web site to guide agencies -- because projections show that the government could lose about 900,000 of 1.8 million employees through resignations and retirements in the next six years.
Email This Page!