Civil Service Steps Up Recruitment

Ads Set to Appear as Survey Finds Students Have Little Knowledge of Federal Jobs

Civil service leaders announced a media campaign yesterday to lure talented applicants to the federal workforce at the same time that a new study says the government needs to do a more effective job of recruiting college students for federal jobs.

Linda M. Springer, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the agency will begin airing four 30-second television ads featuring federal employees touting the work they do and encouraging viewers to explore job opportunities at http://www.usajobs.gov/ . The ads come as the federal government faces an unprecedented wave of retirements among the baby-boom generation, with about 60 percent of the government's 1.8 million workers eligible to retire over the next 10 years.

"We often call it the retirement tsunami," Springer said. "We've got to get ready for it."

However, the new study by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, scheduled for release today, shows that federal officials have often failed to reach out to a group of people who might be expected to fill the jobs of departing civil servants: university students.

The partnership, whose mission is to entice talented people to consider federal careers, found that university students -- as measured by the responses of juniors, seniors and engineering graduate students at six universities -- say they lack the knowledge of federal jobs and internships necessary to map out career decisions.

Specifically, 54 percent of students said they did not feel knowledgeable about federal opportunities, compared with 13 percent who said they were very or extremely knowledgeable. Forty-two percent of students said they were very interested in federal jobs, slightly less than the percentage who said they were interested in private-sector spots.

Students said their biggest concern about taking a job in government was too much bureaucracy.

The OPM ads and the report come as the difficulty of maintaining a skilled federal workforce is building. The problem is especially critical at the uppermost levels of career bureaucrats, with 90 percent of Senior Executive Service members eligible to retire in the next decade.

Max Stier, president of the partnership, said the next generation of federal workers will think differently about their career paths than the generation that is about to retire.

"The generation that's leaving" believed in a system in which "they came into government for lifetime employment," Stier said. "The model no longer works today. This is a problem the government has never had to address before."

Springer acknowledged the new demands yesterday, saying the government must offer more flexible work arrangements. "We can't just bank on employees today in the 21st century that want to come work in a bricks-and-mortar building and stay there for 20, 30 or 40 years," she said. "It's not going to happen."

The partnership's report urges the government to create substantive relationships with colleges and universities, pool resources of agencies to recruit for certain careers, stress the public-service component of government work and tailor recruitment with as much face-to-face effort as possible.

Springer also said OPM and other agencies must redouble their efforts to simplify the red-tape-laden federal hiring process, which is notorious for leaving job applicants in the dark for months. And OPM is encouraging workers who could retire over the next few years to stick around longer, perhaps through new part-time arrangements.

An area of acute concern is workers with technical skills. The Defense Department needs to hire 6,000 engineers annually, while various agencies need 2,000 information technology experts, according to the partnership. About 12,500 new air traffic controllers will be needed over the next 10 years. At the same time, scientific proficiency in U.S. schools is not keeping pace with that in foreign schools.

"The numbers are dramatic," said Doris Hausser, an OPM senior policy adviser. "The university systems of foreign competitors are generating engineers and scientists at a much higher rate than we are. That's not to say we don't have good engineering schools, but what needs to happen is for federal agencies to establish good working relationships with the departments at some of these schools."

The partnership's report said engineering students tend to be less interested in federal jobs than others, with only a quarter having actually sought information about them.

The report reflects the views of 3,200 students who responded to a survey sent to about 31,000 students at Clark Atlanta University, George Washington University, Louisiana State, Ohio State, Stanford and the University of New Mexico. At Ohio State, only language and engineering students were surveyed.

Ohio State engineering seniors Andrew Bramnik and Erica Nollen chose different paths to employment, illustrating some of the challenges and successes of federal recruitment.

Bramnik, 22, an electrical engineer, stopped at the booth of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at a job fair last fall and talked to a representative for about 20 minutes. He was then invited to an interview in Illinois and visited a training room simulating a nuclear power station.

Soon after, though he was still talking to several companies about lucrative positions, he accepted a post in the commission's nuclear material safety branch. "I have friends who have accepted employment with other companies who will be starting in more entry-level, low-level positions," he said. "I get the feeling that going to work for the NRC is going to give me an opportunity to learn and progress a lot, while studying and being trained."

And, Bramnik said, "I've always known I wanted to do something with my engineering background that could provide a benefit to society."

Nollen, 22, a mechanical engineer, considered a job with the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington state but elected instead to be a consultant for McKinsey & Co., which offered her several thousand dollars more in salary. After an interview on campus about the shipyard position, she flew to Puget Sound for a tour. Officials there explained that though the pay was less than what the private sector offered, other benefits, such as a 40-hour workweek or guaranteed overtime, would make up for that gap.

Yet Nollen said she was worried that officials didn't put much effort into tailoring a position to her interests in strategic management. McKinsey, she said, conducted a demanding series of interviews that probed her career interests clearly.

"It wasn't necessarily that I didn't want to work for the government," Nollen said. "I don't know how they got a good read on me being a fit or not. It was just such a short screening process. You want to make sure you're getting the right people in the job."