How to attract and hire the talent you want

There are a pair of challenges to building any new team within government: the anticipated retirement of a sizeable chunk of the existing labor force and the difficulty of attracting young employees to government.

Traditionally, people would come to government for job security and retirement benefits, offsetting the pay cut that comes with the territory. Today, those benefits are less readily available and private industry -- especially in the startup/tech sectors -- is more attractive than ever, with comparatively excellent pay and benefits.

The common wisdom is that it’s difficult to entice people to government (local or otherwise) because the pay simply can’t keep up -- but it turns out that money isn’t the only, or even the biggest, motivator for people when they’re looking for work. This is particularly true of millennials, who tend to be motivated more by a desire to do meaningful work, as well as by the type of work environment they’re exposed to.

Possibly the biggest blocker to attracting young talent to government is the opacity of hiring practices, combined with an exceptionally long wait time between an applicant’s submission, and hearing back from a hiring manager. This alone deters many potential government employees, who literally cannot afford to wait six months or a year to hear back anything from a position they’ve applied to.

They’re also likely applying to multiple positions simultaneously. This means that even if your position is a number-one choice, you’ll lose out to other organizations that are more responsive and transparent in their application processes.

So, if you can’t offer private-sector pay and perks, or promise traditional government security and longevity, how do you entice people to join your team?

• Write better job descriptions. Understand what you really need for the position you’re trying to hire and write the description accordingly. Don’t make the mistake of requiring that a data scientist also be a communications specialist and an expert programmer and...and...and… This has the effect of diluting the quality of candidates who will apply, not to mention overwork the successful candidate -- making her harder to retain.

Make a clear distinction between the skills and experience that are absolutely required to do the job you’re asking and those that simply would be nice. For example, is it absolutely necessary to require a computer or information science degree, or would a few years of experience suffice?

This is particularly true for technical positions. You don’t need a computer science degree to be an excellent developer, and listing one as a requirement could cost you qualified applicants.

• Improve the transparency and responsiveness of your hiring practices. Be open from the start with what your process looks like, even if it’s not ideal. Is it going to take six months to make a hire? Say so. Does your process include panel interviews, written tests, or code challenges? Say so.

Understanding that changing hiring processes to be faster or more transparent may take months itself, look for ways to indicate to candidates that their applications haven’t been lost in the ether. This means more than an automatically generated email. If there’s someone you’re interested, a quick, personal message explaining your process can go a long way.

In the longer term, are there ways that you can expedite applications? Are there review steps that can be removed or approvals that aren’t really necessary? Is there a way to front-load administrative requirements for hiring, so that candidates in your pipeline are shielded from it?

It may also be important to communicate any changes you’re making to your hiring process, in the hopes of attracting return applicants.

• Look for alternative benefits or perks as motivators. If you can’t offer pay competitive to the private sector, what can you offer? Think about ‘soft benefits’ like an excellent workplace culture, a central work location, flexible schedules, or telecommute benefits, conference attendance, and training opportunities.

• Appeal to people’s sense of service. You may be surprised to find that the opportunity to serve their community or improve their government is a heady incentive for civic work.

• Don’t expect to hold on to people forever. The days of someone staying in a job for 30 years are over. While some people may stay for a few years or a decade, that’s increasingly rare, so accept that people will leave after a shorter amount of time and prepare for it. Make documentation a part of every job and work to preserve institutional knowledge. When someone on your team is ready to move on, offer support.

• Improve your onboarding. Reduce frustration as much as you can by putting that aforementioned institutional knowledge to work and make these resources available to new hires immediately. Be transparent about interpersonal and political challenges in your office as much as you can be.

• Adopt startup standards and practices. This doesn’t have to be “move fast and break things.” It can be as simple as supporting personal and professional growth, or as complex as instituting an Agile methodology (which is probably a good idea in a tech-oriented team, anyway, but that’s for another resource).

If you can find a way to support a results-oriented workplace, in which your staff defines their own schedules, work habits and locations, vacations, and breaks, so much the better. At least one study showed that a results-oriented workplace reduces turnover among employees, among other benefits.

Can you relax the dress code? Host potluck team lunches? Bring in outside experts who are willing to volunteer their time to teach your team something new? Modify your office to break people out of cubicles and encourage collaboration?

• Offer training: Subscriptions to Treehouse and Lynda.com can give great results. But if you’re offering to pay for it, also offer time for it. Your new employees may have the drive to teach themselves after-hours (in fact, they may expect to have to), but building in time for them to do this during office hours is a great way to encourage it. If you can, encourage conference attendance as well and make it easy for staff to attend.

Try the ‘see one, do one, teach one’ model. Let your existing practitioners teach anyone who’s interested and make time and space for that teaching to happen.

• On equipment: Give your employees control over their own equipment. Yes, there are very good reasons to lock down an organization’s PCs, particularly among a group of less tech-savvy people. Nobody wants to be the person calling IT because they downloaded a virus. However, nobody wants to be the person calling IT every five minutes when they’re trying to run R or another data package and can’t because they don’t have admin rights over their desktops. This sort of control can have a chilling effect on data exploration.

If you can loosen those controls even a tiny bit, so that your data people can install software and run packages, you’ll make their jobs that much easier and more efficient, not to mention encourage them to explore what they can do with data. This is especially true for anyone building apps. At the very least, don’t firewall tools like Google Drive and other free web-based applications.

If you’re worried about viruses, see if you can get your team Macs instead of PCs. They’re a little more expensive, but they’re less prone to hardware and security issues. Plus, they can run Windows in parallel to their own operating system, if that’s a requirement.

• On policies: If you think you can’t do something because “it’s against policy,” take another look at the actual language of the policy -- not the interpretation that’s been held as common wisdom. Does that policy actually say what you think it says? Is there a way to interpret it, or modify it, to support your end goal?

Todd Park, the former CTO of the United States, tells a story: For a very long time, a particular agency refused to use cloud services. The agency cited a policy that made the use of cloud services literally illegal. Turns out, the actual language of the policy didn’t say much of anything at all about cloud computing. Once that was cleared up, the agency was able to move onto a cloud infrastructure, which made their service-delivery jobs much more doable.