When Michelle Amante graduated from graduate school, she knew she wanted to work for the federal government, but the lengthy and complicated process for gaining employment with a government agency discouraged her.
“Twenty years ago when I was doing this it was very tough. I knew when I graduated I couldn’t wait six months to find a job – to pay the bills, to pay the rent. So I got an offer from a consulting firm and I went there, even though my heart was totally in the civil service,” she said.
Today, Amante serves as vice president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that works to make the federal government more efficient. She leads programs to help agencies improve their workforce. In that role, she finds that the barriers to hiring federal employees she encountered 20 years ago remain.
“For students in public service-related fields and majors, there’s a stigma attached to applying for a federal job,” she says. “They feel defeated even before they even apply.”
According to the Partnership, only 7% of full-time civil servants will be under the age of 30 as of the end of fiscal year 2022, well below the 20% of the overall U.S. workforce. With a 2022 White House document concluding that 30% of the federal workforce could retire over the next five years, staffing shortages could be exacerbated by an unsteady supply of younger workers.
A lack of representation also means federal agencies could miss out on younger perspectives and talent, particularly Generation Z. Gaurav Gupta, managing director at Kotter, a consulting firm that studies workforce transformation, argues that the workplace could benefit greatly from younger workers who are “much more inclined toward change.”
They feel defeated even before they apply.
— Michelle Amante, Public Service Partnership
They feel defeated even before they apply.
“The level of uncertainty in today’s world and the speed at which things are changing is dramatically different than before, and I think that will impact organizations in terms of how they need to adapt, how they need to be more flexible, how they need to be more agile,” he said. “While this change is happening in the world around us, Gen Z is entering the workforce in this environment, so I think they’re going to play a really important role in that.”
While there are a number of commonly agreed-upon solutions to increasing the number of younger federal employees, many agencies lack the resources needed to make such changes and are hindered by long-standing practices.
Application Process
Those interested in working for the federal government are likely familiar with usajobs.gov, the site where agencies post job openings. The website isn’t known for being easy to use.
Amante said a major problem with the platform is that the job descriptions are confusing.
“The job descriptions are really complicated; they’re full of federal jargon and people don’t understand what the job means,” she says. “When we talk to Gen Z, they often read a job description for an entry-level employee and immediately think, ‘Oh, I can’t apply for this. This doesn’t apply to me. I don’t understand half of this job description.'”
Wendy Mazoway, a senior leader at management consulting firm Korn Ferry who loves recruiting and plans to continue doing it after she retires, said job seekers, especially younger ones, see submitting an application as a relatively easy task.
“When you create a negative experience or an experience that’s outside of your own range of experience, you’re really limiting your candidate pool. [the applicant’s] “It’s something that you can experience in your daily life: You open the app, you make three clicks, you buy something on Amazon, and it’s probably delivered to your door the same day,” she says. “People are going to be happy with every interaction they have with you.”
Amante recommended creating clearer job descriptions and improving the system individuals use to apply for jobs, as well as having agencies communicate regularly with applicants (for example, by letting them know their application has been received and when they can expect to hear back), ensuring that employees with diverse backgrounds serve on interview committees, and creating pathways for people who aren’t hired at one agency to easily apply for a similar role at another agency.
Lack of interest
The Partnership reported in April that 67% of 18-34 year olds see a federal career as an opportunity to improve their community. But a similar number, 68%, said they’d never considered a non-military federal job.
“A big gap the federal government needs to fill in terms of youth perceptions is employment and young people’s potential participation in the government workforce,” Nazeya Shtaba, research manager for the partnership, said when the survey data was released.
The survey also found that 69% of young people believe the federal government is not communicating effectively with them.
Last year, Staba encouraged federal agencies to use social media to recruit younger employees, specifically highlighting the Instagram accounts of the Transportation Security Administration (@tsa) and the National Park Service (@nationalparkservice), both of which share content including informative and entertaining videos.
Relatedly, a survey by college networking site Handshake found that 73% of undergraduates in the Class of 2024 said they would be more likely to apply for a job after viewing employer content.
But Amante warned that social media recruiting efforts could backfire if not executed well.
“An agency that we were working with on recruiting had a picture of a young guy in their office and said, ‘Hey, would you like to come work at their agency with Kevin?'” she says. “Kevin was standing in a sea of cubicles with no one else around. And the response to the feed was, ‘Poor Kevin! Someone help Kevin!'”
Increased flexibility
Mazoway emphasized that unlike previous generations, many younger workers were not raised to work in an office from 9am to 5pm.
“Having to be physically present at a workplace somewhere from X o’clock to Y o’clock is a very rigid way of approaching work for a generation that is used to a lot of flexibility and on-demand in their lives,” she said, noting that she has been working from home since 2000.[Gen Z] “There seems to be a dislike for these kinds of constraints, but I think breaking down those constraints as much as possible in a federal environment really opens up more options for different generations to participate in the workforce.”
Some Republican lawmakers have criticized the Biden administration’s remote work policies as too lax, saying they are hurting productivity, but the White House has also begun urging agencies to bring employees back to the office.
At a May event focused on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, Public Health Director Vivek Murthy encouraged leaders of hybrid and remote work teams to foster intentional team building and create opportunities for meaningful social connection with younger employees.
“A generation or two ago [we] We used to take it for granted that people would come into the office, build relationships, and everyone would work together and everything would be fine. But that’s not the case anymore. Not because young people are inherently more deficient than previous generations, but because I think we’ve done them a huge disservice by fundamentally doing these things. [social media] The platforms are sucking them in and having some negative effects on their development and we’re not putting up guardrails around them from a safety perspective.”
Strategic planning
Amante also argued that many agencies don’t think about building a talent pipeline for early career talent.
“Agencies don’t have a lot of open positions for young talent. When a GS-14 leaves an agency, it’s rare for leadership to say, ‘Should we replace another GS-14? Or should we consider replacing a couple of GS-7s to help build the career ladder for incoming talent?’ That thought doesn’t come up,” she said.
(GS refers to the general schedule classification and pay system for civilian federal employees in the federal government, ranging from a minimum of GS-1 to a maximum of GS-15).
“It’s not a matter of getting people to want to apply for the federal government; there have to be jobs,” Amante said, “and there aren’t many jobs available for people just graduating or in their early 20s.”
Similarly, Gupta encouraged institutions to provide leadership opportunities to their younger employees.
“Whether that’s a small pilot project or breaking down a larger program so different people can lead different parts, leverage those leadership skills early on and don’t wait until someone has a status leadership role to be able to leverage those skills,” he said.
It’s not just a matter of getting people excited about applying for the federal government; there have to be jobs.
Michelle Amante, Public Service Partnerships
It’s not just a matter of getting people excited about applying for the federal government; there have to be jobs.
Since 2001, strategic human capital management has been on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list of federal programs at risk for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement or in need of change.
I’m looking forward to
Amante said there isn’t much disagreement about how to get more young people working in the federal government.
“When you talk to talent leaders across government, none of them disagree that these things are needed,” she said. “We just don’t have the resources to do it.”
The Biden administration in April announced new regulations for federal internship programs aimed at increasing recruitment of young people.
But Gupta argued that reforms that help younger applicants and workers will also help older generations.
“I don’t believe that federal agencies or any other agencies should change the way they do business because of Gen Z and the needs of Gen Z,” he said. “This is what’s needed in this day and age, and we need to change the way we do business.”
