(Gov Exec's Tom Shoop interviews John Sepulveda,

CHCO, VA, and Robert Buggs, CHCO, Education.

Picture is from ClearanceJobs.com, one of our

fellow underwriters for the Press Club event.)

On Tuesday, I heard two top Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs) confirm what we have been sharing with our clients as the way ahead in 2012: Even amidst budget issues, agencies and their workforce need to get the story out about their value. In fact, with government employees being slammed as under-worked and over-paid, the present is the best time to show taxpayers the ROI on their taxes and government leaders the ROI they receive from investing in employees. Employees can then genuinely believe their own management finds them worthy of enhancing skills through education and training.

The occasion was a Government Executive leadership briefing at the National Press Club on human capital challenges, co-underwritten by TMP Government. Both John Sepulveda, Assistant Secretary for Administration and CHCO at Veterans Affairs (VA) and Robert Buggs, CHCO at Education, acknowledged that retention and recruitmentneed a boost from branding.  Mr. Sepulveda noted that getting everyone on board for this effort remains challenging as many in government still feel alien to branding. Yet with retirements happening and possibly fewer high quality applicants (see the recent NACE survey), government has to get across the significance of critical work, e.g. reducing homelessness of veterans.

Mr. Buggs mentioned that the two strongest statements of federal branding he knew were President John F. Kennedy's first inaugural address with its call: ""Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" The second was the U. S. Army's "Be All You Can Be" brand, which ran for 21 years and came from legendary N. W. Ayer copywriter Earl Carter. This latter brand was based on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which has influenced the TMP approach to employer value propositions. Maslow saw that once people have satisfied basic physical and psychological needs, they sought higher fulfillment in becoming the person they "were meant to be," e.g. a calling.

In our branding process, we parallel this self-actualization need, with the self-expressive aspect of a value proposition, when a person aligns their personal goals with the agency mission. It follows that the best way to get and keep people is for them to feel genuinely that they are achieving their highest potential while working for your aims. The Kennedy line reinforces that this ideal employee is sufficiently self-actualized to be able to "put service before self."

Of course, enunciating a value proposition is only one step in creating brand salience, i.e. ensuring that job seekers will remember you at the time they apply. Current government employees are extremely influential in shaping attitudes, and, as Mr. Sepuveda said, they have been "punching bags" over the last few years. These employees need to see that they are valued and worthy of investment.

Hence, the CHCOs pointed out the need for training and additional retention measures. The hiring process needs to have its value affirmed, too. At the top end, CHCOs need to assume a strategic advisory role with agency heads to help them understand the staffing demands of incipient programs. On the tactical level, hiring managers had best speed up processing applications and reduce the still unfavorable time-to-hire that loses prospects to the private sector. 

We'll add that both need to be able to articulate who you are, how you benefit the American people, and what you offer your workforce.

There’s little doubt that agency recruiting has become far more complex and challenging over the last year. Internal hiring restrictions and increased inter-agency competition for talent—among other factors—have complicated this increasingly essential component of agency management. So today it’s become all the more critical to:

• one, frame an accurate and compelling Employer Value Proposition (EVP) for your agency, and
• two, bring this EVP forward consistently and prominently at every “touch point” with potential recruits - in your print and online materials, in your social media outreach, and in your event activities.

When I say this I don’t mean incessantly trotting out an itemized “logical” statement of the points of value that your team members get out of working at your agency [although formulating this framework is a highly useful background step]. What I do mean is making certain that you convey what it’s like to work at your agency in a style that engages the immediate attention of potential recruits, and speaks to them in familiar and comfortable ways.

One way you can do this is by stressing the appealing aspects of concrete, on-the-job reality at your agency. I’m suggesting three approaches that will help you inject a dose of authenticity and immediacy into how you portray your EVP or employer brand. The good news is that all these approaches are “media-agnostic”, i.e., they can be implemented in print, video, online, social media, and event-oriented form. The (maybe) not-so-good news is that they require some creative effort and production elbow grease.

Portray agency workplaces realistically and visually. Serious candidates want to get an authentic feel for working with you. So don’t hesitate to make liberal use of photos of your workplace environments. That’s not to say you shouldn’t consciously set up these shots in ways that underscore the variety of work settings and the attractive attributes of your EVP; just don’t let them look too staged and cheesy. Include people at work (and not lined up like the yearbook shot of your high school chess club). If, like many agency websites, you stick to a sterile verbal presentation, without realistic visuals, you’re missing an opportunity to engage candidates in an authentic and direct way, free of off-putting, if subtle, pretensions of authority. If this purely verbal web approach is agency-mandated, you should consider using other media to capture the real-world spirit of your workplace environments.       

Let representative team members make your case for you.  Don’t forget that candidates respond at a deeper, more personal level when they see and hear people like themselves describing their jobs, their working experiences, and the underlying cultures of their agencies. Personalized visual and video testimonials, sidebars, blurbs, case studies and so on add more real-world zing to the underlying attributes of your EVP.  Paragraphs of factual but unevocative prose about mission, teamwork, work-life balance, variety of assignments, and prospects for advancement just can’t carry this off as well.  Again, if agency Web standards make these resonant first-person approaches difficult, consider social media and YouTube as your creative platforms for this tonal outreach.

Don’t presume that an authentic portrayal precludes inspiration and emotion. Agencies attempting to depict their respective EVPs in recruiting engagement media frequently stray into one of two less effective habits: they either attempt to convey the higher values of their mission and the dedicated spirit of their agency teams in purely verbal terms, or they restrict their visual/video employee testimonials to facts alone, with no emotional or inspirational coloration. The former approach can veer into the forced and stilted; the latter into the sterile, stiff, and formulaic. The most engaging solution: let your visuals subtly convey higher values and your employees speak directly from the heart. It will pay off in recruit response.

We don't need to catalog the number of times that Federal workers faced uncertainty in 2011. And surety of steady, funded day-to-day employment is by no means a done deal for 2012. Yet this past week, USA Today posted several articlesabout how well Federal employees are doing. Again we saw the factoid that Federal employees slightly outearn their private sector counterparts, justified by the higher educational and experiential demands of civil service. Even more interesting are figures showing higher payrates for starting employees, e.g. a mechanical engineer, age 25 to 29, started at $63,675, up from $51,746 in 2006. Meanwhile, as all Fed employees reading this well know, while they may have gotten raises for longevity, merit and promotions, America's 2.1 million civil servants did not get a scheduled 0.9% inflation adjustment this year. That cut saved the government about $2 billion a year. And employees will not receive a 1.1% across-the-board pay hike scheduled for Jan. 1.

Although we try to remind our government clients that security alone does not a strong government brand make, the USA Today articles show that security figured importantly in Federal decision-making:

• Holding onto jobs tightens. The rate of quitting has fallen 29% since 2007. Ordinary retirements are down 11%. Early retirements are down two-thirds. Disability departures have dropped one-third.
• Layoffs decrease.Under the Obama administration, layoffs from reorganizations have dropped by two-thirds to fewer than 300 a year in the 2.1 million person workforce. Workers are 13 times more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off from the federal government.

As expected, the USA Today articles have provoked heated on-line exchanges, which implicitly revolve around the role of government. With many citizens outraged over what they see as a bloated, unresponsive Behemoth, the Federal government and its agencies have the opportunity to reconsider and redefine its value proposition. For our perspective about what we can learn in this regard from 2011, please see our article, "The Year that Almost Wasn't."

As I pointed out in my last post, now may be the best time to shape up and tighten down all aspects of your HR programs, and particularly your approaches to retention and recruiting. In the days to come, agency HR is likely to face challenges on all fronts—from Congressional measures to limit the size of the government workforce to aggressive competition for talent from corporations emerging lean and hungry from the recession.

Our team at TMP Government has been wrestling with the implications of this long view, and we have identified several areas where your agency can get the most bang for the buck in holding steady amid the disruptions to come..

Let your workplace culture shine. Of course you want to attract the best and the brightest with your employer value proposition, but you should also make sure that the work environment you provide has comparable staying power with the top performers you already have on board. Don’t be naïve: other agencies, pressed by attrition and scarcity on the recruiting front, will be looking to poach not only your stars but your supporting players too. Take pains to keep all your valuable performers satisfied that your agency’s culture meets all their needs for support and personal development.

Fortify your employer brand. What’s the net recruiting value of making the top tiers in the Partnership for Public Service’s “Best Places to Work” ranking? It’s certainly high today, and will likely skyrocket amid tomorrow’s inter-agency competition for the best talent. Qualified students and other potential recruits who are inspired by the public service ideal are still out there, although admittedly not in the high numbers of a year or two ago. Ask yourself how well your agency stacks up against others as a potential employer in the eyes of an intelligent and discerning candidate. Then let a frank assessment of your existing brand guide you in a good faith effort to refine it—i.e., to make the reality of your workplace match the promise of your branding.

In recruiting, engage the most promising individuals at the right moment. Although ‘targeting’ may sound a bit harsh, it’s exactly the right idea when it comes to identifying the segments of candidates most likely to advance your agency’s mission and at the same time thrive in your culture. Smart ‘audience’ research is the key to productive engagement; the more precision you achieve in this task, the more successful and cost effective you’ll be in engaging and on-boarding recruits likely to stick around for the long haul.  Focus the same precision approach on choosing outreach events and media. Not all online and/or social sites will be equally productive for all agencies or for all circumstances. Study and refine your results on the fly. Don’t just shoot from the hip.

While you have time, spend it on supercharging the efficiency of your HR processes and systems. Chances are that the next few years will be marked by shrinking resources in government HR departments. The agency that can make the most of what it already has will have the advantage. Focus right now on getting your systems and processes up to snuff. Agencies that can bring successful candidates on board quickly will have an edge. Increased online communication and interactivity among recruiters—and among recruiters and interested candidates for that matter—will help the best HR departments keep a handle on recruiting quality individuals as fiscal and operating restraints tighten.

Not one of these countermeasures is in itself a solution to the challenges you face, but, implemented together, they should help you steer a straight course through the gale warnings on the horizon. 

Considering looming trends in Congress and attitudes reported to be widely held among Americans, it makes sense for Federal HR strategists to start right away with contingency planning for a significantly altered recruiting and human capital environment. And I don’t mean Band-Aid solutions. The atmosphere that’s taking shape is likely to impact recruiting in the government for the next several years at least.

The political trends—not to mention the drift of public opinion—are clear. Certain current and incoming members of Congress have put the size and salary structure of the Federal workforce on the legislative agenda. Recent (and mutually contradictory) surveys on government compensation compared to that of the private sector—characteristically amplified by the media—have raised the visibility of both the salaries and the sheer numbers of Federal workers in the public eye. And let’s be honest with ourselves: the salad days of high enthusiasm for government service among young job seekers—approaching a peak barely two short years ago—appear to be gone for a while.  What’s more, the dreaded retirement exodus—admittedly overhyped in the press for a decade—can still exert some destructive force on the Federal workforce and on the embedded experience and know-how your current agency team embodies.

The impact of these and other emerging conditions on how your team manages the work of your agency can be substantial and, in the worst case, disastrous. So, as I said at the top, it’s not unwise to plan for the worst case—i.e., a shrinking workforce and parallel restrictions on compensation and on how many recruits you can bring onboard to handle your agency’s mission. Given these impending threats, your future could be all about competing to attract and retain the best talent available, and doing so with limited resources. And remember, you will be competing on two fronts:

• First, with a corporate sector emerging from a recession and playing human capital catch-up, and then
• with other Federal agencies that need to retain and replenish their workforces under the same bleak conditions that you will be facing.

All this seems to promise a bumpy ride for Federal recruiters, managers and planners alike. So get ready. In my next post, I’ll bring forward a few suggestions about dealing with this potential nightmare for the agency manager and human resource specialist.

Central to the identity and appeal of TMP Government (and of course of our parent company, TMP Worldwide) is its position as “the Digital Brand Authority.” Followers of this blog might benefit from my discussing exactly what this short tag implies for TGov clients.

At the obvious level, this term succinctly underscores our knowhow in two intersecting realms: branding and digital engagement. As you yourself may have discovered, a productive blend of these two expert disciplines is not particularly common, especially in our Washington, DC market.

When we state that we know how to brand our clients—either as employers or as “corporate” entities—we’re making a pretty far-reaching assertion in our own right. For starters, it implies that we can deliver on the analytical front—specifically that we are accomplished at discovering the full implications and nuances of a given client’s…

1. Identity (both self-declared and widely perceived by folks on the outside)
2. Competitive position/share of mind in the Federal arena and/or talent marketplace
3. Complex relationships with stakeholders and targets of influence (including, as relevant, potential recruits)

That’s the first qualification…knowing how to identify, sort, and balance all these underlying factors in the brand. The second? The insight to fine tune, revitalize, or even alter these elements substantially to accommodate real-world conditions or—when change is on the agenda—to match the client’s “aspirational” goals. In step three, the icing on the cake, we develop a resonant and memorable creative expression that embraces and focuses the evolving brand.

So far I haven’t mentioned the “digital” part. Here’s where TGov lengthens its lead on the competition. Clearly the creative “engine” behind a client’s brand has to leverage online, electronic, rich media and mobile knowhow (all these fall under the digital mantle). Anyone who knows our work has at least sampled the full spectrum of digital creative products—from websites to online games to video to social media—that we have produced for Federal clients. Ensuring that these digital products—usually the mainstream output of our efforts--are brand-authentic is the culminating component in our work.

Even so, this doesn’t convey the full picture, digitally speaking. We live in a digital world. For the most part, our clients’ key audiences are digitally savvy. To clarify what I mean, let’s rewind to my comments on the analytical aspects of brand-building. The constraints and possibilities of operating in a digital world have to be astutely considered and factored in during all our early-stage “discovery” activities as well. Make no mistake: the complexities are legion, and the experience and training it takes to do this with style and smarts are not easily earned.

And that, in short, is why we can honestly call ourselves the digital brand authority. In our government market, who can compare?

As I hope you have noted from my last post, my TMP colleagues and I have lately been thinking hard about how diversity recruiting in the federal government might be improved. Don’t misread my meaning here: fed human capital strategists have chalked up many exemplary achievements in recruiting and retention, most notably their outstanding record with African-American candidates over several decades.

But what we’ve really been puzzling about is why we haven’t seen similar large-scale advances among the Hispanic-American community, the country’s fastest growing minority. While our company has enjoyed solid success in helping a number of standout individual agencies with their recruiting of Latino-Americans, our agency-specific success has contributed only modest advances in the government’s efforts to increase Hispanic numbers in the fed workforce as a whole.

As OPM’s recent report reminded us, the overall numbers are disappointing, to say the least: Hispanic-Americans comprise about 13% of the population, but only 8% of the fed workforce. And as I reported in my last post, in 2009 the feds hired even fewer Latinos, by percentage of new hires, than they did in 2008. 

So maybe it’s time to adjust the standard approach before the government loses seen more ground. My TMP colleague John Bersentes and I have attempted a logical analysis of the challenge in “How can the federal government improve its programs for recruiting and retaining Hispanic-Americans?” In this newly-released TMP Government white paper, we suggest a few reasons why Hispanic participation in the government workforce is lagging. Among our key points: it’s essentially a new kind of problem, different in many ways from the government’s earlier challenge in recruiting African-Americans.

In the second part of “How can the federal government improve its programs for recruiting and retaining Hispanic-Americans?” we advance a few bold suggestions for making progress on this front. Among the most far-reaching: Deputize OPM to create and administer a government-wide program for recruiting Hispanic-Americans. Individual agencies would participate as partners in a common-cause initiative, rather than contending with each other as rivals for Latino talent. We need to break this negative cycle. We suggest that only OPM has the charter, the reach, and the reputation to get this important initiative back on the rails.

Give our piece a read and let me know what you think. 

This month saw the publication of the Office of Personnel Management’s annual progress report on efforts to increase the number and seniority of Hispanic-American employees in the federal workforce. Once again the news is not good. Overall, the percentage of Latinos in government service remained flat (at 8%) compared to last year’s numbers. But here’s the really distressing part—Hispanic-Americans’ share of the total number of new government hires dropped from 9.3% last year to 7.3% this year.

You can read all this for yourself in OPM’s “Ninth Annual Report to the President on Hispanic Employment in the Federal Government.”

If you’re looking for a bright side in all this, you might draw some encouragement in the revelation that, overall, Hispanic-American participation in the federal workforce is up… from nearly 138,000 in mid 2008 to just over 144,000 when last measured in 2009. Presumably this is because retention rates among Latino feds have improved a bit.

Still, when you consider that Hispanics make up about 13% of the total U.S. workforce—and that the Latino community, according to the Census Bureau, will constitute fully a quarter of the U.S. population by mid-century—there’s more than a little room for a hard look at how the government goes about recruiting and retaining members of our fastest growing minority.

My colleague John Bersentes and I attempt just that in “How can the federal government improve its programs for recruiting and retaining Hispanic-Americans?” a new TMP Government white paper. The paper, adapted from an earlier article John and I authored for The Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, is available at the White Papers section of the TMP Government web site.

There are several new wrinkles in the OPM government employee survey currently being distributed to your agency’s workforce. Among its most significant enhancements is timeliness: OPM is increasing the distribution frequency of this mainstay tool to every year, rather than every two years as before.

The survey also has a new name. Formerly the Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCS), it’s now the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, a rebranding that reflects an expanded emphasis on employee engagement and other morale factors. At the very top level, engagement denotes the degree to which federal employees identify with their agency’s mission and with the concrete ways in which their agency manages its workforce to support that mission.

But it’s clearly more complex and nuanced than that. A tried-and-true—very broad and basic--metric for gauging employee engagement is job satisfaction. The central question here: does a given employee feel included and appreciated by colleagues, supervisors, and managers for his or her talents and contributions? By and large, a disengaged team member usually falls somewhere on the scale between mildly cynical and entirely alienated. And you can be sure a disengaged team member is anything but fully productive and supportive of agency goals.

But what’s the connection between employee engagement and success at recruitment, an all-important element for both OPM and our TMP Government team? The tie-in is direct. As OPM helps agencies create workplace cultures that attract the best and the brightest, its survey results are core progress assessment tools. And they also form the basis for the Best Places to Work rankings from the Partnership for Public Service, which in turn directly influence many government job-seekers during the application process. Similarly, if engagement findings (and Partnership rankings) are favorable, they boost word-of-mouth enthusiasm among an agency’s own employees--in itself a powerful recruiting asset.

But will all these survey enhancements advance OPM’s stated objective of making the government “America’s model employer for the 21^st Century?” That’s an extraordinarily ambitious goal, certainly, but the energy and discipline that the OPM team is pouring into all its programs—not just the employee survey--gives this commentator some reason for optimism on this score.

If you’re interested, I can point you to an online copy of the survey instrument. But please wait to ask me until after the data gathering closes in mid-March.

Judging by their efforts, the most pro-active practitioners of social media outreach in the government are turning enthusiastically to the mobile web, Facebook, and other Gov 2.0 modes as they strive to expand their respective agencies’ prestige and audience reach.

For those of us who are focused on recruitment, it’s a little surprising that most of these initiatives don’t begin with the intent of attracting new hires. Still, these leading agencies are building their brands and that, done well, results directly in more informed and enthusiastic recruits.

Here are three examples of federal organizations that are demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of the power of social media, although each emphasizes a different aspect of the challenge:

• the U.S. Army’s IPhone application,
• the White House’s use of video on its Facebook page, and
• the EPA ‘s development of guidelines for its employees’ use of social media.

The Army has released an IPhone app that allows access to a vast store of materials, including content from the Army’s Facebook and Flickr pages, as well as all the video products on its Web site. Released in mid-December, the app achieved more than 20,000 downloads in its first month alone, soaring to a Top-25 ranking for free news sources at the iTunes App store. Take note of its Find a Recruiter facility if you need evidence of the app’s more direct contribution to recruiting. You can find out how to download the app at www.army.mil/mobile/.

Best Practies case number two is the White House, which recently posted a seven-minute video on its Facebook page. The video is a professionally produced mini-documentary about the White House advance team’s trip to an Ohio town to prep for a presidential visit. From a branding standpoint, this slice-of-life coverage, complete with jiggly hand-held camera work, reinforces the authenticity and appeal of everyday activities by the team. Other agencies—particularly those with a more urgent mission to recruit employees actively—can find a polished model here. This is exposure to on-the-job reality at its best, an indispensible tool for reinforcing the appeal of an agency to the community of potential recruits, which is almost always more expansive than agency human capital planners imagine.

My last case is not flashy in any way, but underscores an emerging need in federal social media use: how to ensure that overenthusiastic employees don’t go overboard with the tools at their disposal. EPA’s guidelines are judicious and prescient. Among agencies that encourage informed employee/brand ambassador use of social media, this is a first. In the hope that other agencies will emulate it, I’m reprinting EPA’s handy flowchart below.