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.

In our view at TMP Government, this is a question that sorely needs to be asked. My colleague John Bersentes and I have attempted to frame an answer to this puzzle in an article forthcoming in the March issue of The Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

We raise concerns about issues like…

• competition with the private sector for talented Latinos
• the relative scarcity of Hispanic-Americans in regions where the Feds recruit most heavily
• the absence of visible high-level government champions for Hispanic inclusion
• the absence of multi-agency, common-cause initiatives to tackle the challenge
• the possibility that agencies are unconsciously channeling bilingual Hispanics into customer contact positions and effectively discounting their qualifications for other career paths

The government’s lack of progress on this front is a very serious problem—especially considering the rapid growth of the Hispanic workforce in the American economy at large. If the Feds continue to lose ground here at the accelerating pace we’re observing, there will almost certainly be formal mandates from the top to kick Hispanic recruiting into gear. But I’m just wondering if a state-of-emergency catch-up policy is really the soundest human capital policy.

You can find a long excerpt from John’s and my article right now on ERE.net. Your best bet is to go here to read the posted excerpt and add your comments.