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.

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.

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.

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.

In October I commented on government agencies’ growing use of Facebook and Twitter. My focus then, based on a pair of September articles in Federal Computing Week, was on these social media tools as aids to recruitment. I’ve since taken a closer look at this trend.

The takeaway from my informal scan of federal social media: this trend is growing like a swath of mushrooms after a spring rain. I counted more than thirty major agencies or departments with Facebook pages and innumerable others on Twitter (contact me for a full list, if you’re interested).

None of the government Facebook pages that I found appears to be mounted with much conscious attention to recruiting. Most are devoted to agency programs and activities, and most are (first) linked from their sponsor’s home page, rather than their Careers sections.

What does this tell us? I’d venture that in most of these instances the creative impetus to enter the social media realm originated with agency public affairs professionals rather than HR staff. This doesn’t diminish their effectiveness as collateral recruiting tools. After all, they do reinforce their sponsoring agencies’ brands, and that’s a bonus for recruiting…although a bit more focus on the agency culture--and its employees—would be nice. The same goes for Twitter.

All this is good news for human capital professionals and recruiters, even if your agency’s Facebook and Twitter outreach is administered by your public affairs department. In the first place, an agency social media presence is a powerful branding “hook” for engaging potential recruits. Just because HR doesn’t own your agency’s social media resources doesn’t disqualify you from at least promoting it in your recruiting outreach, both online and off.

What’s more, these tools can provide a recruiting engagement platform that’s accessible to HR at virtually no cost other than the exercise of your team’s intra-agency persuasive powers. If you can sell the team that administers these resources on letting HR contribute content, that’s a big win indeed for your recruiting program.

Given the government’s reputation in some quarters as a stodgy, slow-to-adopt monolith in matters of online communication, some might expect Web 2.0 social media tools, spreading so infectiously in the private sector, to have little appeal among the feds (at least during this decade).

Federal Computer Week gives the lie to this cliché in two articles published earlier last month. FCW ranks the federal agencies most successful in using Twitter and Facebook, respectively, to engage the public. The reach and social media savvy of these early adopters might surprise you.

The agencies on either or both lists are not—primarily—reaching out with a human capital and recruiting agenda top-of-mind.  Even so, if you’re inclined to regard these social media programs merely as plain old information dissemination, you’re understating their influence on their audiences. That’s like calling a popular music concert just an exercise in listening enjoyment. Yes, the description may be accurate at its core, but—especially if it’s a rock, R&B, or hip-hop event—it doesn’t quite capture the full experience of being in the auditorium.

For many in these agencies’ social media audiences, that “experience” is charged with high value, and often as much as the information content itself. The truly committed among them gain what brand adherents thrive on—the felt sense that they are insiders and sharers. To me this seems like a pretty cost-effective way to tap the collective enthusiasm and energy of appreciative individuals, in effect, kick starting the social motor of brand contagion. In their efforts to cultivate attentive communities for the agency and the medium—not merely to distribute information—these leading agencies are showing that they “get” social marketing and Web 2.0.

Will the sponsoring agencies also reap recruiting benefits from these Gov 2.0 initiatives? Do you really need me to state this obvious benefit outright? As you build a compelling brand and a community of admirers, you will attract more and more qualified and enthusiastic individuals to your workforce. It's as simple as that.

Text in graphic on right:

Government Twitter leaders (FCW, September 10) 

• The White House: 1,071,927 followers
• CDC Emergency: 808,979 folowers
• NASA: 125.901 followers
• U.S. Army: 14,263 followers
• Smithsonian: 12711 followers

Government Facebook leaders (FCW, September 14)

• The White House: 327,592 fans
• Marine Corps: 83,144 fans
• U.S. Army: 49,416 fans
• CDC: 21,257 fans
• State Department: 16,386 fans

That’s right the rumors are true: the federal government has fully acknowledged that it can no longer tolerate outdated hiring processes. Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management John Berry says in an interview with Wired.com, “Many of our policies and practices are – I wouldn’t go so far back as the 19^th century, but certainly the 1950s in terms of their approach. Our hiring, for instance, has become so cumbersome and so complicated that it is a nightmare…we need to make that simpler…allowing people a fair shot at a federal job.” And while Gen Y might enjoy retro for costume parties, today’s younger job seekers prefer a job seeking experience that blends with today’s transparent, anytime, anywhere environment.

Director Berry believes that these young people have much more to offer the feds than just a replacement for baby boomers, whose retirements remain uncertain due to the economy. “When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the average age of the federal workers who were at Mission Control – the people who got him there safely and got him home – was in the late twenties,” Barry said. “We’re not the first generation to try to involve young folks…the government did it very effectively in the 60s, and those people produced miracles.”

A draft plan (PDF) written by OPM to make the federal government the model employer is currently online and comments from the public are encouraged. The four overall strategic goals include, recruiting and hiring the most talented, providing the tools necessary to help federal employees succeed in their careers, hold leaders and workforce accountable for results and reward those with exemplary performance. Do you think the government is on its way to being “America’s best employer?”

In an effort to get government moving on practical hiring reforms, Office of Personnel Management chief John Berry is mandating a handful of audacious new HR measures. Berry, who calls himself "the Chief People Person for the Federal Government," has instructed all agencies and departments to shape up many of their human capital processes.                                       

We all know how complex and frustrating the process of hiring and on-boarding can be in the government. There’s been a hue-and-cry for years that the cycle has to be shortened and the process simplified. Enter John Berry, flush with the new administration’s energy, enthusiasm and optimism.

"We have, by and large, the best workers in the world," Berry told attendees in his keynote at July’s Excellence in Government conference," but we do not have the systems or policies we need to support them." His agenda for reform mandates just that, from streamlining the agency hiring process and making it more transparent to the public, to improving employee satisfaction and wellness.

Berry apparently means business with his SWAT team mandate, requiring each agency to appoint key managers and human capital staffers to their respective teams. Responsible for all aspects of the reform agenda in their agencies, the teams will address issues like mapping their hiring process, putting job announcements in plain English, notifying applicants at all stages, and involving hiring managers in the recruiting process. All agency SWAT teams were required to be in place and working by early July; they’re each on the hook for a full progress report to OPM by the end of September. To keep the teams motivated and productive, key OPM staffers have been detailed to each.

By December 15, all agencies have to submit action plans that both identify the barriers to hiring the best and brightest and also establish measurable paths to reversing these barriers and improving HR operations across the board. If you’re interested, I refer you to Berry’s June 18 memo which sets out all these mandates and goals pretty plainly.

For his part, Berry’s own goal is no less than "a complete refresh of the federal government’s people policy." A lot of folks are rooting for him, including this commentator.