GovernmentExecutive.com

The government filled a greater percentage of mid-career jobs with private sector applicants in 2003, but the number of job notices advertised to all comers declined, according to a new survey by the Partnership for Public Service.

The Partnership, a Washington nonprofit group working to encourage more Americans to consider federal employment, found that government agencies filled 15.3 percent of positions from GS-12 to GS-15 with outside hires. The total has risen each year since the organization first conducted its mid-career hiring survey in 2000, when only 10.5 percent of the GS-12 to GS-15 positions were filled from the outside.

During the same time period, though, the number of jobs opened to outside applicants declined from 49 percent to 43 percent.

Partnership President Max Stier said the survey shows that the federal government "has not invested in mid-career hiring very significantly." Government service has traditionally been viewed as a lifelong career, he added, and as a result most government hiring has been at the entry level. But workforce preferences are changing, and now Americans "increasingly view jobs as not a place to spend an entire lifetime, but [a place] to spend a shorter period to build your career."

Government will have to look more to the private sector to fill its employment needs, Stier said, because the federal downsizing during the 1990s left a gap in the pipeline of qualified managers and technicians. Agencies are going to have to go outside to find qualified leaders. "The talent needs of the government are enormous," he said. "The only way to get the very best talent is to seek talent in all the places it exists."

While the survey data indicates that government agencies are skeptical of private sector applicants, mid-career professionals are skeptical of the government, according to Partnership research. A survey of mid-career professionals earlier this year found that many are leery about coming to work in what they view as an overly bureaucratic environment.

Because of hiring rules, agencies can't recruit specific workers, as private sector companies might, a factor that makes luring top talent all the more difficult. But Stier argues that the federal government can overcome these difficulties. Agencies will have to learn to recruit beyond colleges and universities, looking to professional associations and advertising in professional journals. The best managers are already scouting out top private sector applicants, said Stier.

"It's not inconsistent with open and fair competition to try to persuade the best people to apply," he said, even as the applicants still have to go through the competitive process.

Still, many government agencies seem to open jobs to the public in a perfunctory manner. The partnership data, which was culled from the Office of Personnel Management's Central Personnel Data File, found that the Small Business Administration, for one, opened 97 percent of mid-career openings to outside applicants in 2003, but only 4 percent of the jobs were filled by outside applicants.

SBA had the worst record of any agency in the survey, followed by the Treasury Department (6 percent), Social Security Administration (8 percent), and Justice Department (8 percent). The Health and Human Services Department, by contrast, filled 25 percent of its mid-career openings with outside hires, followed by the State Department (23 percent), and the Army (22 percent).