The agencies were lazy, he said. They showed up late to recruit and made job offers in the summer after graduation. One recent year, they went to the schools for recruiting interviews, but there were no students to interview. Information technology companies had approached all the students with job offers the previous summer, and many paid for their second year of master's study. Many advertisements for work lead with job classification and salary, with is putting our worst foot forward, he said.
Creative people tell the significance of their agencies in their ads.
Army ads don't say anything about boot camp. Recruiting and retention would be helped if people were allowed to rotate through a variety of roles before being assigned a permanent job and if people could see they could have an effect without working in a rigid system for years, said O'Neill. Changes in public employee systems can come either of two ways, said O'Neill. The usual way of changing a civil service system is to work around the fringe by starting pilot programs or experiments, like one to promote dedicated people quickly. The other is to abolish the civil service system, like at least two states have done.