Energy discovers a better recruiting path

By Jory Heckman
Federal News Radio

Getting students interested in federal government positions may just be a matter of getting the information out to college campuses.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia concluded in a hearing Tuesday that student ambassadors may be one of the best approaches to pique the interest of students in working for the government.

“We believe the student ambassadors are an excellent way to complement the electronic world we live in,” said Michael Kane, chief human capital officer at the Department of Energy. “Whether we’re tweeting or texting, we have the ability for students and faculty to find somebody who can tell them what we’re really like — who can talk about our values, can talk about our training opportunities, can talk about our career paths in a language that they understand. And they can tell us more directly what’s working in our recruitment and what isn’t.”

Kane added DoE started an ambassador program in 2009 with six students. Throughout the seven-month rotation, those six students created contacts with 71 faculty members.

“Now those students may graduate and move on, but that bridge that they’ve created, to mine the tent that’s there, to refer it, is continual,” he said. “It’s a non-renewable resource for us.”

For 2010-2011, DoE expanded to eight ambassadors and focused more on diversity with half of them working at a historically Black college or university or a university with a large and diverse population.

“Like the previous academic year, this cohort of student ambassadors worked at a DOE office or lab and has a diverse field of study from business and finance to nuclear engineering and international relations,” Kane said. “So far, these student ambassadors have established a network of 1,718 students and faculty; promoted 24 jobs; held 50 promotional and informational events; and generated over 10,000 application visits from the Web links they provided.”

Kane said the cost for these ambassadors is about $5,000 each, which includes a $3,000 stipend and a $2,000 “recruitment/marketing” budget. “We have found in our ROI analysis that it costs about $5,000 each time we send a federal recruiter to a one day career fair at some of these non-local universities,” Kane said. “This includes travel costs, registration fees, shipping of materials, etc. Having Ambassadors on these campuses allows the agency to maximize efforts beyond just a one day visit, to a year round presence for nearly the same costs.”

Placing those ambassadors for maximum impact, however, requires additional tools. Christine Griffin, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), said USAjobsrecruit.gov may help fill that role.

“[USAjobsrecruit] is a very recent tool — I think we’ve only implemented it about a month ago — that will allow agencies to find schools specifically with the students that are getting the skills that they need in their agencies,” said Griffin. “And then they can go directly to those schools, and they can develop relationships with folks at those schools.”

Kane also said President Obama’s 2010 executive order calling for Pathway Programs, will help recruitment efforts for federal internships from high school through the post-graduate level.

The Department of Energy, with its large number of highly specialized skill sets like nuclear engineering, environmental engineering, power transmission, appreciates that what “the Pathway Programs and others like it does is give us the ability to work with students early on, and to encourage those students to use internships, use viable competitive methods coming straight out of school,” said Kane. “We also look at Pathway Programs as an opportunity to diversity our recruitment efforts. We get what I call geographic harmony, where we don’t hire from all one local area. Pathways does that because it brings a whole large set of students into play.”

OPM is working on new regulations for Pathways and other new intern programs. Griffin did not offer a timetable for when OPM would make the new regulations public, only saying in the “near future.”

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Jory Heckman is an intern with Federal News Radio.

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