Federal human resources offices are at the intersection of a growing federal hiring challenge: The number of HR employees isn’t much increasing, but the work employees have to do still extends throughout the entire employee lifecycle.
At the Department of Commerce, a mismatch of resources and workload creates a ripple effect on the overall recruitment techniques, said Jessica Palatka, the agency’s chief human capital officer.
“What that does is that leaves the administrative functions in paper processes,” Palatka told Federal News Network. “It leaves us without the data maturity. It leaves us without clean data that we would love to be able to then employ in some of these more advanced technologies.”
Working within budget constraints also pushes Commerce to tailor its federal hiring strategy to focus only on the events and methods that ultimately delivered the best results.
“Not every strategy is a winner. We have had very few that have not been incredibly successful, but when we come to budget restraints, it comes back to, which one was the most successful?” Palatka said. “We would love to continue as many of them as we possibly could … but budget constraints come into play, so data becomes very important on where the successes have the greatest impact.”
On the back end, Commerce’s HR staff use data to determine whether or not they will continue certain federal hiring strategies. The agency can collect plenty of information on candidates and applicants, but a remaining challenge is being able to reach the next level of data maturity.
A focus on high-touch communications
At the same time, Palatka said her staff is always thinking creatively, working within the tools they do have on hand, and combining resources to try to reach a larger, more diverse pool of federal job candidates. For instance, all department federal hiring events are open for any component of Commerce to participate.
Commerce’s HR department is also highly focused on increasing “high-touch communication.”
“We make sure that it’s not just email bursts that are coming out that are impersonal,” Palatka said. “We want a personal touch. We want a high-touch recruitment effort within our office.”
Additionally, Palatka said it’s “incredibly important” to communicate with candidates and answer their questions whenever those come in.
“If they got a high-touch response — a personalized response — it’s going to send them to the next step of applying for a position,” Palatka said. “We want them to be able to envision a career for themselves.”
But within the resources they have, Palatka said her team also faces some challenges in forming personal connections with federal job candidates.
“You just have less ability to interact on a one-on-one, a personal basis, which does make things like AI and generative AI so much more important to us,” Palatka said. “If I’m not going to be plussed up from a staff perspective, I would hope then to be plussed up from a technology perspective, to at least be able to address the needs of my employees and candidates from a more technical approach.”
Tailoring federal hiring to the candidate, setting
Commerce’s overall federal hiring strategy is what Palatka described as a “multi-tier approach.” It involves a mix of virtual engagements, such as social media campaigns, as well as attending job fairs and visiting colleges and universities in person. But the agency is not focused solely on educational backgrounds of candidates — Commerce is also looking to connect veterans, military spouses and other groups with federal job opportunities.
In-person events, according to Palatka, make for easier engagement with job seekers, and more activity on job postings immediately following an event.
Virtual events, on the other hand, are more challenging to move an individual from being a job seeker to getting onboarded as a new hire.
“It can be really hard to spur engagement in the virtual world,” Palatka said. “A lot of the time, at in-person events, I can walk up to someone and engage them. But if they’re in a [virtual] waiting room, it’s hard to really get a read of if the person is actually interested.”
There’s also a significant difference between what Palatka said are “active” versus “passive” job seekers. Some candidates are actively looking for a new position, while others may be more content in their jobs, but are still seeing what else might be out there. The differences between those two types of candidates mean Commerce’s HR staff have to approach them somewhat differently.
Palatka said, “the amount of communication might change, but the forms and methods that we use to communicate are really dependent on emerging technology that we’re seeing — and that has changed significantly.”
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