When Brittany Corprew was a college sophomore, she knew exactly what she wanted to do after graduation. During one of her Women and Criminal Justice classes at Penn State in 2011, a recruiter dropped by to distribute brochures about the nonprofit Teach for America program.  While the pitch was intended for seniors, Corprew was hooked. She waited until her senior year and applied to Teach for America in October 2013. She interviewed by phone and again in person, and was accepted to the program by January. Corprew is now a third grade teacher at Pugh Elementary School in Houston.

Launched in 1989 as the product of founder Wendy Kopp’s undergraduate thesis, Teach for America recruits college graduates to teach in low-income communities, typically for two-year stints. In exchange for their public service, recruits are paid an entry-level teacher’s salary and offered assistance with their student loans through concurrent enrollment in the federal AmeriCorps program. Twenty-five years after inducting its charter corps, the organization now places teachers in 50 cities and rural communities nationwide.

In spite of challenges with two recent recruitment cycles, which Teach for America officials attribute to an increasingly competitive economy, the program remains popular with college seniors. About 45,000 individuals applied for just 5,300 spots in the 2013-14 corps, hailing from a diverse range of Ivy League schools, flagship public universities, small liberal arts colleges, and historically black colleges and universities. According to Harvard Magazine, about one in five of the university’s seniors has applied in recent years. Corprew joined a cohort of over 40 corps members from Penn State alone. In terms of hiring, Teach for America is something of a millennial whisperer. 

What is the secret sauce behind Teach for America’s hiring success, and could it be a model for the federal government?

While government hiring has long been sclerotic, representation of young people in the federal workforce literally hit a new low this year. Just 7.1 percent of federal employees are under the age of 30. Compare that with the broader American workforce, for which the figure is 25 percent. What’s worse, millennial representation continues to tick downward. We are now at the lowest share of federal employees younger than 30 in a decade.

Compounding the problem, we’re entering a critical time in the public sector. Baby boomers are beginning to retire in a long-anticipated demographic wave, just as millennials seem to be ambivalent about working for the government. By 2025, millennials are expected to comprise 75 percent of the nation’s workforce. The question is whether government will be able to attract a diverse and talented cadre of young professionals.

Targeting a Generation

The idea that Teach for America could be a model for the government was first proposed by Bob Lavigna. Now assistant vice chancellor for human resources and adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin, Lavigna worked for four years at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit in Washington that aims to “inspire a new generation of civil servants and transform the way government works.” He is also the father of a Teach for America alumna. Inspired by her experience, he analyzed the organization’s hiring approach, breaking it down into key elements:

• A clear and compelling mission
• Aggressive, strategic and coordinated recruiting
• A rigorous, yet timely, assessment process
• A comprehensive onboarding process and a commitment to continuous training and development
• A focus on results
• Long-term career support

Elissa Kim, Teach for America’s executive vice president for recruitment and admissions, believes the organization’s hiring approach all comes down to its mission. When she was a student at Northwestern University, Kim had planned to apply for law school. Then she heard about Teach for America. She liked the idea of service, so she applied during her senior year and was accepted. Even after accepting the offer, Kim thought she would stay for two years and then return to law school. That all changed the first time she stood in front of a classroom. 

“We’re simply trying to give people a chance to fall in love with our kids,” she says, much like her own experience. “Once that happens, everything changes.” Kim points to several of the program’s guiding principles:

• Leadership is a meaningful game changer.
• Transformational change is possible in our lifetime, and we need to help drive it.
• Diversity is critically important, given the vast majority of the kids we serve are kids of color.

If those ideals sound youthfully idealistic, don’t think Teach for America neglects the hard realities of recruitment. Kim says the organization has to recruit aggressively and strategically. She describes hiring in the language of a drill sergeant: “The student body president on a given campus might have three different offers before springtime even hits. And when you’re up against that kind of competition, you’ve got to be able to fight. And we are willing to.”

More often than not, government isn’t even in the competition. Agencies are struggling to connect with young people, whose needs range from modern technology and flexible schedules to careers that offer variety and advancement.  For a generation accustomed to the freelance economy, the prospect of a 30-year federal career tends to distress more than relieve. The Office of Personnel Management acknowledges the problem and has launched several initiatives targeting millennials, including a revamped Pathways internship program, an emphasis on social media outreach, and flextime perks like the Housing and Urban Development Department’s Innovation Time, which gives employees up to four hours a week to work on passion projects. The jury, however, is still out.

Long-Range Support

Teach for America runs recruitment operations on hundreds of college campuses, and like well-tended perennials, you can expect to find recruiting signs blooming on corkboards every fall. Even if students were to somehow miss the ubiquitous posters, they’ll doubtless find Teach for America online in the sidebars of their Facebook pages and in promoted posts on their Twitter feeds.

Once students express interest in the program, a campus recruiter connects them with everything from large information sessions to one-on-one conversations and field trips to visit corps members and their students. The application process is rigorous, but efficient, according to Lavigna. When recruiters decide in January that they want an applicant, they dial up the attention even further. The week after Corprew was notified of her acceptance, she received an offer package—and it wasn’t just any old manila envelope. She received a formal letter, a Texas bumper sticker and a letter from a grade school student welcoming her to Houston.

The moment applicants confirm their placement with a school, they’re assigned preparatory online modules, even as they meet their last college graduation requirements. Preparation accelerates after graduation as corps members relocate across the nation. Where possible, Teach for America helps smooth the landing by setting up welcome fairs with community organizations and providing advisers to help with the minutiae of starting life after college.

After a brief adjustment period, corps members enroll in Institute, a five-week cram course. They learn the essentials of teaching, such as how to manage a classroom, develop a lesson plan, give precise instructions, supervise students and mete out discipline. It’s not all technical training. Institute also includes discussions on race and class. Corps members read Spelman College President Beverly Tatum’s book on the “moving sidewalk” of privilege. It raises questions that go beyond the classroom: Why are all the Hispanic kids sitting together in the cafeteria? What do race and family income mean for a teacher?

The first year of teaching underprivileged students is challenging, and one would expect dropouts at this stage. Yet retention is remarkably high, with 88 percent returning for a second year. In part, this is because each teacher is assigned a mentor, a “manager of teacher leadership development.” Another reason is the rigorous, independent evaluations aimed at holding corps members accountable. While the goal is to place talented college graduates in the classroom, some of the recruits aren’t education majors—a controversial approach that has riled critics of Teach for America. The program relies on evaluations for its credibility, according to Kim, who says that performance data is also used to drive continuous improvement.

As Lavigna notes, corps members benefit from long-term career support long after they “graduate” from their two-year stint with Teach for America. Understanding the millennial inclination to change careers early and often, the program doesn’t attempt to lock teachers into 30-year careers, instead emphasizing a lifetime of advocacy and civic leadership. It offers resources to alumni, including a career center, partnerships with graduate schools, and employer referral programs with companies such as Accenture, GE, Goldman Sachs, Google, J.P. Morgan and McKinsey.

The Federal Maze

Teach for America’s success in recruiting millennials can be attributed to an aggressive, targeted strategy, and attendant programming from the first handbill to the last day in the classroom. Still, some might be thinking: “Sure, but Teach for America? Is this approach realistic for the government?” 

Clearly, there are differences. There’s the small hurdle of scaling a 10,000-person organization to a workforce of 2 million. But even beyond size, the federal government faces hiring realities that Teach for America does not.

In sheer numbers, government has a much bigger hiring responsibility than Teach for America. In 2014, the federal government hired 375,000 people, compared with Teach for America’s 5,300 recruits. John Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, describes the experience of one federal official who posted five identical openings and received 30,000 applications within a week. Yet agencies that have targeted recruiting by school or program have weathered accusations of favoritism, Palguta says. 

Agencies also are bound by hiring rules like disability authorities and veterans’ preference. There’s a widespread belief among federal managers, for example, that veterans are given more hiring preference than Congress intended. A November 2014 survey by Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive, found that two-thirds of managers believe veterans’ preference, in its current form, sometimes prevents the best candidate from getting the job. 

Even after securing new employees, agencies fight an uphill battle to retain them. Many incentives common in industry are disqualified from government based on ethical grounds or expense. Whatever the reason, federal new hires can’t expect to tour the “Googleplex” or walk into a break room and find the foosball table that is synonymous with hip, young companies.

In spite of the obstacles, federal personnel officials are hopeful.

Last spring, the Partnership for Public Service released an ambitious report, “Building the Enterprise: A New Civil Service Framework.” The study, which calls for major reforms in hiring, firing and everything in between, has the ear of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Several bills, including one proposed by House Democrats to institute parental leave for federal employees, have been introduced in the new Congress—even if they offer piecemeal solutions.

Whether this infamously divided Congress can enact measured, thoughtful reform of such a political hot potato as the federal workforce remains to be seen. Palguta, though, finds hope in the naysaying. The first step of the 12-step program, he says, is recognizing that you have a problem. No one is saying the federal government is doing a great job hiring millennials, he adds. 

Palguta says the public sector will have to adapt to the talent market, not vice versa. When it does adapt, it could do worse than modeling itself on Teach for America, he says. 

The program inspired Brittany Corprew three years before she ever entered the classroom. When asked whether she applied anywhere else, she replied without hesitation: “Nope.”

If only government recruiting could inspire that kind of commitment.