Talent Search

Pick up the Sunday editions of The Washington Post or the New York Times and you will find page after page of high-end classified advertising by companies looking to recruit for im-portant positions.

Sometimes in these sections, one also sees a few advertisements placed by federal agencies to fill senior positions in their ranks. But most of federal recruiting has migrated to the Web. The largest site, USA-JOBS, is run by the Office of Personnel Management.

USAJOBS includes pages touting the virtues of federal employment ("It's not just a job . . . it's an adventure"), and lists jobs of every description-17,413 of them on a recent day in September. The home page of the site demonstrates its sensitivity to current events, prominently advertising for people to help rebuild infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Online recruiting is a great tool, but it has some limitations. It does not have what one might label the "serendipity factor." A Web site is a passive tool. Thus recruits must be active job seekers. The employer probably will not reach the person who might be perfect for the job, but who is not currently looking-the stranger across a crowded room, in the words of the old ballad.

Government is on the hunt for talent from outside its own ranks, as OPM Director Kay Coles James often stresses. But most of the hiring is done from the inside. Even in the Senior Executive Service, which brings in political appointees from outside government, the ratio of inside promotions to outside hires was better than 2-to-1 last year (513 internal promotions and 236 from outside government). In GS grades 12 to 15, only 15 percent of hires are from outside government.

With so much hiring done internally, our team at Government Executive thought we might play a useful role by creating a section of the magazine devoted to helping find the right matches between employers and people who might be open to new jobs. Our readers are at senior ranks in government, and thus are the people who are hiring key employees and also the people who might be interested in making a change if informed of challenging work elsewhere in government (or outside government as well).

We believe this small advertising section can help improve the employment market for agencies, some of which are now working to create a more visible "brand" for their missions. It will be a meeting place for them, for workers, professional recruitment firms and for private sector companies looking to hire people who are retiring from federal employment.

For more information on Government Executive's new executive recruitment section, contact Libby Barton at (202) 266-7277, lbarton@govexec.com, or Fred Kuhn at (202) 266-7338, fkuhn@govexec.com.