Many prospective Generation Z applicants complain that descriptions for federal jobs are confusing. kyonntra / Getty Images
Gen Z is underrepresented in the federal workforce. Here’s how some experts would fix that
People younger than 30 represent 7% of the full-time civil service despite being 20% of the overall U.S. labor force.
When Michelle Amante finished graduate school, she wanted to work for the federal government. But the lengthy, labyrinthine process to get a job at an agency deterred her.
“Twenty years ago, when I was doing this, it felt overwhelming. When I was graduating, I knew I couldn’t wait six months to get a job. I would have bills to pay. I had rent to pay,” she said. “So I went into a consulting firm because they were giving me an offer…even though my heart was fully in public service.”
Today, Amante is a vice president at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that works to make the federal government more effective. She leads programs that help agencies improve their workforces. In that role, she’s observed that the barriers to federal employment that she encountered two decades ago have persisted.
“For students who are in fields or disciplines that are public service-related, there is this stigma with applying for federal jobs,” she said. “They feel defeated before they even apply.”
Only 7% of the full-time civil service was under the age of 30 at the end of fiscal 2022 compared with 20% of the overall U.S. labor force, according to the Partnership. This shaky pipeline of young workers could exacerbate staffing shortages, as a 2022 White House document concluded that 30% of the federal workforce would be eligible to retire over the next five years.
The underrepresentation also means that federal agencies could miss out on younger perspectives and talent, particularly from Generation Z (individuals born in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s). Gaurav Gupta — managing director of the consulting firm Kotter, which researches workforce transformation — argues that workplaces could greatly benefit from younger workers who have a “much higher propensity for change.”
“The level of uncertainty and the pace at which things are changing in the world today is just dramatically different than it's been before. And I think that has implications for organizations in terms of how they need to adapt and how they need to be more flexible and how they need to be more agile,” he said. “I think Gen Z has a really important role to play in that, because while this change has been happening in the world around us, Gen Z has been entering the workforce in this environment.”
While there are many generally agreed upon solutions to increase the number of younger federal employees, their implementation is hampered by longstanding practices across many agencies that lack the resources necessary to make such changes.
Application process
Anyone who is interested in working for the federal government should be familiar with usajobs.gov, which is where agencies post job openings. The website is not known for being easy to use.
Amante said that a significant problem with the platform is confusing job descriptions.
“The position descriptions can be really complicated. They use federal jargon, and people don't understand what the jobs mean,” she said. “When we talk to Gen Z, oftentimes, they will read a job that is meant for an entry-level employee, and they think immediately ‘Oh, I can't apply for this. This doesn't apply to me. I don't even understand half the words in this position description.’”
Wendy Mazoway — a senior leader at the management consulting firm Korn Ferry, who loved being a recruiter so much that she plans to do it in her retirement — said job seekers, especially younger ones, expect submitting an application to be a relatively simple activity.
"You're really limiting your candidate pool when you create a negative experience or an experience that is outside of the realm of [the applicant's] experience in their everyday lives. They can go into an app, click three things, get something off Amazon and it shows up at their door probably the same day,” she said. “People should be delighted with every interaction that they're having with you.”
Along with crafting clearer job descriptions and improving the systems that individuals use to apply for jobs, Amante recommended that agencies regularly communicate with applicants (e.g. notifying an individual that their application has been received and when they can expect to hear back), ensure employees from diverse backgrounds serve on interview panels and create pathways so that a person who didn’t get picked for a job at one agency could still easily be considered for a similar position at a different agency.
Lack of interest
The Partnership reported in April that 67% of 18- to 34-year-olds agree that a federal career is an opportunity to improve their communities. But an almost equal amount — 68% — say that they’ve never considered pursuing a non-military federal job.
“A big gap to bridge for the federal government — in terms of perceptions of young people — is on hiring and potential participation of youth in the government workforce,” said Nadzeya Shutava, a Partnership research manager, when the survey data was announced.
That survey also found that 69% of young people don’t believe the federal government communicates effectively with them.
Shutava last year recommended that federal agencies could use social media to recruit younger workers. In particular, she highlighted the Instagram accounts of the Transportation Security Administration (@tsa) and National Park Service (@nationalparkservice), which both share informative as well as funny videos and other content.
Relatedly, 73% of the undergraduate class of 2024 said they would be more likely to apply for a job after seeing employer content, according to a survey from the college networking site Handshake.
However Amante warned that an agency’s recruitment efforts on social media can backfire if executed poorly.
"There was an agency we were working with on recruiting, and they had a picture of a young person in the office, and they were like, 'Hey, come join Kevin and work at that agency,'” she said. “Kevin was standing in a sea of cubicles, and there was no one else there. And the responses to this feed were 'Poor Kevin! Somebody save Kevin!'"
Increased flexibility
Unlike earlier generations, Mazoway emphasized that many younger workers did not grow up being conditioned to work in an office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“To have to go to a workplace physically onsite somewhere, from X time to Y time, in that kind of a setting, that's a very rigid way to approach work for generations that are used to a great deal of flexibility and on-demand in their lives,” she said, noting that she’s been working from home since 2000. “[Gen Z] seems to recoil from those types of constraints, and breaking through those where you can in a federal environment, I think, can really open up options for people from different generations to participate in the workforce.”
Several Republican members of Congress have criticized what they consider to be the Biden administration’s too-lenient remote work policy, arguing it hurts productivity. However, the White House has also begun pushing agencies to bring employees back to the office.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy at an event in May focused on workplace mental health and well-being encouraged leaders of hybrid and remote work teams to promote intentional team building and create purposeful social connection opportunities with younger workers.
"A generation or two generations ago [we] took it for granted that people just can roll into an office and they build relationships and everyone works together and everything is hunky dory. But that's not an assumption that we can make anymore," he said. "It's not because young people are intrinsically deficient in some way compared to prior generations. It's because, I think, we've done them a great disservice by essentially having these [social media] platforms which have sucked them in and have had some negative effects on their development, and we put no guardrails around them from a safety perspective."
Strategic planning
Amante also argued that many agencies don’t think about creating an early-career pipeline.
“Agencies don’t have a lot of open positions for young talent available. When a GS-14 leaves an agency, so rarely does a leader say ‘Should I replace it with another GS-14? Or should I consider replacing that with two GS-7s to build a career ladder for someone new coming in?’ That thinking doesn’t happen,” she said.
(GS refers to the federal government’s general schedule classification and pay system for civilian federal employees, which goes from a low of GS-1 to a high of GS-15.)
“It’s not just a matter of getting people to aspire to apply for the federal government. There have to be jobs available,” Amante said. “And there are very few jobs available for people who are just graduating or in their early twenties.”
Likewise, Gupta encouraged agencies to give their younger employees leadership opportunities.
“Whether that’s small experimental projects, whether that's taking larger programs and chunking them up so that different people can lead different components of it, but really utilize those leadership skills early on and don’t wait until someone's in a positional leadership role for them to be able to utilize those skills,” he said.
Strategic human capital management has been on the Government Accountability Office’s high risk list of federal programs that are vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement or are in need of transformation since 2001.
Looking forward
There’s not a lot of disagreement about how to bring on more younger employees to work for the federal government, according to Amante.
“When you talk to the chief human capital officers across government, there's no resistance that these things need to happen,” she said. “It's just that they're under-resourced in how to do it.
The Biden administration in April announced new regulations for the federal government’s internship program with the aim of increasing recruitment of young people.
But Gupta argued that reforms to help younger applicants or workers will help older generations as well.
“I don’t think it’s just federal agencies — or whoever — need to operate differently because of Gen Z and what Gen Z needs,” he said. “We need to operate differently because this is what we need in today’s moment.”