Attracting Tech Talent to Public Service

The business of serving the government can seem complicated, but it boils down to two basic things: hiring and developing strong tech talent, then showing government customers that we indeed have the talent and capability. When we can attract great talent, government missions benefit.

Our company has control over over a number of factors that attract talent: finding purposeful project work, building a positive culture, and providing competitive pay and benefits. Government has a huge influence in some key factors that hinder our ability to bring in the right people.

The following changes in government policy or acquisition strategy would help us attract talent, and thus improve the capacity for providing excellent services to the government.

1. Set Reasonable Rates that Keep Pace with Inflation

In theory, we set our rates we charge to the government. In reality, the government effectively sets the market price that they are willing to pay, and some vendor will always be willing to bid unrealistically low. Our prices to the government limit what salary and benefits we can provide.

At this moment, high inflation is a national news story. Tech salaries are going up at an even higher rate. If market salaries are rising by 6–10% and typical contract escalations are at 1.5–2.5%, the situation is untenable, and talent will be lost to the commercial world that is not bound by these constraints.

What government can do:

• Buyers should kick out unrealistically low bids, and critically consider prices. A 10% price difference may be the difference between a high-performing team and a brain drain.
• Buyers and Contracting Officers (COs) can mod existing contracts to change escalation rates to account for higher inflation today.

2. Make Space for Junior Talent

Junior talent can make meaningful contributions to projects. However, some contract labor category descriptions set arbitrary years of experience floors that rule out whole categories of the talent pool.

By making more space for junior talent, we can build a better pipeline of talent in the government ecosystem, bring down overall average rates to the government, and build more diversity into teams.

What government can do:

• Those writing RFPs should remove arbitrary requirements from labor category definitions.
• COs can mod contracts to modify or add in junior-level labor categories.

3. Fix the Clearance Process

Pretty much any government employee or contractor needs a clearance in order to do work. Most commonly, this is at the “public trust” level. The information collected and analyzed is very similar across agencies, yet the process is lacking.

There is no reason why most initial clearances shouldn’t be done within about 2 weeks. In some agencies, this is a typical case. In other agencies, it takes 6–12 weeks. Fixing the process will allow people to start working sooner. It also prevents us from losing talent that can balk at a long hiring process.

Reciprocity helps make people more portable across agencies, applying their talent for short stints. With a recent background check and public trust clearance, I should be able to go from one agency customer to another with little delay — certainly within a week or two if not less. Unfortunately, this is not the case with reciprocity eligibility seeming arbitrary with each cleared candidate.

In addition, the process considers marijuana use (regardless of medical necessity). Even though recreational marijuana is legal in many states, it is still technically a federal crime. Most people don’t understand this distinction. We have a silly situation where people are not knowingly breaking laws, but now can’t work for the government in any capacity. This knocks out about 10%+ of the talent pool in our experience.

What government can do:

• End marijuana prohibition, or at least take executive action to stop considering marijuana usage in public trust background investigations.
• Speed the process of initial clearance by taking parallel background processes in individual agencies, and consolidating that duplicative effort into a governmentwide shared service (similar to US Access for badge issuance).
• Mandate true reciprocity across agencies for public trust clearance.

All of these measures and updates in policy would allow for a more diverse, strong talent pool to impact public service missions.