NEOGOV Blog

It’s a question that seems obvious, but can be used to gain critical insight into your recruiting and hiring processes: how attractive is this job I posted to job seekers?Determining a job posting conversion rate will allow you to see which job postings are doing well and which could use some help to attract more applicants.

Building diversity, equity, and inclusion is vital for public sector organizations. Learn how to support DEI in the workplace with education and training.

While rules for each organization may differ based on location and state legal regulations, local government agencies across the nation are grappling with the challenge of how to collect and track employee vaccination information to ensure the safety of their workforce -- especially given the recent FDA approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on August 23, which may prompt more organizations to mandate employee vaccinations. 

Entry-level employees are critical to your organization's success. Here are vital to ensure your new employees are prepared to perform at their best.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts should be a crucial part of any organization’s recruiting and hiring process. However, it’s easy for DEI webpages with boilerplate phrases like “equal opportunity employer” to be written off as disingenuous if an organization doesn’t put in real work to ensure DEI initiatives are fruitful. 

Despite a semblance of normalcy on the horizon, the effects of the pandemic will have a significant impact on how local government agencies are run in the future, especially for human resources departments. Government HR leaders have been forced to meet challenges they never had before, in ways they may have never thought possible -- like enabling remote work, designing touchless work spaces, and migrating manual processes to the cloud.

The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves around the world in 2020, and one of the major effects was on employment, in both the private and public sector. Due to the business closures brought on by the enforced lockdown and the payroll freezes, many news sources including the Wall Street Journal describe the “economic downturn” of the COVID-19 pandemic as the worst recession since the Great Depression caused by the stock market crash of 1929. In fact, the national unemployment rate rose from 4.5% in March 2020 -- close to the record low --  to a record high of 14.7% just one month later (Bureau of Labor Statistics). 

Attracting enough qualified applicants to public sector positions can be challenging. While many applicants are drawn by the prospect of doing meaningful work and supporting their communities, public sector roles are often overlooked by applicants in search of perks the private sector can offer.

In addition to health concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an upheaval of the public sector job market that has left many workers uncertain about their future. With massive layoffs and a hiring freeze, the US unemployment rate increased to 14.4% in April, the highest since World War II. Learn more about the data behind recruiting in a pandemic below.

According to our survey of 23,310 job seekers between April and June of 2020, 51% reported their job status had changed as a result of the pandemic. The top three reasons that caused a job status change were involuntary, including being laid off (32%), reduced working hours (25%), and being furloughed (18%).

The unexpected disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic caused many organizations to work remotely for the safety of their workforce. When we asked HR teams whether their teams moved to remote work at some point during the pandemic, 93% said they had. Despite a lack of preparedness, the majority we surveyed back in May found that with flexibility, resourcefulness, and a ton of support from their IT departments, they managed to adjust and persevere.