NEOGOV Blog

Used to recruiting older generations? Recruiting Millennials takes new strategies and a whole new mindset.

Determine what you need to do to become an employer of choice, from improving your hiring process to sharing compelling stories about your organization. 

Feeling burnt out trying to hire in this competitive job market? Find out how to win top talent despite today’s public sector HR challenges.

Finding quality candidates is a hard enough job on its own, but too often, HR professionals and hiring managers make the job even harder by grading applicants and candidates on the wrong things. Making job listing requirements highly specific or strenuous may actually be too prohibitive, discouraging eligible candidates who are more than capable of learning on the job or who have relevant experience that substitutes for a specific degree. On the flip side, using an unstructured interview process is only about 20% successful in predicting the future success of a candidate, according to Harvard Business Review. Then there’s the inevitable presence of unconscious bias, which can lead hiring decision makers to make snap judgments on candidates based on irrelevant information or past experiences, whether positive or negative.

If you feel your time-to-hire and/or quality of candidates are not up to par, you should take a look at where you’re sourcing your candidates. This includes everywhere you post your jobs: online job boards, career pages, social networks, job fairs, traditional media like newspapers or magazines, and via referrals. This will allow you to determine where to find the best job candidates.

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.

Our 2021 Diversity Report highlighted important public sector recruitment data from January 2019 to December 2020, with a focus on the discrepancies between Black female and White male candidates.  

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%).