Some of the most interesting and telling statistics in this year’s report relate to the achievement gap between “high poverty” and “low poverty” schools.

On average, students from “high poverty” schools scored sometimes as much as 30-40 points lower on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading, mathematics, music, and art assessments as students from “low poverty” schools. Also 23% fewer 12^th grade students graduated from “high poverty” schools with a diploma than they did in “low poverty” schools.

Based on the data, it’s fair to assume that “high poverty” schools are falling behind schools with large populations of students from more prosperous households. But what’s the cause of this achievement gap?

One of the most fundamental problems is that young people in “high poverty” areas lack a vision of what they can become and do not have ready access to the opportunities for achieving their highest potential.

While many young people in “high poverty” areas have firm beliefs that a good education can lead to opportunity and success in careers and wealth-building over one’s lifetime, they also hold strong beliefs in the reality of their individual lives that continue to translate into underachievement.

Many of these students ‘believe’ in the power of education, but they self-exclude due to personal challenges at home and in school. While it is widely accepted in America that education is important to career success, the concept loses its meaning for young people who are exposed to a different set of concrete experiences on a day-to-day basis.

The result is a population of students that believe that education can lead to a better life via better, more profitable careers, but feel that they don’t have the ability, avenues and tools needed to get an education and compete in the workforce.

In addition to this negative attitude, students in “high poverty” areas often suffer from low self-esteem and very low self-efficacy which has a negative impact on motivation and future success. They also tend to come from family backgrounds and communities where the presence of positive role models and positive feedback are hard to come by.

The achievement gap and the ongoing education challenges facing “high poverty” areas create more problems than just contributing to the cycle of poverty in our country. With increased competition in the global economy for jobs as a result of increasingly skilled and educated workforces abroad, America can no longer afford to have entire populations not entering the mainstream workforce.

Changes have to be made, and programs put into place to ensure that students in both “high poverty” and “low poverty” regions are educated in the skills and abilities needed in today’s growth industries before all children are left behind.

Monster Public Sector & Education is working with local regions to implement solutions and programs that will make a difference. In an upcoming post, we’ll take a look at the things that need to change to illicit positive change in “high poverty” regions and discuss our new iSucceed Program, which is designed to provide the support, opportunity and motivation needed to close the achievement gap in America’s school system.

We’ll also be holding a Webinar on September 15, 2010 to introduce the program and ways that it can help your region. Check back often for new posts and additional details on the upcoming Webinar.

It is important to recognize that the attraction, recruitment and hiring processes for government are essentially establishing a “buying transaction” with citizens. Job seekers have so many choices, industry vs. government, government vs. non-profit, federal vs. state or local, agency 1 vs. agency 2, job announcement 1 vs. job announcement 2. Also, today’s job seekers go to the internet FIRST to research alternatives using available information.

Most agencies make the mistake of addressing seekers as a uniform or homogeneous population with the same needs and requirements. That is a mistake because many seekers are making a serious life decision based upon on the information that is available on the internet. Ultimately, each seeker will make job and career direction decisions based upon “best value,” which could include agency culture or mission; most interesting job assignment; job location, work schedule and other quality of life considerations; perceived job stability; salary, benefits or promotion potential; etc.

The best response to that understanding is for agencies to consider hiring as a “selling transaction” requiring market research, packaging, branding, marketing and closing, including segmentation and differentiation messaging that communicates across all of the targeted segments of the multi-generational workforce.

Agencies need to address this demand for agency-specific information and “branding,” possibly including different landing pages for different demographics so that messaging can be properly tailored to the different populations (students, mid-career, core occupational specialty, executive.) This researched, tested and tailored messaging is your “value proposition,” essentially why the job seeker (“buyer”) should select your job in your agency over all others!

The first step in any competitive buying-selling transaction is reaching out to potential and qualified “buyers.” Job posting sites alone do not provide ready access to the best-practice outreach tools that could promote agency brands and locate hard to reach populations.

While announcing an opening on a job board provides great visibility to “active” job seekers who have time and effort to expend in looking for a job on a daily/weekly/biweekly basis, it lacks the outreach capabilities to locate “poised” (infrequent seeker) or “passive” (rare seeker) populations that comprise the bulk of workforce, including the highly desirable “top talent” in the diversity, mid-career and executive ranks.

Reaching these populations requires outreach where top talent visits and congregates, like:
• professional associations,
• niche, interest-based affinity sites,
• social networks,
• other professional profile and resume data bases and
• content sites enabled with behavioral marketing.

Modern behavioral advertising tools (like Monster’s Career Ad Network – CAN) can seek out the right job seekers where they congregate on the web or scan actually segment and differentiate among the web surfers and target your job ads to just the right person.

That’s why the story of Jessica Gabriel caught our attention. This weekend, Gabriel, a 22-year-old veteran service representative with the Department of Veteran Affairs, was featured in The Minneapolis Star Tribune in a “How I Got That Job” feature. Surprisingly, Gabriel didn’t go through the usual process that most people go through when applying for a government job.  In fact, she didn’t apply at all.  She obtained the job when the agency contacted her after seeing her résumé on a university jobseekers’ data base.

When asked about the best part of the job, Gabriel said, “There are tangible results from every step that I take. A veteran is getting a letter, getting results that are going to help him get money so that he can pay for medicine or take care of his sick wife. Coming into this job and seeing all of the hard work that our military personnel do is pretty overwhelming. It’s pretty satisfying to know that what I do can help pay them back.”

What about for new graduates who are ready to look for a job in government? Gabriel stresses that time is of the essence, “start looking for a job before you graduate! I would also recommend that people see if their school has something like [job boards]. It got me my job.”

Although Gabriel’s story is encouraging, it is even more positive to see an agency take proactive steps to identify the right candidate for the job.  It demonstrates that the VA is changing the way they are thinking about recruiting.

Here at Monster, we embrace this new way of thinking and can help.  Using Power Resume Search, agencies like the VA and others can reach qualified candidates not only at universities but within all levels of experience, to fill open positions.  Agencies can reach out to candidates whose resumes display the appropriate skills and invite them to apply while still following the standard federal hiring process.

So while the current process still seems cumbersome, there are tools out there designed to alleviate some of the issues and allow agencies to spread the word about new openings to qualified candidates.  We salute the Department of Veterans Affairs being proactive and thank Jessica for her dedication to public service!

Do you have a story to share?  If you have secured a position with the federal government and want to discuss the process or if you are a federal recruiter that has used new methods to find qualified candidates, post a comment below.

The US Federal Government is made up of a talented and diverse workforce, keen on improving Civil Service – and it is during these 3-days at HCMF when everyone gets together to share agency strategies and align initiatives to achieve this goal.

Join the top-quality HR Leaders in the US Government as they share progress on how your agencies have advanced federal government human resource programs to develop leaders, acquire “Grade A” talent, and recognize performance; and how you can continue to improve current policies and practices in workforce development and leading a new era of Civil Service.

Thirty-two finalists in eight medal categories represent the 2010 Service to America Medals contenders. Together, their work represents the important contributions of all federal employees, across the country and throughout the world, to protect our homeland, safeguard our health, and improve the lives of their fellow citizens.

By recognizing these talented and dedicated individuals, the Service to America Medals program shares their outstanding stories and puts a compelling face on government service.

Human Capital Institute’s second annual Government Talent Management Summit once again brings government and military thought leaders in strategic HR, talent acquisition and OD/learning to you for three days of knowledge sharing and networking. Together with other progressive human capital leaders and officers, you will take a deep dive into today’s transformation from traditional HR to new talent management practices — and propel your organization or agency into the future.

The Partnership for Public Service, with the support of the Office of Personnel Management, invites you to attend the first of three interactive sessions designed to help you succeed in your hiring reform efforts.

During this session, you will hear from executives from both the public and private sectors on how they have addressed similar challenges and achieved success. You will also have the opportunity to learn and share successful strategies for managing reform and receive practical tips and resources to bring back to your agency for immediate use.

As the federal workforce becomes younger – almost one in three of the 142,690 federal workers hired last year were 29 or younger and one in four was between 30 and 39 – the “typical workday” may change dramatically.

The road to one change was paved earlier this summer with the passage of the Telework Improvements Act which aims to expand work-at-home options for federal agencies. However, despite support from the Obama administration and, presumably, a younger workforce, a recent survey of federal workers showed that only 10 percent take advantage of telework flexibilities.

The Telework Improvements Act is designed to ensure that agencies appoint a telework managing officer who would work toward boosting participation for those federal workers who don’t handle secure or classified information. Some agencies are ahead of the curve with initiatives that help them manage information security concerns. For example, the Veterans Affairs Department has equipped about 60,000 of its 300,000 employees with technology enabling them to work remotely without compromising security.

Government personnel experts predict that in 10 years approximately 400,000 of the 2 million federal workers will be younger than 35, and those workers will expect to partake in the same types of work-life balance initiatives, including telework, that are offered to their private-sector counterparts.

However, aside from employee expectations, there are practical reasons to expand telework flexibilities in government. For those workers in the Washington, D.C. area, the snowstorms of earlier this year – dubbed “Snowmaggedon” – effectively shut down their ability to commute to work for multiple, consecutive days. Telework would save the government millions of dollars in lost productivity due not only to these types of weather events but also to the traffic congestion that can unexpectedly derail any commute in the DC area.

According to John Streufert, deputy chief information officer for information security at the State Department, in a story on GovExec.com, “There’s a lot of talk about the trouble of commuting to work, but to me the real national security issue is if we had something that disrupted the ability of the federal workforce to get to the office, could we continue to provide the services of government? I think you’d find that many departments and agencies would have problems.”

The Government Accounting Office will be responsible for ensuring that agencies are participating in the Telework Improvements Act’s work-at-home initiatives. This vital new program could be a key component of keeping our government workers engaged, satisfied, and able to work through any potential crises.

Although the economy has showed signs of improvement, hiring remains down and the unemployment rate in many regions remains high. While it seems counterintuitive, there are many reasons why companies would be hesitant to hold off on hiring despite increasing revenues.

With many companies nervous of a repeat of the economy’s downward spiral and subsequent credit crunch, they are holding onto every dollar they can. Additionally, many companies are hesitant to consider the economic downturn behind them and begin operating and hiring as such.

And who can blame them, really? Hiring people is expensive.

But Ohio is betting on their people. In an effort to help put their large unemployed population back into jobs and back on the private sector payroll the state has implemented a new program to take the risk out of the new hiring process for local companies.

The program, called Project Hometown Investment in Regional Economies (HIRE) is a statewide Workforce Investment Act initiative funded by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Administered by the Ohio Department of Development in collaboration with the One-Stop Workforce system and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS), Project HIRE provides enhanced job matching strategies linking employers and job seekers at no cost to either.

Through Project HIRE, the State of Ohio is making federal funds available for up to six months to help offset up to 50% of the cost of on-the-job training for fulltime jobs in a handful of targeted, high-demand industries. These industries include, but are not limited to:

• Advanced Energy and Environmental Technologies
• Aerospace and Aviation
• Bioscience and Bioproducts
• Instruments, Controls and Electronics
• Polymers and Advanced Materials
• Healthcare

Project HIRE benefits both companies and prospective employees immensely. For employers, a high-performance workforce is created that is trained in the necessary skills and abilities on-the-job at a significantly reduced cost. This takes the gamble out of hiring new employees by reducing a company’s investment in each new hire while ensuring that they have what it takes to be successful in their jobs. For employees it provides valuable on-the-job training in a handful of high-demand, growth industries.

The State of Ohio is taking huge steps towards getting people back into jobs and creating a high-performance workforce. Between the Ohio Means Jobs portal that we discussed previously on Unleash the Monster and Project HIRE, Ohio means business when it comes to getting its citizens back to work.

What could your state learn from Ohio?

The first step of the reform for OPM is to reduce time-to-hire by eliminating knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) essays and replacing them with traditional resumes and cover letters. The second step is to improve diversity in government. One way to do this is to recruit students and recent grads.

In a recent Government Executive article, OPM Director John Berry said that he is assembling a team of 65 people to lead an aggressive diversity effort to “get to a place where, over the course of the summer or early fall, we will create a program to take to the president to recommend on how we can encourage diversity in the federal government and do better there.”

While we are encouraged to see the OPM calling for diversity, we also recognize that there is a great deal of work that will come with this effort, including:

• Improving the branding of federal government agencies to demonstrate the benefits to choosing a career in government.
• Streamlining the hiring process. Students looking for jobs want immediate feedback and are unwilling to wait long periods of time before hearing from an employer.
• Connecting where students group together. Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks are places where agencies can connect and recruit students while extending their own brand.

If you are a student and would like to share your story about applying for government jobs, please post and comment below. If you are a recruiter and have implemented new methods for attracting new students into government positions, we want to hear from you too!