Publications

“Leaving Talent on the Table: The Need to Capitalize on High Performing Student Interns” focuses on ways to leverage student interns as a strategic component of workforce planning, recruitment and hiring at the entry levels. For instance, the report examines the significant gap between the private and federal sectors in intern conversion rates—private employers report converting more than half of their interns, whereas federal agencies convert fewer than 7 percent.

Partnership Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Kevin Simpson testified before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.

Partnership President and CEO, Max Stier, testified before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Management, Investigations and Oversight on recruiting and retaining quality candidates and increasing morale at the Department of Homeland Security.

The Partnership for Public Service and Universum USA teamed up to examine the results of Universum USA’s 2008 survey of undergraduates—The Universum IDEAL Employer Survey 2008—to identify the qualities young people seek in an employer. This report details key findings of this research, and there are a number of signs to suggest government’s appeal extends beyond the new president. More importantly, the report offers operational advice to federal recruiters about how they can use this information to do a better job of attracting and retaining top talent.

The Partnership for Public Service partnered with Gallup to examine the public’s attitudes toward government. The poll is part of the Partnership’s State of the Public Service initiative to gauge the health of the federal government.

There are two primary reasons why operational issues are often overlooked: Our government is run by short-term political leadership that often has little incentive to focus on long-term issues, and our government operates in an environment without any real-time metrics for performance or organizational health. The transition from one presidential administration to the next offers an important opportunity to change this paradigm and push to improve government operations.

The key to improving our federal government’s operational health is a robust management framework — a roadmap to reform — that tackles challenges from federal budgeting to the use of technology to deliver services. The centerpiece of the president’s government reform plan needs to be a strategy to restore prestige to — and increase the capacity of — our federal workforce. Every single policy of the next administration will be influenced by the people charged with executing it. Simply put, good government starts with good people.

This report diagnoses the current challenges facing federal onboarding and presents a model for strategic onboarding, which can serve as a guide for agency reforms. This model outlines a set of overriding principles that underpin effective onboarding programs. It identifies key stakeholders and clarifies their roles in the process, breaking down the onboarding process into five distinct time periods and explaining what agencies should be doing during each phase.

Partnership President and CEO, Max Stier, testified before the Senate Oversight of Government Management Subcommittee on how the federal government can effectively recruit and hire the next generation of federal employees. Among his recommendations, Stier suggested agencies adopt an “applicant’s bill of rights” that would promise a user-friendly application process.

Our federal government today faces challenges of unprecedented complexity, from combating terrorism, to competing in a global marketplace, to fixing our nation’s decaying physical infrastructure, to dealing with an aging population at home.

Partnership President and CEO, Max Stier, testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging on efforts to recruit and retain older workers in the federal government. Stier highlighted key research findings from the Partnership’s Golden Opportunity report and discussed the recently launch FedExperience Transitions to Government Pilot Program with the Department of Treasury and IBM.