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What happens to a community when the stewards of the public’s resources are understaffed? The answer is that the community struggles. When the public sector faces challenges the impacts are pervasive and felt throughout a community.
During the pandemic, essential workers were highlighted for their work in maintaining public infrastructure and institutions. This work included school officials adapting to new ways to educate, transportation workers ensuring people get to and from work, and utilities staff maintaining safe and efficient water and sewer systems. However, recently local governments have found themselves with a growing employment and hiring shortage for these essential workers. This problem is exacerbated by the recruitment challenges that the industry is having with early talent increasingly applying for positions in the private sector. Despite the tumultuous employment environment, local governments in particular can resolve their recruitment challenges by building a strategic early talent pipeline. Below are a few tips on how local governments can address recruitment challenges.
Expand the talent pipeline
Ensuring a fully staffed and trained government workforce requires intentional action to identify and cultivate an early talent pool. Building a career in local government starts early therefore leaders should:
- Start with education. School districts, colleges, and universities offer local governments direct access to potential interns, part-time, and full-time employees. Partnerships with schools will entail participating in career fairs, speaking engagements, and experiential learning activities so students can be introduced to government. The goal is to expose students to local government so they can understand how to apply their interests (planning, accounting, science, etc.) to a career in the public sector.
- Leverage your community. Diversify the talent pipeline through a targeted strategy to partner and strengthen relationships with community organizations and institutions. Local governments should be representative of the communities they serve and to ensure this it is essential for leaders to speak with local students at community colleges, HBCU’s, Women’s colleges, and culturally relevant non-profit organizations to expand representation and interest in local government across the community.
Lean into your competitive advantage
One of the biggest challenges governments have competing with the private sector is compensation. Leaders in government must lean into their competitive advantage and think differently about benefits.
- Highlight what makes you different. Emphasize the benefits associated with a career in local government. The public sector offers, on average, more predictable work hours and stronger work-life balance for commitments outside of work compared to the private sector which may come with longer work hours and less flexibility. Furthermore, governments do not operate in an environment that is highly competitive like the private sector. Although economic cycles affect government revenues and budgets; the public sector is less vulnerable to contraction and it has predictable job security.
- Think differently about incentive plans. Develop programs to subsidize the cost for staff to expand their education or professional development. Consider incentives such as sign on bonuses, student loan paydowns after a predetermined period, as well as scheduled pay raises and COLAs.
- Leverage early talent’s familiarity with technology in your operations. In general, governments have areas of opportunity to leverage technology in day-to-day operations and build a more digital based approach to the business of government. Hiring early talent means bringing digital natives into your organization. Employees who grew up with technology are able to adapt as technology changes and even contribute ideas to automate manual processes. An added bonus of recruiting early talent is the value of expanding the generational diversity of your employee base. Diversity of backgrounds, skills, education and other attributes is known to benefit organizations and drive success.
Leverage every partner and stakeholder
Local governments need educators, accountants, transit operators, and more. The pandemic highlighted the importance of essential workers and their role in providing necessary services. Now governments must work to recruit the leaders that will keep communities running across the nation. Local governments must consistently bring partners to the table to collaborate and understand how every stakeholder in their community can help build and maintain their workforce. Well established banks like Wells Fargo have a specialized team of bankers that are dedicated to helping governments and organizations overcome their workforce challenges.
Leaders in local government should ask themselves the below questions about their banking relationships and workforce challenges:
- Does your financial institution proactively offer webinars that will apprise you of recent employment trends?
- Has your banker identified and presented opportunities to create additional revenue streams to fund employee wellness and benefits programs?
- Is your banker sharing ideas and solutions that other governments have implemented to successfully address their staffing shortages?
These questions challenge your banker to come to the table with ideas and solutions. When local governments are understaffed, the impacts are felt throughout the community. Therefore, it is important for stakeholders and banking partners to be aware and involved in curtailing the staffing shortage.
