Work for America is a new organization which “is committed to making public service a desirable, accessible, and stable carer path that uplifts families, communities and our country. Launched about six weeks ago, “the response has been incredible. We've heard from hundreds of government workers, elected officials (and) potential partners,” according to its new executive director Caitlin Lewis.

As Lewis wrote, “People love to hate on government, but here’s the truth: If state and local government was a company, it would be the single largest employer in America – x10. Every day, over 20 million state and local workers ensure we have safe drinking water, well-paved roads, and timely 9-1-1 responses.”

The organization published a report featuring “insights from state and local government leaders on the government staffing crisis” in June, which you can find here, and sponsored a webinar on October 8, which featured Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Boston's Chief People Officer Alex Lawrence, the first person to hold that new position in the city. You can see the webinar here, but here are a few highlights:

Lucas: 

• “Thirty, forty years ago, we had the chance to have an entrance exam for all city employees. There were hundreds of applicants, and not just in the fire and police services, but city wide we could be choosy.”

• The challenge now is “how do we let people know that this is not just an honorable career but is one that you can build an outstanding and interesting life. How do we make sure that we better calibrate our pay with the very real work that people are doing.”

• “Another thing that we need to very seriously consider (are residency requirements). We recognize why we have them – connection to our communities and making sure there are opportunities for people from our communities – but we also see the exclusive approach to it, making it so that some who live in the suburbs or other communities for any number of reasons cannot be part of our workforce.”

Lawrence: 

• “In government, we frequently don’t have the resources to be competitive and I know in government, we don't like to use words necessarily like competition or thinking of our work as sales but recruiting fundamentally is sales and we're doing that with no sales infrastructure.”

• “I think our product is the most amazing product that we could ever possibly sell. Our jobs are so important, so unbelievably impactful.”

• My team has been for the last two years running hiring days, refining our hiring processes, trying to think about how to implement skills-based hiring, how to articulate our benefits more clearly (and) restructuring our benefits to meet a modern workforce.”

• There is so much room for this work I could probably hire a team three times the size (we have) and we would not even be close to running out of work to do on a day-to-day basis.”

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