Competition for digital talent is fierce and agencies often lack the ability to offer competitive salaries. Image: Golden Dayz/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe Chief Human Capital Officers Council has listed familiar issues as hampering agencies’ ability to recruit and retain IT staff, including lower salaries and a longer hiring process compared with the private sector, and outdated systems on which they would be working.
The assessment in the council’s annual report for 2022 came in response to language in a spending bill calling for a description of “employment barriers” in those occupations.
“The competition for digital talent is fierce and agencies often lack the ability, and the resources, to offer competitive salaries compared to their private sector counterparts. Mission is a significant selling point for government service, and it helps to attract talent as seen in our United States Digital Service ranks, but mission alone is often not enough when at any time a significant number of information technology (IT)/cyber positions go unfilled,” it says.
It also cited “the presence of legacy IT systems in a number of federal agencies and the need for continued investment in technologies that drive innovation in the private sector” which “make it hard for the federal government to attract talent and demonstrate that it is on the cutting edge.”
Also agency HR offices “lack the bandwidth and capacity to get hiring certificates issued quickly, and do not have dedicated resources to focus on digital talent hiring. Generally, HR talent in the federal government is scarce, and there is fierce competition amongst agencies for this talent pool. This often leads to job hopping by HR specialists, creating critical gaps within HR offices. These gaps within HR offices contribute to a longer hiring process, which makes it harder for agencies to compete for talent.”
Further, HR staff need more training “to better keep pace with a persistently changing digital sector where the hiring authorities across agencies, positions, and types of skills needed constantly fluctuate.”
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