Averting a Pending Department of Defense Civilian Personnel Crisis: The Need for a Corporate Recruiting Strategy

摘要

In the next two decades the Department of Defense faces a potential civilian personnel crisis, that of an increasingly aging workforce and a shrinking labor pool. The average age of a DOD civilian employee is currently 45.2, and within the next few years the first wave of the baby boomer generation will reach retirement age. In fact, 30 percent of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire by 2006 with an additional 20 percent that could seek early retirement if budgetary constraints dictated it be offered. Within the Navy, 47 percent of engineers, 55 percent of scientists and 70 percent of computer specialists will be retirement eligible by 2007. With such a large percentage of its civilian workforce eligible to retire, the DOD needs to revitalize its civilian recruiting efforts. A suggested approach is to adopt a marketing based corporate recruiting strategy similar to that currently being used by many successful business leaders. In a marketing based recruiting strategy, success means understanding what employees want, developing and promoting a corporate image that conveys what your agency offers relative to prospective employee desires, and then delivering that image to target audiences in order to attract a quality hire.