Communications of the ACM
How to Recruit Students For Government Service
According to a project completed by second-year master's students at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, government needs to be doing a better job of recruiting top IT talent. The report "From Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Fixing U.S. Government College Recruitment" outlines the changing dimensions of government technology recruitment. The report surveys the ways that government agencies reach out to students; the ways that government agencies are using social networking sites; and the steps that government needs to take to relate academic coursework to practical, real-world work.
Government agencies still tend to emphasize career fairs as a way to reach out to students, despite the fact that career fairs are one of students' least-preferred ways of learning about jobs. Students preferred to get information from social networking sites and from e-mails via groups or which they already are members, so government agencies might want to redirect career fair resources into other activities. Second, companies are more active than government on Facebook and other social networking sites. Most large firms have themselves established Facebook groups for the company while few government agencies have done so. There is an opportunity, then, for government agencies to establish more of a social networking presence and make more of their content sharable via social bookmarking sites like Digg.
From Federal Computer Week
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