Recruiting and Hiring a Diverse and Talented Public Sector Workforce

Although there is great interest in attracting talented and underrepresented individuals into public-sector careers, there is also concern that graduates of colleges and universities may not be considering the public sector and that government agencies are not doing all they could to attract the next generation of workers. A recent report from RAND and the Southern California Association of Governments seeks to help bridge these gaps by identifying the most promising strategies that public-sector agencies, colleges and universities, and community organizations can pursue to increase the flow of talented and underrepresented workers into public-sector careers. This report examines one regional public-sector workforce, that of Southern California, but many of the issues and strategies that the authors identify are broadly applicable to other regions. These strategies focus on two fundamental goals — increasing underrepresented students’ awareness of rewarding opportunities in the public sector and making public-sector organizations more diverse — that should reinforce each other.