[logfromblammo]

I once overheard actual-employees of the government discussing the possibility of hiring the current contractor-employee workers as actual-employees:

"We couldn't pay them half of what they're making now, and the person with ten years of experience--experience specifically in the exact job we'd be hiring for, the guy actually doing the work right now--wouldn't even be higher than the third page of the interview list."

Smart people are interested in interesting jobs. The government does not want to hire them, in accordance with its own laws. Those people do exactly the same jobs for a contractor company, and then the government hires the contractor, because they are legislatively, executively, and economically barred from hiring the best-qualified personnel directly.

This setup tends to prevent anyone that has good ideas, and anyone with any control over government budget items, from ever coming into direct contact with one another.

I don't think it's a setup that can be fixed with better advertising.

[josinalvo]

>> wouldn't even be higher than the third page of the interview list."

Does this mean the first two pages are filled with even better people? Or that the selection process for a government job is somehow favoring people who are less qualified in practice but more qualified academically?

[dragonwriter]

> Does this mean the first two pages are filled with even better people?

In many public sector jobs, it would mean the top ranks of hiring lists are filled with preference-category candidates, the most common of which (and the one with strongest preference boost in most systems) is veterans preference.

[logfromblammo]

Exactly this.

And this particular office was required to interview candidates in the order they appeared on the candidate list.

They can't get rid of the veteran's preference, either, because the military-industrial complex is a massive jobs program for people who have 20 years of experience with skills that are juuust short of entirely worthless outside of the military or military-associated companies. If you're a maintenance mechanic for a model of aircraft that only one government flies, and it has no civilian version....

Then it's time to use the preference points.

[dragonwriter]

Solving the problem that military pay and post-service direct benefits (retirement pay, etc.) inadequately compensates for opportunity cost by making hiring in the rest of government (states as well as federal) less efficient rather than addressing it more directly seems to be a decidedly overcomplicated and suboptimal solution.