The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

Foreign Service appeared to have lost much of its luster as a pre- mier public service employer. The Foreign Service written exam, which historically had at- tracted some 15,000 participants annually, drew a record low num- ber of takers — 8,047 — in 2000. Twice in the 1990s, the exam was not given at all. The yearly budget for recruitment advertising was down to less than $100,000. Top talent clearly was look- ing elsewhere for employment. A “woe is us” attitude pervaded the department. (However, contrary to a wide- spread perception that exists to this day, the department did not encounter a spike in attrition in the 1990s.) Furthermore, by 2000 those who had passed the exam and subsequent oral assessment and had made it onto the hiring registers were distributed unevenly across the five career tracks. The department was struggling to hire suf- ficient management and consular officers in the face of a surfeit of political officer wannabes. This exacerbated systemic mismatches that already existed between the skills and interests of generalists and the careers for which we hired them, due in large part to the “unconed- on-entry” policy in effect for generalists hired from 1990 to 1996. On the Foreign Service specialist side, intake of office and information managers also had dried to a trick- le, forcing posts to operate far below optimal staffing lev- els in critical areas. Training suffered enormously as well, creating for managers and employees the unpalatable choice between receiving a trained employee months late or welcoming an untrained one earlier. Department employees and retirees openly questioned whether our days were numbered and our relevance past. Now fast forward to the current reality. A record 20,342 people sat for the 2003 exam, and another large crowd is expected on April 24, 2004. The registers of cleared, ready-to-hire Foreign Service generalist candi- dates now total about 1,500 people, of whom over 500 will be hired this year (compared with 110 hired in 1995). A-100 orientation classes at FSI now average over 90 par- ticipants, up from lows of 20 or so in the mid-1990s. We also have robust registers and intake for all Foreign Service specialist hir- ing categories, including office managers, general services officers and information managers. At the same time, the historically high quality of our applicants has been maintained, garnering consis- tently positive feedback from super- visors in the field. Incoming special- ists see a bright career ahead as spe- cial agents, officer managers or health professionals, while generalist candidates continue to bring in a breathtaking array of professional, linguistic and academic backgrounds and skills. The department’s new “critical-needs language” hiring policy is making sure that qualified applicants — both generalists and specialists — who speak languages like Farsi, Arabic and Korean are placed higher on our reg- isters. A visit to the Foreign Service Institute’s George P. Shultz Center in Arlington, especially around lunchtime, bears unmistakable witness to the surge in hiring and ongoing follow-on training. Indeed, enrollment of State employees at FSI has grown 38 percent since DRI began in 2001. DRI by the Numbers To make all this happen, the State Department set about retooling its entire hiring process beginning in 2001. In June of that year, we staffed up a dedicated “Diplomatic Readiness Task Force” consisting only of six full-time members, representing Foreign Service generalists and specialists and the Civil Service. However, biweekly DRTF meetings (now monthly) also brought together col- leagues from HR’s Offices of Recruitment, Assignments, Policy Coordination, Civil Service Personnel, and the Executive Office; all five schools at FSI, plus its front office; the hiring and clearance operations in both DS and MED; and assorted others. These meetings focused on expanding pipelines and breaking bottlenecks to handle a doubling of clearances, intake, assignments and training throughout the DRI period. The meetings served as a cat- alyst for changes that affected how literally hundreds of department employees and contractors have done their jobs — and how over 4,000 new colleagues experienced being hired — since DRI began. Examples include: • Expanding the budget for recruitment, advertising and outreach activities to over $1.5 million annually from under $100,000 in 2001. F O C U S A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21 We are evolving from a system that placed little value on training to one that makes it a top priority. The author, an FSO, has served as the State Depart- ment’s Special Coordinator for Diplomatic Readiness since 2001.