Stop Looking for the Unicorn

We Keep Defining the Job to Screen the Talent Out

In a previous community, I was looking for someone to serve as a "technical assistant" in my Construction Office. In practice it was administrative support work with one specialized wrinkle: some familiarity with the building code process in a busy permitting environment. We went through resumes and interviews but weren't feeling great about the candidates.

Then it hit me: this was basically an entry-level role. Learning it from a process standpoint wouldn't be that difficult. Someone with exact experience was likely already working in another community, and because salaries were generally similar across the region, there would be almost no reason for them to seek employment elsewhere. We were left with people with various levels of administrative and secretarial experience but no public sector background.

The candidate we eventually hired had done basic administrative work in a hospital and ran her own successful house cleaning business. The bureaucratic reflex was real, and some couldn't get past the résumé: she had never worked in a municipality, had never touched a permit. The objection wasn't that someone else had done it longer; it was that the public sector work couldn't possibly be learned by someone who hadn't.

Even without public sector experience, she had organizational skills, business acumen, interpersonal abilities, and the demeanor to handle the role. She excelled in it. And because the community supported professional development, ten years later she serves as a licensed Tax Collector in a much larger community, nearly tripling her initial income from that entry level job a decade earlier. Yes, we eventually lost her, which is the risk of developing people well, and a better problem than the vacancy we started with. The job some insisted couldn't be learned by someone with no public sector experience, she learned, and then learned a harder one.

Hiring for talent and transferable skills rather than perfect experience opens up your candidate pool significantly. Look for problem-solving abilities, communication skills, work ethic, and cultural fit. Most positions we fill in local government can be learned on the job when you have the right foundation of skills and attitude.

The Big Chair Isn't the Only Chair

Anyone following the profession has seen the stories about the difficulty filling CAO positions. Ask a recruiter, though, and you'll usually hear something different: the applicant pools are fine. Where they aren't, the problem generally isn't the market, it's a community that has made itself unattractive, and everyone in the field can name a few.

Meanwhile, not everyone entering local government aspires to the big chair, and there's no reason they should. Many want stable careers where they can do good work and advance modestly without the uncertainty that comes with the manager's office. That describes the overwhelming majority of public employees, and it's where the actual hiring problem lives. It's the deputy clerk position that's been posted for six months, the code enforcement vacancy, the finance office running two people short. Those roles don't generate think pieces. They generate the work that doesn't get done.

A generation ago, a career in public service meant relative job security, good benefits, a respectable pension, and generally being well-regarded. Today, we're not only competing with comparable private sector salaries and benefits but also confronting a fundamental shift in how many Americans view public-sector employees. Career seekers overlook local government entirely. Most people still have a positive view of their own local governments, but that goodwill isn't translating into applicants.

It's easy to look at a vacancy and see only the salary being saved. A department head might decide the office can manage without filling an open zoning position for a few more months, assuming the backlog is inconvenient but manageable. Then permit reviews begin stretching past statutory deadlines. Applicants become frustrated. Attorneys spend hours responding to claims that approvals have vested by default because the municipality failed to act in time. Staff from other departments are pulled in to answer questions they weren't hired to answer. What looked like a short-term budget savings quietly becomes a far more expensive problem.

The vacancy never really saved money; it merely moved the expense somewhere less visible.

The Politics Followed Them Home

Talk to anyone in the profession and you'll hear that the political environment has never been worse and that national fights have come home to the council chamber and made the work unbearable. The instinct is to treat this as unprecedented, a break from some calmer past.

It isn't. A century ago, control of a single Chicago ward was worth killing for; the New York Times reported in 1921 that one ward politician was shot dead in a rocking chair on his own sidewalk, his two young children beside him, just back from church. Municipal politics has been lethal in living memory. What's changed isn't the temperature. It's the content, and how it reaches us. That was a different era, but the lesson holds: local politics has never been gentle.

What is somewhat new and happening with higher frequency is that local campaigns increasingly run on national platforms, the issues over which a governing body has no jurisdiction whatsoever. Candidates campaign on immigration enforcement, gender policy, and on positions that will never appear on a single agenda they vote on. And in the many communities where the general election is a formality and the real contest is the primary, the voters deciding who governs are the most ideologically committed slice of the electorate. The ideological council member isn't an accident. The structure selects for them.

Once seated, that member tries to force everything the municipality does through an ideological lens. It may be only one person poisoning the well, but one is enough. Ask the code enforcement officer who now has to explain why a permit decision wasn't a political statement, or the clerk fielding records requests designed to prove a conspiracy. This is the environment that drives out the people we already have and warns off the ones considering the field.

But none of this is beyond a manager's reach and the answer isn't a values statement. It's making the organization demonstrably professional: clear performance standards, advancement criteria based on merit, real professional development, and a manager willing to absorb political pressure rather than pass it down the org chart. Employees should know their success depends on how they do their jobs and nothing else and they should be able to point to evidence of it. That's a retention argument before it's a recruitment one. Staff who see professionalism protected tend to stay, and organizations where people stay are the ones quality candidates want to join.

Brian Started at $70,000. Fifteen Years Ago

Even those with a passion for doing good and serving the public want competitive salaries and benefits. Because of the political pressures, compensating employees appropriately has become increasingly challenging. According to the Economic Policy Institute, state and local government employees earn, on average, 17.6% less than comparable private-sector workers, and even counting benefits, the gap only narrows to 14.5%.

One habit I've seen both managers and elected officials struggle to break is setting starting salaries based on what outgoing employees earned when they started years ago. The discussion typically goes:

There are several problems with this logic. Most fundamentally, a starting salary from 15 years ago isn't worth the same today. If Brian started in 2004 at $70,000, that salary is equivalent to $94,000 by 2019 — and the town is still posting the job at $70,000. I'm deliberately using pre-pandemic figures here. Post-2020 inflation would make this look worse, and I'd rather understate it than be accused of inflaming it.

Does this mean the replacement should earn $94,000? Maybe. Factors like experience and education matter. But they certainly shouldn't be paid a starting salary from 15 years ago for the same position, especially when competing against private-sector employers who adjust for current market conditions.

The irony is that organizations will often lose a strong employee over a relatively modest salary gap, only to spend more replacing them. Recruitment costs, onboarding, training, lost institutional knowledge, and months of reduced productivity can easily exceed the raise that might have retained the employee in the first place. Retention should never be automatic, but it should be intentional. Regularly reviewing compensation against the market and making thoughtful adjustments for high-performing employees is often one of the least expensive investments an organization can make.

You might lose good people and you can't avoid that. The goal is to make it survivable. A position might see three people over twelve years, and if you hired each of them for aptitude and developed them deliberately, that turnover is nearly seamless because the bench is already there. This is the mirror image of the unfilled vacancy: an unplanned absence bleeds money through legal exposure, delay, and borrowed staff, while a planned succession costs almost nothing, because someone was ready. And some of what looks like turnover isn't loss at all. When you promote a strong employee into another department, the seat turns over but the talent stays in the building.

Government Is the Last Industry That Didn't Have To Change

Ask anyone in charge of hiring in the public sector and you'll hear the same challenges in recruiting early career professionals to the field. While generational differences in workplace expectations aren't new, government is often the most resistant to cultural change. Despite growth in the govtech space, people still need to visit town hall to pay taxes, utility bills, and apply for permits. With technological solutions available for nearly everything, there remains strong resistance to upgrades in government operations.

Kevin Curry made the point in The Hill nearly a decade ago and it has aged well. Young people want jobs with social impact. That part hasn't changed. But as digital natives, they notice that most government agencies have barely changed their day-to-day operations. Under competitive pressure, he argued, nearly every other industry had to change how it operates to survive. Sheltered from that pressure, the public sector languished.

Throughout my career, I've implemented many new technologies. In promoting these changes to my employees, I've always argued that while they help us become more efficient, they're equally important for the people who come after us. If you want a workforce welcoming to early career professionals, you need to update your systems and resist pressure from internal stakeholders to keep doing things the way they've always been done. The argument that "we've always done it this way" usually disappears the first time the clerk realizes agenda preparation takes less than an hour instead of the three-day ordeal of cutting, pasting, photocopying, and collating (literally — I have seen scissors and a glue stick).

The Geography Problem

Entire articles can be written on population decline in rural areas. Even in more densely populated regions like the Northeast, rural areas are losing population to locations closer to cities. While many may be leaving for private sector opportunities, the challenge remains that there are still residents in these rural locations and local governments that need to provide services. Between 2010 and 2020, more than two-thirds of all nonmetropolitan counties lost population.

Since local governments can't do much to prevent this outward migration, they can help cultivate the talent that remains. The model already exists. Penn State's Next Gen Leadership Academy, part of the Volcker Alliance's Next Generation Service Corps, which runs on more than twenty campuses nationally, pulls undergraduates from every major into a multi-year public-service track. ICMA's own Bob Turner Scholars internship places students inside municipal government; one recent State College Borough intern worked across half a dozen departments and presented to the borough council before graduating. These programs work. Communities that partner with area universities and community colleges on fellowships and internships don't need to reinvent anything as there's a pipeline that's already been built.

The open question, and it's the one the recruiting brochures don't ask, is whether the talent stays. A national service corps cultivates people who are, almost by definition, mobile. The student who presents to a council at twenty-two and impresses everyone in the room is often the student who leaves for a bigger stage. For a shrinking county, cultivating talent and retaining it are two different problems, and the second is the harder one. The partnership gets you the applicant. Keeping her is a question of everything else in this piece, the pay, the systems, the political environment. The pipeline is necessary. It isn't sufficient.

But don't stop at colleges. Engage at the high school level through civic partnerships, facility tours, student council collaborations, and career day presentations that showcase the range of public service work available. The high schooler who stays in the county is, for a rural government, worth more than the honors student who won't.

All of It Is Us

The unicorn didn't exist. The person we hired instead outgrew us and runs a tax office somewhere bigger.

That's the whole argument, and it scales past the Construction Office. The workforce problem in local government isn't that the talent isn't out there, it's that we keep defining the job in a way that screens it out. We hold vacancies open waiting for a résumé that matches the last person's, price the work at what it paid a decade ago, run the operation on systems no one under forty recognizes, and let one ideological voice on the dais make the whole enterprise feel radioactive. None of that is the labor market. All of it is us.

The fixes aren't complicated, though they aren't free. Hire for what people can learn. Pay for the job as it exists now. Modernize the work so it doesn't repel the people you're trying to attract. And protect your staff from the politics rather than passing it down to them. Do that, and the pipeline problem looks a lot smaller at every level, not just the big chair.

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