Published: March 22, 2004

[Federal Times]

No se habla español: The one minority the government can’t recruit

By TIM KAUFFMAN

Agencies made scant progress recruiting Hispanics last year and actually lost ground when compared to the increase of Hispanics in the national labor pool, new federal statistics show.

Hispanics remain the only minority group that is underrepresented in government when compared to their numbers in the nation’s overall labor force. And the disparity is worsening as the nation’s Hispanic population continues to swell at a fast pace, according to the latest diversity report by the Office of Personnel Management.

Hispanics comprised 7 percent of the permanent federal work force as of Sept. 30, up slightly from 6.9 percent a year ago. This pales in comparison, however, to their availability in the national labor pool, which rose from 12.2 percent to 13.1 percent during the same period. See related graphic.

Representation of all minority groups in government improved slightly or remained flat at all pay levels in fiscal 2003, while the percentage of women of all colors increased in the higher pay grades, according to the report, “2003 Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program Report.” The report was submitted to Congress on March 2 and will be sent to agencies shortly. A copy was obtained by Federal Times.

An OPM work-force expert said such modest gains are understandable, considering the sheer size of the work force and the comparably small number of new hires each year. Roughly 80,000 employees are hired a year, about 4.5 percent of the work force.

“It’s very hard with numbers that big to make substantive changes,” said Nancy Kichak, deputy associate director of OPM’s Center for Workforce Planning and Policy Analysis. “We are encouraging agencies to continue to find ways to reach out to minorities and women, but these are still good numbers in a work force of that size to make a measurable difference.”

Some Hispanic community leaders are frustrated at the slow progress, however. President Nixon created the first governmentwide program to address Hispanic underrepresentation in 1970, and the disparity has only grown larger over time, they say.

“If you have increases of that magnitude, where [federally employed] Hispanics have gone up year to year by less than 1 percent, then you are never going to have Hispanics represented at the same level as the civilian labor force,” said Jorge Ponce, co-president of the Council of Federal Equal Employment Opportunity and Civil Rights Executives.

Why the problem?

Most experts interviewed by Federal Times for this article do not believe there are particular challenges to recruiting Hispanics as compared to blacks or other minority groups.

As with any recruiting drive, those directed at Hispanics must be well-targeted, pro-active and smartly designed to reach the intended audience.

About 30 percent of Hispanics are not U.S. citizens, so many of them would be disqualified from federal employment, said Brent Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Hispanic advocacy group in Washington. All federal positions subject to competitive hiring must be filled by U.S. citizens. And there is a ban on any federal employment of aliens unless they are lawfully admitted for permanent residence or otherwise authorized to be employed. Nevertheless, this leaves 70 percent of Hispanics in the country who do meet this basic requirement.

Lack of higher education also should not be a significant factor. Ponce pointed to the University of Puerto Rico, which graduates large numbers of Hispanic students with scientific and engineering backgrounds, as a prime source of job applicants.

Ponce said he believes some managers perceive Hispanics with an accent as being less educated than non-Hispanics. But with people of Hispanic origin expected to rise to one in four Americans by 2050, according to Census figures released March 18, being bilingual should be a strong selling point for Hispanic job applicants.

Wilkes said the poor showing by Hispanics in federal offices translates into Hispanics being underserved by federal programs.

“Agencies chronically underserve the Latino community, which is no surprise because Hispanics are underrepresented in the federal work force,” he said. “We don’t get our fair share of the resources because there’s nobody looking out for us.”

Manuel Oliverez, president of the National Association of Hispanic Federal Executives, said failure to hold hiring officials accountable for increasing the number of minorities is the main culprit.

Many agencies include diversity or equal opportunity elements in their executives’ performance evaluations, but Oliverez said he knows of none that actually withholds bonuses, promotions or training opportunities from executives who fail to hire minorities.

“Those supervisors and managers who don’t perform . . . should be held accountable for it. They’re not, but they should be,” Oliverez said.

How to improve Hispanic hiring

Agencies that have succeeded in recruiting large numbers of Hispanics and other minorities appear to have three things in common:

• Commitment from top leaders.

• Links between increasing diversity and meeting agency performance goals.

• Targeted use of special hiring tools.

Officials at the Social Security Administration, which has had particular success recruiting a diverse work force, decided several years ago that the agency would be unable to meet its mission without having a work force that represents the people its serves, said Fred Glueckstein, national recruitment coordinator.

Once a month, Social Security’s civil rights office prepares a one-page report for agency executives that tracks the diversity of the work force. “It gives everybody an idea of what accomplishments have occurred. It becomes, in a sense, a simple tool but an effective tool to help show diversity over a period of time,” Glueckstein said.

To reach Hispanics, the agency targets schools with large Hispanic enrollments and advertises job openings in Hispanic newspapers and magazines and on Spanish-language television stations. The agency’s recruitment brochures and materials reflect a diverse work force, and many are printed in Spanish.

One of SSA’s advantages is that it has offices in nearly 1,500 locations nationwide, which makes it easier to attend a local job fair or visit a college campus, Glueckstein said. Recruitment officials also visit Puerto Rico once a year to target job candidates.

The result? More than 19 percent of the 4,470 employees the agency hired in fiscal 2003 were Hispanic, while nearly 8 percent were Asians and Pacific Islanders, which is another fast-growing group.

“It takes energy, it takes commitment, and it does take a certain amount of hard work,” he said.

The Labor Department has found success recruiting Hispanics and other minorities for its special hiring programs, said Pat Pizzella, Labor’s assistant secretary for administration and management.

Hispanics comprise 13 percent of the 30 candidates selected so far for Labor’s MBA Fellows Program, which aims to recruit future agency leaders, and are represented in large numbers in a mentoring program for employees from GS-11 to the SES.

“We make every effort to cast as wide a net as possible,” Pizzella said. “We coordinate those [programs] departmentwide so they have the attention of the assistant secretaries and senior managers.”

OPM’s Kichak said agencies could be making more and better use of various special hiring programs that are available, especially those for recruiting interns and developing future leaders.

“There are many hiring tools out there the agencies don’t know they have available to them. We are working with the agencies to educate them as to the tools that they’re not using,” she said.

OPM’s diversity report includes dozens of examples of how agencies have addressed minority underrepresentation and should be a valuable tool for agencies interesting in improving their own numbers, Kichak said.

One agency’s challenge

The National Institutes of Health, a large bureau of the Health and Human Services Department, has had limited success so far recruiting Hispanics. Less than 4 percent of the agency’s 18,000 employees are Hispanic.

One of the main challenges for NIH is finding candidates with the appropriate education for its highly scientific and technical jobs, said Pedro Morales, NIH’s assistant director for minority corporate outreach and recruitment programs. A bachelor’s degree is a minimum qualification for most jobs, including administrative support positions, while applicants for research and grant-writing positions must hold doctorates.

NIH also is highly decentralized, with 27 institutes and centers that run their own recruitment offices and often make hiring decisions independent of each other. This makes it difficult to coordinate a comprehensive hiring strategy .

Still, NIH is taking steps to improve its minority hiring by building a pipeline of future employees. A scholarship program provides up to $20,000 a year in tuition for undergraduate students with low incomes who commit to work at the agency after earning their degree. Another program tailored to students preparing for graduate school has attracted a number of students from Puerto Rico, Morales said.

“We’re doing what it takes to build the pipeline to make sure minority students and Hispanics are part of the future,” he said.

Some progress also is evident among the agency’s top leaders. The director of NIH’s National Institute of Drug Abuse is a Mexican scientist, while a Latin American woman is heading the division that funnels 85 percent of NIH’s research money to universities and other outside institutions.

“We’re confident we’re on the right track,” Morales said. “In 10 years we’re going to have the very best, the cream of the crop of minorities, coming to NIH.”