Coffee Chat with FBI's Head of Talent Acquisition
There’s no secret that a war for talent exists. And, the federal government certainly has its challenges to attract, engage, and hire top talent. With the continued focus to recruit talent into the government workforce, we sat down with the FBI’s Head of Talent Acquisition to discuss how the FBI is positioning itself as a preferred employer and how it is engaging the candidates throughout the hiring process. We cover a series of topics including, how the FBI is:
Shifting from post / pray to more direct sourcing activities
Aligning recruiters and hiring managers
Leveraging social media and other emerging recruitment tech
Engaging candidates in a longer than average hiring process
Competing with private industry and what other governmental agencies should be doing
Video Transcript:
Mike Kapetanovic: Hey, Peter. Nice to a nice to catch up with you again.
Peter Sursi: Hey Mike. Nice to have be on and happy to chat this morning.
Mike Kapetanovic: Yeah. You are an influencer in driving a lot of the recruitment and employer brand type of activities over at the FBI. You want to tell me about sort of some of the activities that you're doing at the FBI and sort of where, how did you even get into talent acquisition and take a gov side role?
Peter Sursi: Yeah, sure. So yeah, like a lot of people in HR and talent acquisition, I kind of came in sideways. I started the Bureau originally as a Japanese language analyst. I studied abroad. I Spent two years in Japan after college teaching English, you know, came back to the States, wanted to use my Japanese you know, found a job online with the FBI. So that's how we started and then worked most of my career in the foreign language program. Obviously the Bureau has about 1,400 employee and contract interpreters and translators to do the work of the FBI as needed. After doing that for a while, I moved into the linguist recruiting and hiring, you know, from my operations role really loved it, you know, found that to be super fulfilling. And then after five years doing that I was lucky enough to get the head of talent acquisition job, which I've been doing for the last four and a half years. We're responsible for hiring for all 56 field offices, all the headquarters entities you know, when they people think of the FBI, they think of special agents but that's one of our 500 jobs here. You know, we have, of course everything, everybody has Realty specialists, budget analysts doctors, nurses, forensic accountants, you know, everything. So I'm trying to hire, you know, for the geography of the Bureau and all the specialized skill sets. You know, it's pretty challenging. So it's really exciting job.
Mike Kapetanovic: How, how has that been? I guess when I, when I think FBI, I think agents out there in the field and recruiting for that, and I'm probably not the only one out there that thinks that. So has it been challenging of sort of attracting and engaging sort of those, those candidates that would be healthcare professionals or some of these other non special agent type of functions that you just mentioned is just cause you sort of have to it's not really what the FBI is known for, but you still have a need to fill.
Peter Sursi: Yeah. Great question. So I think that over the last couple of years, we've really tried to move from, let's say a past FBI history where the prevailing it feeling inside the FBI is, you know, we're the premier law enforcement intelligence across the country. We don't have to woo people, people come to us. But that's not really the case. Like to your point. People have a very specific idea about what the FBI is. The external labor market, you know, pre COVID was super-hot, very competitive. So we spent a lot of time talking about how do we both market the other non-agent positions to people, how do we bring more diversity into the special agent ranks, hire more minorities? And women are very important to us to look like the population that we serve and protect.
Peter Sursi: So, you know, we, we took did a lot of tools, right? So, we kind of try and try to get away from, you know, sort of the post and pray methodology, you know, put up a posting on the website, you know, cross your fingers, hope that, you know, qualified people see it in the two weeks that they're hating their job. And then that's our candidate pool. So, you know, we opened ourselves up to you know, a lot of the flexible hiring authorities that we have to do more direct sourcing through things like LinkedIn recruiter or direct ad campaigns. We specialized on our very hard to fill positions like the linguists, the forensic accountants. We started to pull together teams of recruiters and HR specialists and the hiring managers themselves with the hiring data. So that every month we would all be in the same virtual room with the data and the, you know, whatever we've been doing the most and look at fill rates and attrition modeling.
Peter Sursi: Then finally we overhauled everything that we have online. Back in 2016, when I started, we had a barely functioning website. We had no social media presence at all. So we built a presence on LinkedIn at FBI jobs on Twitter, a better website new marketing collateral, you know, actually right now, four years later, we're just overhauling all that again. Actually this week in April we just launched our new brand campaign with the new logo all new pictures. We're super excited about that. And I think a lot of that has been focused on not just all the jobs that the FBI has, but also that the FBI can look like, you know, the American populace. I think the failure to imagine yourself that the FBI could even look like you. I think that's really the first big hurdle. And so a lot of our communication, a lot of our videos and marketing are really designed to try to like allow you to see your own self working at the FBI and talk about the amazing work that we have.
Mike Kapetanovic: Absolutely. And congrats on that brand campaign. That brand campaign looks fantastic. I saw that get deployed what yesterday or the day before?
Peter Sursi: Yeah. This week. Yeah. So we've worked on it for a year. Yeah. Super excited for all the stuff that's getting ready to come. We've done a lot of video shoots, a lot of amazing photo shoots featuring real FBI employees talking about their jobs. We want to lean into people talking about their own jobs and their own feelings about working at the FBI. We feel like that will give potential applicants the best authentic understanding of what it's like to work here. Which, I mean, it's definitely not for everybody. Right. But like we have a lot to offer. So we want to feel like they get that sort of true and accurate, you know, feeling of what it's like.
Mike Kapetanovic: What's next after that brand campaign, it looks like the messaging is messaging is a great. The creative is hopefully going to be effective and it looks fantastic. What's next? Because I think you and I have talked about previously sort of the, maybe the FBI generally speaking might be a little more sort risk averse to new platforms, new channels and, and some of those things. So I guess how, how creative can you, can you be given some of the sensitivities national security or otherwise on that? So talk to me about Instagram or other channels out there.
Peter Sursi: Yeah. So a great question. The FBI obviously always has, when dealing with social media, you know, always has to think of concerns of, you know, exploitation loss of information's information security because you know who we are. But at the same time, you know, we, we have to live in the world that exists right now. And the reality is like everybody uses social media tools to hire and tell their story. So we work with our office of public affairs very tightly. They work with DOJ to approve news social media channels. So for example last year, year and a half ago FBI got its first Instagram account, the corporate account. So we've been working with them for a year to get us spin-off account for FBI jobs.
Peter Sursi: So hopefully we'll get that approved and launched that this summer where we can have sort of a dedicated careers site. Same thing for Facebook and a separate Facebook site FBI jobs, where we will be able to do even more videos with people talking about their work, talking about hiring process. So we're super excited about that. You know, our public affairs partners though, they're, you know, our job as the employment marketing people is to push the envelope you're right. And their job as the public affairs people is to evaluate the corporate risk to messaging. So it's a pretty good push pull, you know, partnership, they don't try to tell us employment marketing trends and we don't try to second guess their view of how risky a message might be because they have, they have insight into everything happening in the FBI. And so they're, they're looking at it from that angle. So it's a really good partnership. It works really well. I'm super excited that we'll be able to leverage a couple of new channels, obviously we're on LinkedIn, we have FBI jobs. We're really trying to really think about what, how we can use those, those platforms better. But I'm just really excited about what's coming, coming up.
Mike Kapetanovic: Have you explored any sort of emerging tech, whether it be chat bots and AI and machine learning that predictive this, and just like, where, where are you sort of experimented? What are you most excited about, whether it be applied to the FBI or just generally that FBI might not be able to use it because of some of the sensitivities we just talked about but maybe some really cool emerging tech that's out there for other recruitment TA professionals.
Peter Sursi: Obviously how AI, machine learning, deep learning is going to change the face of HR, obviously a very hot topic in our industry right now. We're trying to be a part of that conversation and kind of see what's working for private industry. Then as you said, you know, see what we do for ourselves. The first thing we're already doing, we've been doing for a couple of years now is using some machine learning modeling on our attrition models, right? So unlike a private sector corporation where, you know, they have a vacancy and they have a req to fill it and they might be able to turn somebody around and get them hired in two, three weeks, four weeks, maybe you know, for us, we have our top secret security clearance process.
Peter Sursi: So that backend investigation is going to take between nine and 12 months. So we need to anticipate vacancies that are going to merge a year from now and start them in the background today. Right. And so that's where we're using machine learning to take everything we know about internal people, you know, their age, their grade level, are they applying to other jobs? What is the five-year history of all of your employees at that grade level, in that job at that age and what they're doing to predict a nine month forward attrition model per position. And then we use that in a report to our hiring managers and saying, okay, you have only two vacancies now but our model says in nine months, you know, we have a couple of people that are in backend that are going to land. You have a couple of people that are statistically likely to leave.
Peter Sursi: So our nine month model says, you're going to have eight vacancies in nine months. So we want you to fill those now. And because of the background process and the fallout rates, you need to get three times that number to say yes to a job offer. So for eight vacancies, nine months from now, we need to find 24 people to say yes today. It's just a lot. Right. First of all, I think that, using that machine learning and attrition modeling super important for anybody that's trying to do, data-driven HR. We are starting to have conversations now about the potential use of chatbots to answer applicant questions and things like that. We've had a lot of conversations about it. We do have a corporate board with all of our it folks on how to use AI in the FBI leaning on guidance from the Intel community and what private sector is doing.
Peter Sursi: HR is a member of that board because of course we're really concerned, not just about information security as we talk about, but we want to make sure that as we practice ethical HR we're not building bias into our modeling or AI use. I would say in early stages right now, but I think that it is inevitable that we will end up using chat bots because that is the direction that private sector is going. And I think people also, you know, whether you, you know, buy a trip through Expedia or you're, you know, talking to your bank, you know, and their customer service, I think people are more used to this, like automated, you know, customer service help. So, you know, I think that's going to be an inevitability for us
Mike Kapetanovic: Couple of years ago, chatbots drove me crazy, but now it's impossible to step away from. I bank at bank of America and I couldn't get anybody on the phone the other day to a live agent but their chat bot was surprisingly very helpful.
Peter Sursi: Yeah. And I think the natural language algorithms that are being developed right now do make a more seamless experience. And, you know, even where it's like, Hey, we've reached the end of what I can help you with. And I'll, I'll punch you over to a real human being. I think that that's the direction we're going to go. Obviously we have thousands of applicants each year, you know, a lot of their questions are the same. So in our early conversations, we do feel like, you know, if we can get over the information security ethics, and we do feel like there's a great market for those use in HR, just to deal with the standard, you know, conversations, where am I in background? You know, what is the position do? How does a good general schedule pay work? You know, things like that.
Mike Kapetanovic: It's interesting though, because you've got, you've got an interesting challenge in the sense that... I'm making some assumptions here, but the, the brand of the FBI is, is pretty high. Everybody in theory knows who the FBI is. We were very familiar with FBI, whether or not we understand fully and to the largest degree, sort of the missions and programs that the FBI supports and how that varies from other sort of other agencies your counterparts. But I think going back on your comment where the clearance requirements of sort of that nine to 12 month process, I'd imagine that your, your brand is high, but you see quite a bit of sort of spill out of the candidate funnel and the candidate journey, just because how many people don't want to go through sort of that background process before knowing if they've got a job or if they don't have a job, or that's sort of probably another challenge that you, that you wrestle with on a daily basis, how are you, how are you doing that and managing sort of those expectations with the candidates and maybe the other question would be, what would you tell candidates to keep hanging in there and being patient. And going through the journey with you?
Peter Sursi: Yeah. Great questions kind of a lot to unpack there. Yeah. You're, you're absolutely right. It is definitely a challenge. We do try to be super honest upfront with individuals, you know, at the start of their application and hiring journey both with information on our website, but also, you know, when we interview people or we have recruiting events you know, if you are unemployed right now and you're looking for a job right now, this is not going to be the job for you right now, because that's just not a realistic, you know, assumption. But what we try to lean into is like, Hey the FBI has an amazing mission. We're still going to have that amazing mission and nine or months or a year from now. If you want to be part of something important, you know, it's worth the wait.
Peter Sursi: And we do find that, you know, because we're transparent upfront about that, you know, a lot of people buy into that. We do deal with a lot of fallout and we do try those hard because people are disappointed. We do try to be as, as possible as people fall out of the background investigation process or fail a polygraph, things like that because it's, it's a member it's a matter of risk. And sometimes that risk you know, is about your past activity or your behavior, or sometimes it's just something about your connections that just makes it too difficult for the FBI to, you know, take that risk for you. So it's hard for people. So, you know, we do try to be as gracious as possible. The other thing we do is, you know, the biggest complaint we have from candidates when I came into this job a couple of years ago is sort of like the black hole of communication during the very long background process.
Peter Sursi: And so a couple years ago, we sent it to do is to try to ease that concern. We put in place, this automated series of emails that when you're in background, like every three weeks, you get an email from the FBI basically saying we haven't dropped you. You're not in a black hole, we're still working on it. Here's a cute video. Here's something about our core values, just like, hang in there. Just as a way to be like, Hey, I know radio silence, but like, this is very normal, right. We also tried to give them better expectations on like how long you might be in various stages. Like, don't call us until this amount of time, because this is all very normal. So, you know, just trying to message that to the candidates you know, again, be a little more clear, be a little bit more upfront you know, about what experience they're going to have, but again, leaning into the mission of the Bureau, the importance of the work, the exciting work that we have.
Peter Sursi: And just say that it's worth it. We do tell candidates like, Hey, while you're waiting cause a lot of candidates come ask us like, Hey, what should I do while we're waiting? And I think the general advice we give is use the time you're waiting to improve your skills yourself, whatever that may be, right. So, you know, if you ha you know, make a job, offer to somebody and then they don't start until a year later, you hope that they'll have more depth of knowledge, more breadth of knowledge, more leadership experience, whether it's supervisory experience or just leading a team or leading a project. So, you know, that's what we really tell people is like, Hey, use that time for learning growth whether it's personal growth or growth in your field or your industry so that you're bringing even stronger hand, you know, to the table, you know, when you, when you finally get through, you know, that will really serve you well, for sure.
Mike Kapetanovic: That's a great, that's a great tip. It's, it's, it's interesting because my background was doing a lot of recruitment marketing for the military and a lot of it, you could draw a similar they're equivalent to your long process based in the security requirements is the candidate journey is typically a 12, 24, maybe 36 month process. This sort of that from, Hey, do I want to join the military? Do I want to sign up for four years, eight years, whatever number of years of service and fight the front line. So it's, how do we leverage tools like marketing automation platforms, Marketo Pardot, yada, yada, yada on sort of, how do we just continue keeping those leads warm, but then also nurturing them throughout the sort of the candidate funnel as well. So, it's you've, you've got your challenges military sort of has there is, but anybody that's sort of longer, longer than average hiring timeframe could, could definitely lot of those technologies that you're using definitely come into play.
Peter Sursi: And I think the other challenge we have is, you know, we want people that have sort of stick-to-itiveness and initiative and there is a big discussion in the FBI about like, what is handholding versus a good candidate experience. Right. If you talk about enhanced communication, we want to say that's a positive candidate experience and, you know, we want to, you know, keep them warm while they're waiting, but there is definitely a line that the Bureau doesn't want to cross into like I'm holding their hand because they just can't pack it without that. Right. And that sort of goes against, you know, what the kind of people we want in. Right. And so, you know, that is definitely a balance that we have. And we talked to a lot of internal hiring managers about like where that, that balance is. I think that's, that's something we just still, you know, work on every day, for sure. Yeah.
Mike Kapetanovic: Where does the USA jobs come into play in all of this? Because I just, again, from my background, so many of recruitment marketing campaigns for the government we had to either drive them to recruiters military recruiters or otherwise or drive them through USA jobs. And from a marketer standpoint, USA jobs is oftentimes sort of a black box. Where do we go from there? So,
Peter Sursi: Yeah, so I'm actually about five years ago, we got permission to get off of USA jobs entirely. So we have our own sort of candidate portal at FBI jobs.gov. And so that allows us, of course, tons of control over the developmental experience just the marketing, the pictures, how we post jobs, the language it gives us tons of flexibility to push things up and down work with our own, we PeopleSoft as our, ATS in the background. Allows us to have our in-house developers, you know, change the application process. And, you know, we, we believe that we need that flexibility to do that. We still do use USA jobs occasionally either as a placeholder because a lot of people go to USA jobs in search cause they know that's where the government jobs are.
Peter Sursi: So we have a lot of placeholders that say, Hey, if you're interested in this click, this link, it'll take you over to FBI job where you can apply. Or there are a couple of jobs where really the, the candidate pool are government people. So I'll like an HR. We have this discipline called position classification, which is about writing job descriptions and, you know, doing analysis of what the grade level of the job is. I mean, the only people that are, are do that job or government people. So when we have a position classifier job, we might post it on USA jobs because like that's where those people look for jobs. Because we are an accepted service agency, which means we have more flexibility than some of our other government partners like commerce or, you know, housing, urban development, you know, we're also able to direct recruit again by posting jobs on LinkedIn or you know, using other platforms like indeed Glassdoor or even direct recruiting at professional associations and things like that.
Peter Sursi: We've started to think of this matrix internally, what we're talking to our own staff about and our hiring managers about the intersection of sort of three different axes, right? So like, what is the geography of the location? Is it a big city, you know, where there's lots of people or is there very remote, hard to fill location? What is the specificity of skillset? Is it like a general administrative body? Or is it like a super strict, like, I need a Chinese linguist with, you know, rocket science, right. And then also what is the grade level or the skill level, like entry mid, you know, medium. And so sort of at the intersection of those three axes, there is a sourcing strategy, right? Whether it's entry-level through our very large internship program or collegiate hiring, you know, university hiring, whether it's, you know, you can get a bunch of people from a posting, you know, if it's GS nine 11 in a big city, easy to fill location, very general skillset, you know, that maybe as your right plan.
Peter Sursi: But like the more specific the skill, the higher graded, you know, you want a lot of work experience, the harder to fill location, you know, the more you move to the extreme ends of those axes, like the more likely that a direct sourcing method, for example, using LinkedIn recruiter or employee referrals in that geographic area is going to be the more successful strategy. And so that's been a pretty big change for the Bureau in the last couple of years. We're not used to really thinking of it and having all those options. We're still doing that education to hiring managers to my own HR staff and so we're really working through that culture change right now.
Mike Kapetanovic: How much of a national versus localized approach are you, are you focusing on, are you drawing candidates nationally and either bringing them to the DC Metro or wherever they would be reassigned, or are you more of, Hey, I've got a position in Montana and I'm really spending my time targeting people within a two hour radius of whatever that location is? How much sort of, how much national versus hyper local are you doing?
Peter Sursi: Yeah, yeah. Great question. I would say for the special agents and the intelligence analysts those are our two largest job categories. When they get through the PR, they go through a very extended process of multiple rounds of testing. Obviously the agent side has both a physical and then a physical fitness tasks, you know, the run, the push-ups and sit-ups right. So it's a huge pipeline of talent. And when they get out of it, they have to go to Quantico, to the Academy for an extended number of weeks. They have a combined curriculum with agents and intelligence analysts. They're hired nationally to come to Quantico, and then we send them back out nationally. Right. And so those two jobs, when you accept the job offer, you're saying that you're going to be willing to go where they have wherever the FBI chooses to send you you're sort of signing up for that in advance.
Peter Sursi: Got it. For the other job categories, it's much more likely that we're hiring locally. Like, obviously we don't limit the pool. We don't say, Hey if we do put up a posting or we do look on LinkedIn we aren't saying, if you're in a different location, we won't consider you but our budget for transfer pay transfers and relocation expenses is pretty limited. So, you know, we do have a better track record, you know, trying to find candidates who are already in that locality and then saving our limited dollars for relocation incentives for a really hard to fill job like a doctor something like that and so that's kind of how we sort of split, split that.
Mike Kapetanovic: Interesting. There's this notion of sort of this war for talent with government and private sector and private industry, you graduate college with an engineering degree naturally, you want to go to Google and Facebook and Apple, and on, on, down in Silicon Valley sort of path, what, what are you doing and sort of what what's the FBI doing, and maybe even broadly, what should perhaps government be doing to attract more and more of those types of candidates away from private industry, given that there is a shortage of talent, especially in micro subsets whether it be engineering or, or otherwise.
Peter Sursi: Yeah, yeah, for sure. The way we look at it is, you know, we look at the labor market studies showing that gen Z and the, you know, folks in college today also, you know, millennials who are already in the workforce, right. The top things they want in a job, or they want better work-life balance, which, you know, admittedly, the FBI has struggles with sometimes but not as much as other folks. But they want to do work that matters and is meaningful. And so we lean really hard into that because I think, you know, when your mission is protect the American people and uphold the constitution, like it doesn't get much more meaningful than that. And I think we can tell these amazing stories of the kind of work that you'll be able to do here, the impact that your work has on protecting your local community and literally changing the face of protecting, you know, democracy in particular communities in this country.
Peter Sursi: Right? What we do when we find that that's a very great tool to sell people on the job. Well, we also find is that, you know, if you're fresh out of college and you want a six figure, you know, engineering salary, and then, you know, we are not for you. Like that is, that is just not something that we can offer you. But we often do find is that after those students have been at the Googles of the Facebooks or whatever for a couple of years they're super burned out and they're kind of soulless. So we sort of try to swoop in and be like, okay, look, obviously you're going to make more money and staying where you are, but you know, you can almost always not really, but like almost always have a 40 hour work week.
Peter Sursi: You do get paid vacation time, which you can take there are great benefits, the work you're doing is amazing and it matters it's unlike the other work that you're going to be doing. Maybe give us a try and see, you know, it's different, but maybe it's for you now that you've sort of tried that. And, you know, you just can't deal with that, you know, burnout culture. That's been a very successful strategy for us. We do find that our attrition rate is super low once people start so it's not that we don't lose anybody. Once you're into the Bureau, you tend to stay the mission and the importance of everybody in the office, everybody in the Bureau working toward that same mission is really toxicating. You can feel the value that you're providing toward that the work is cool and interesting. We never have enough computer scientists or data analysts forensic examiners, engineers, things like that. You are super valued where you are, you know, like if you're the only computer scientist in your set of three squads and, you know, Minneapolis, man, they love you. And so like you get all the love because nobody else has that skillset and so they do feel that appreciation a lot.
Mike Kapetanovic: Are you taking that into some of the, I guess even some of the targeting tactics, whether it be technology or media targeting or otherwise of just sort of honing in on this sense of patriotism is probably not the right word, but sort of making this larger impact of working on this high-level mission to on behalf of other Americans and everything else, are you, are you taking some of that, whether it be creative messaging or even targeting of somehow developing what that audience profile would be of, Hey, these are the candidates that are most propensed to have that messaging resonate with them and targeting that subset.
Peter Sursi: Yeah. I mean to go into a little marketing talk here, right? Like, so absolutely we're leaning into like work that matters mission that matters make an impact, you know, all those kinds of slogans. We do have a couple of brand personas that we identified with our advertising company that we work with focusing on, you know, who are the most likely candidates to come to the FBI intellectually curious people, people who are community service minded, who are already involved in their communities as they are people who are lifelong learners people who believe in a huge sense of integrity in their personal life, right? Like these are all qualities that people have, and it's not like there's a filter on LinkedIn for like, I have integrity versus not. But you know, I think, you know, that, that, that those are definitely the messages that we send.
Peter Sursi: We send in our marketing campaigns and the videos that we produce. We did do some really cool AB testing with LinkedIn a couple of years ago showing about how we do the wording in our ads. You know, where, if you just say, Hey, the FBI needs special agents, you know, a certain group of people, you know, apply to that. But if we say, Hey, are you a financial expert? The FBI needs financial experts to become special agents and then use those finance skills in our white collar crime investigations. That's like a whole new set of people that will interact with that ad. And we'll like, you know, show interest and maybe click through to the job and maybe apply. So, you know, we do do a lot of studies like that to try to, to try to hone in on our target audience and then we do evaluate the effectiveness of those ads, you know, on a monthly basis. We have, of course, national recruiting numbers like everybody does. If we find offices are falling behind on their targets, you know, we might change our ad, spend to spend a little more in that market to try to like help that office, like, you know, meet their numbers a little bit and so we sort of adapt, you know, on the fly.
Mike Kapetanovic: Got it makes sense. Two last questions. It's one government, one when candidate side, from the government standpoint, if there's folks in government that are in similar types of roles to you, what might be some lessons learned that can help them along the way, whether it be from an employer brand standpoint of how to position their agency, their department either amongst other governmental agencies or against private industry that we talked about earlier. Are there any other, I guess, tips or insights that you would offer to your quote unquote peers on, on the government side?
Peter Sursi: Yeah, I guess that's an awesome question. And I do meet with a lot of my current peers and of course we, you know trade stories and tips and, you know, we have a lot of collaboration with each other. I think that, you know, the general advice I would give is that you have to live in the world as it currently exists not the world that you wish existed, right? Number one, the labor market is what it is. And it's your job to know the outside pressures of the labor market and how that's affecting your candidate pools, desire to come to you or not. That's number one. The second thing is I can't overestimate the importance of communicating that information to your internal hiring managers, because a lot of them, especially at the senior level, you know, may have been in your organization 10, 15, 20 years.
Peter Sursi: Well, the labor market was completely different back then and how they applied was totally different. And what the agency was looking for back then was totally different. And a lot of times they're not up to speed on what the current trends are, what the labor market is doing. So for them, you know, they might say something like, you know, well, I don't understand why we don't just spend money on a billboard. It might because it's not targeted and you can't track, you know, the, those ad dollars and how effective they were. Right. And so I think you really need to increase your communication to your internal hiring managers to tell them like, Hey, this is how modern recruiting works. This is how targeted sourcing works. These are the tools at our disposal. Really. We want you to understand that because like, here is our best way forward to get you what you need. Generally they don't know enough to ask the right questions, so we have to really educate them on what we're doing because ultimately like we can throw a million people their way, but if we throw, you know, 50, 60, a hundred candidates their way, and they're like, no, no, I don't really no. Nobody's really like speaking to me. Well, then we've wasted tons and tons of time so yeah, that would be by two, two pieces of general advice,
Mike Kapetanovic: Excellent points. On that note, it's interesting because I've consulted with private industry and even government of the last time, the exercise that I often take folks through is, Hey, pretend like you're a candidate, go through the process, go through, find one of our ads, click through, apply for a job. And what types of experiences do you get from us? Have you ever gone through that exercise and just, would you suggest that exercise to others of just like be in the shoes of the people that you're trying to engage in and attract?
Peter Sursi: Yeah, that's actually a great question. We do, we do tell our managers like, Hey, apply for a job, just go through the system and sort of see what it's like. The other thing that's super useful I'm not gonna lie, does come with some risk is having your family loved ones apply for jobs and then tell you about the experience. Right? So I asked my wife to apply for jobs, FBI jobs. And man, let me tell you, I heard all about the rough part of our app, our applicant tracking system in very much detail. And of course she was right about every single thing she said. Because they'll tell you the honest truth. Like they don't, they don't care. Like if it stinks, they're going to tell you they're not assuaging your ego. I would definitely do that.
Peter Sursi: I think again, the senior executives, when you talk to them you know, sort of the key, I think the key that's been good for me is, you know, most of them, when they want to retire, they do want to retire from the government and then get some secondary private sector, you know, consulting, you know, career, whatever it is. So I try to pitch it as like, Hey even if you're not looking for a job right now in the future, you might be, I'm sure you are, might be looking for a job. And like, we would want you to understand like what's happening now because that's going to affect how you might be looking for a job later, if you ever choose to leave the agency. You know what I mean? So because I mean, I find that like most of them do not have LinkedIn profiles and most of them, you know, have, have not applied for a job online ever because they've never had to. Right. And so you know, just trying to get them to be aware of that. I think that's a good in a, if you're having a recalcitrant executive, who's like, I don't understand why we can't just this, you know, we'll just talk to them a little bit about like what their future might hold for them, you know? And you can even say like 10 years down the road next year, 10 years down the road, you know what I'm saying? Like, you're not trying to hurry them out, but like sometimes linking it can help.
Mike Kapetanovic: The last question is sort of the similar type of question, but for the candidates, whether they be looking at FBI or other governmental agencies, what would you tell them? Knowing that they might be facing longer than average recruiting times where they might be going through USA jobs and having struggles there or whatever the situation might be, I guess what's your, what's your message of hope to the candidates?
Peter Sursi: Yeah. great. I think that it's worth the wait because the mission matters and you can have such an impact on your community by working for the federal government, you know, in any capacity, right? This is how we build equity in systems. This is how we ensure that all parts of the government are taking care of the population. This is how you ensure that your taxpayer dollars are being well spent. Right. You're coming in and you're being a part of that story and working really hard. And I would say for those people who have that drive to be a part of something bigger and improve their community and help people then it's worth it. I mean, yeah, waiting stinks but it's worth it. So I would just say like, make sure you know, what the requirements are make sure you know, what the drug policy is. You know, if you have to start the clock, you know, start it now on how many years has been, remember marijuana is still federally illegal. So that's a big issue for us. But just think about like, Hey, could you, could you see yourself doing that in the future? And you know, what might your life be like if you have that job and if that's something you want, then just stick to it. Okay.
Mike Kapetanovic: I think the tip that you offered earlier of while they're in that process, just continuing to better themselves, whether it's professional education, just continuing to grow and refine their own skills so that they're even a better candidate come their time.
Peter Sursi: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And if, you know I mean, certainly it's going to happen that some of them are going to fall into the background process and not make it through, but then at least like they've spent that time waiting, developing themselves and improving their skill sets and that is going to make them a more competitive candidate somewhere else, you know, if that is in the cards for them. So yeah, I think that's definitely the best advice for sure.
Mike Kapetanovic: Great. This has been really insightful. I think the, a lot of great experiences and great insights here, so appreciate the time and and all your insights. This is, this has been very valuable.
Peter Sursi: Oh yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to come and chat. I really appreciate it.