Are you sure you want to hold out for a Fed job???

This is a short post with some big numbers.  A friend of mine recently went through the interview process with a federal agency for a professional level position.  While I have no way of verifying that his experience is typical, I have a pretty good guess that it is:

Applied: month 1

Received response from application: month 2

Contacted to do interview: end of month 2

Interviewed for 30 minutes and asked 5 standard questions.  Told by interviewer that they had reviewed between 3000-4000 resumes.  He was about interview 300 (yeah-interview 300) for this role.

When should he expect to hear if he is going to make it to next round of interviews: end of month 4 to end of month 5

While the Fed may offer job seekers a bit more stability than the private sector at times, it can be an incredibly long process, especially if you are hanging your hat on that alone.  Bottom line?  Add federal employment searches to a nice, diversified search and be prepared to waaaaiiiit.  Good luck and happy hunting!

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Michelle currently serves as a recruiting and job search consultant helping professionals make the leap from looking to landed.  In addition to her time spent recruiting and coaching individuals, she delivers a variety of training sessions from Social Networking, Working with Recruiters, Online Resume Posting, and Interview Prep.

 

Michelle possesses over 15 years of diverse experience in functional areas such as recruiting, human resources, coaching, training, organizational development, staffing, sales, sales management, retail, and banking/finance.

 

Prior to her work as a consultant, Michelle made her career in the Placement industry working most recently for the 2^nd largest Staffing Company in the World.  For this multi-national organization, Michelle served as an Agency Recruiter, Corporate Recruiter, Senior HR Manager, and Area Vice President.  During her tenure with this organization, Michelle was also tasked with various Organizational Development programs including the creation of a company wide Career Progression Program.  Michelle also served on the three person team that introduced a new “Gen Y” based hiring model that included a greater emphasis on college recruiting/branding and internships.  As a result of this experience, Michelle considers her greatest strengths to be talent identification/retention, talent development, and coaching for performance improvement.   

Want to connect to Michelle? 

Send her an invitation on LinkedIn at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemorettini. 

Follow her on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/mmorettini.

Comments

[John Papers]

Thanks for the post!