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Foreign.
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Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. My guest today is Kaitlyn Lewis. Caitlin runs an organization called Work for America, and we're going to talk a lot about it. And it's something that, to me, you know, anyone who listens to podcast knows I believe that government can be the most impactful force or one of them in people's lives, but frequently has not been for a lot of reasons. Caitlin's going to explain, and she is actually trying to change it, as opposed to just tweeting and complaining and protesting, she does something which already makes her a hero on this podcast. So, Caitlin, thanks for joining us.
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Thanks for having me. Awesome to be here.
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B
So, to start off with just what is Work for America?
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A
Well, as you sort of alluded to, Bradley, we think a lot about making government work. And state and local government in particular is the largest employer in every single community in America. It accounts for 1 in 8 U.S. jobs. And in the last decade or so, governments all over the country have really been struggling to find talent to fill critical roles that deliver services. We all depend on not just picking up your trash, but things like keeping the book so that your city can issue bond deals, build infrastructure projects, etc. We launched work for America because of the fact that so many communities have been struggling to hire top talent. And we do really three things. We help connect incredible talent directly to local government jobs. So we think about getting butts in seats today for critical vacancies. We modernize the way government hires, because if it takes 130 days to hire someone, you're just going to lose out on a lot of talent. So we work with governments to fix that. And then we think a lot about telling a new narrative about public service, working with creators and influencers and meeting people where they actually are to have a conversation about why government's important and why they should consider it as a career path.
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B
And you guys focus on local government?
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A
We focus on local and state government. So cities, counties, states, et cetera.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine you'll disagree with this, but I kind of find myself often telling people that. Like, I know that when you think of government, the mental images, the White House, the Capitol, whatever it is, 80% of the governing that impacts your life happens at the state and local level, 100%. Do you feel like that is really misunderstood, or do you think that people get that more than I realize?
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A
Well, local government is the most trusted level of government. So whether people consciously get it or not, they understand that it is the local government that picks up their trash that actually shows up in their community. I think whether you're a Democrat, a Republican, or somewhere in between, the vibes on the federal level have been pretty dysfunctional for my whole life. And so that creates a broader brand problem for people when they think of government as one big entity. But the reality is you can work in city hall, in your community and be working on incredible projects at a very young age, and that's just not something that is in sort of the vernacular.
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B
So it does, though, feel like the kind of ideological focus attempts to grip Washington has come to cities. And I would guess that most people who voted for Mandani are not thinking about picking up the trash or the water are coming out of the faucet clean. Do you think that that trend is moving into local government and that feeling of these are the people that just do the services that I rely on is changing? Or do you think I misunderstand the Mandani voters or the mayor of Seattle, whoever her name is, and people like that?
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I mean, I think one of the most impactful things I've seen happen in the Mamdani administration, because he has an army of followers who want to be involved with his movement, is when we had record snowfall this winter. He bas basically put out a missive to his followers. Hey, we're gonna pay $30 an hour for you to come shovel snow. And they shoveled all of the snow in record time because everyone who followed him wanted to find a way to get involved. I think he's actually been pretty effective at translating his vision movement into brass tacks. Fill potholes, shovel the snow, et cetera. Local government in a way that has actually engaged people at a service level.
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B
So you worked for Bill de Blasio at city Hall. Obviously, I'm not a de Blasio fan. That's well known. And yet, Caitlin Friends. But I would say one of his many failures, in my view, was massively increasing the size of city government and most of it seeming to be middle management that didn't even really directly help people. And then, at least in this first Mandani budget, no recognition of that or willingness to say, let's find savings that could go back into childcare, free buses, all the things he cares about. By not having this many bureaucrats at this many agencies that could easily either just we don't need, or their functions could be done by technology. Lot, lot easier. When you talk about kind of the importance of local government, state government, and placing people into it, does that mean that you kind of just want as big as possible of the state and city workforce, or do you think that there are areas that should be cut?
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A
Our work is all about having the right people in the right roles. We're never going to blindly advocate for more people just for the sake of it. And I think in the world of AI and all of the uncertainty around what the future of the workforce is going to look like, including in local government, we need to be thinking really strategically, not just about having humans in the jobs of today, but what does the future of the public sector workforce look like and how are we getting talent who can help? Imagine that future workforce in the door. And thinking about it, I think on the topic of just sort of de Blasio administration, size of government increasing. The de Blasio administration did really big things when it came to universal pre K and actually having boots on the ground, enrolling New Yorkers in services. I think one of the places where we tend to fall short in New York City, local government, is having big, ambitious, bold, especially social policies and not actually getting New Yorkers enrolled in and using them. And so that is a place where the work is still very human to actually be in neighborhoods being.
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B
Yeah. And that's something we're about, Tommy. Outreach can really help. Yeah. So, like, this may be too big of a question to spring on you, but, like, fast forward 10 years, what jobs in government, city and state should be done by human beings and what jobs should be done by AI?
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I think it's nearly impossible to say. I mean.
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Well, let me throw some categories at you.
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Sure.
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Procurement. Do we really need human, other than maybe a general counsel or someone to sign off? Ultimately, compliance, facilities management, data management, licensing, permitting. To me, those are all areas where you don't need people and you're better off taking that spend and redirecting. I think for New York City, at least every 10,000 employees is about a billion dollars in city spending. And in a 330,000 person workforce, there's gotta be 30 to 50,000 people doing the kind of functions I just said. Whether it's just giving people money back on their taxes so that they can spend more money in the local economy or providing more services. That's the kind of stuff, at least to me, that seems that you could think about.
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A
Totally. And I think also providing services quicker is a big part of the equation as well. I mean, I think government's always going to be human in the loop and there are endless roles that require critical thinking and human judgment. I mean, you think about caseworkers for the social services. AI can absolutely speed up the administrative parts of their jobs, but there's going to be plenty of roles and functions that actually require a human touch to manage these very human challenges. Things like procurement, where there is risk and compliance and any legal decisions to be made. There are always going to be humans in the loop in government because it's too high stakes for there not to be. But I do think that AI is like a jetpack for most of these jobs. And we should be thinking about how to make these roles more efficient by arming employees with AI tools.
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B
So 50 or 100 years ago would work for America have been needed? Is it that it's always been hard to attract talented people to city and state government jobs, or did or was it at one point a much more appealing respected profession and that then changed along the way?
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A
I think there's all kinds of complicated factors. One, we now are a country where everybody is moving to cities and living and working in cities. There used to be much more of a kind of diffuse population across the country and folks stayed in their communities and local governments were jobs they chose. Local government used to also be a family business, much more than it is today. So it was. Your dad was a fire. Your dad was a sanitation worker, your mom worked at the social services agency. And so you saw that as your career path and chose those roles. Those two things coming together has led
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B
to why did that change?
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I mean, our economy has fundamentally changed. There's much more knowledge work people have. People have seen opportunities outside of their smaller, more rural hometowns, in cities.
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I mean, on the second one, sorry. Whereas, is it that people don't become cops like their father was or teachers like their mother were because their parents want upward mobility for their kids and they're saying, I want you to do something. They may not be using the term knowledge economy, but I want you to do something behind a desk. Or is it that civil service rules change that? Like, why aren't people following the path of their parents and family members into local government?
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A
I mean, I think this is happening across the board now that we have more access to more information about opportunities all over the country in general, kids aren't following their parents path. Whether you're dad was a cop or a lawyer or a doctor, kids tend to think more independently and differently about. Exactly. So I think that's certainly a factor. I mean, when it comes to things like civil service rules and some of the process that makes it really difficult to move through government hiring, that's a lot of process that is just stacked up on top of itself over many years. A lot of it's actually not regulatory or legal in nature. It's. We added step 12 in 1992 and that's how it's always been done. And therefore that's what you have to do. And so I think that over many decades, we now have a 130 day average time to hire in local governments across the country, which is about 4x the private sector. And a lot of that is just process stacked up over time and can be fixed with humans today. No legislation.
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B
Yeah. So do you have a playbook? Like if a mayor just came to you and said, look, I just want to reduce the time for hiring because I have all these critical services that aren't being met as well as they should be. Is there a work for America, like, hey, I'll email you the guide kind of thing?
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A
We have a bunch of different toolkits. I mean, one thing I'll say is we're a no new ideas organization. The private sector has been investing in people, talent and culture for decades and they've more or less figured it out both on the how to reduce time to hire and improve process, but also how to think about and brand your organization as a place that people want to be. So a lot of the playbooks that we run are just modeled off of things that we've seen and know work.
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B
Who does it really well that like in the private sector that you would say this is a good model?
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I mean, now is a bit of a complicated moment that we're living in real life.
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B
Let's go take five.
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Let's go back to when I was in college. Yeah, when I was in college, Google was on campus and they were like, hey, you never have to leave campus. We're going to give you pizza at lunch and you can play ping pong between meetings and we'll do your dry cleaning and going to be googly, I think is what we call it. And so Big Tech in general did an excellent job of framing the industry as aspirational. A place where smart people go, where they work really hard, where they have fun. All of those things are things I would say about my time in local government, but pretty much no one else would think government and have the same association as a place like Google.
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B
Right? So it's funny, as someone older than you who worked in the Bloomberg world, it was like that, right? And it was super. In fact, Schumer, most of the places I worked in government, I think part of the reason I had such really good experiences is because I had bosses who really prioritize hiring talent. Yeah. And that made it fun. And not only would it make it fun, like when I think about my closest friends, like, so many of them are people that I worked with in government. Right. So if you were to go, like, if I just gave you the time machine and say, caitlin, you go back in time and start work for America at the exact moment where you think things shifted. When are we talking roughly?
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A
Such a hard question. I mean, from a culture and brand perspective. I would love to go back to when I was in college. Process. And the things that make it difficult to move through government hiring. It's like Robert Moses and civil service exams and then what do you. Tammany Hall. They're the reason why.
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B
Right. So, like, how do you. It's interesting, right, because we look at people like you and me, who are kind of like technocratic nerds in ways, look at rules and say, okay, this is deterring what government's supposed to be about, which is delivering effective services for people. But if you went back 100 years and we were looking at, you know, Tammany hall and Boss Tweed and all that, you'd be saying, well, you have to have these things because look at the corruption. So what's the balance between preventing. Because even when you had, for example, people following their parents footsteps to go into government, there was a lot of like, oh, my kids, you know, needs a job kind of thing. And that kid may or may not have been the right person. Right. So, like, what's the.
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But arguably that still happens in government and in industries all over the place.
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Even with all the.
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There's always a workaround is the problem.
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B
So what's. What's the balance? I know you've thought about this a lot between, you know, you want systems in place to prevent corruption, but when the bureaucracy overtakes the underlying purpose, that which I think it has in many ways, that's even worse. How do you think? Through the mix?
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A
Yeah, well, let me start with what we. Which is where New York City is today. Because I think it's important to explain what is so messed up about it. And the Mamdani administration is a great example. In the transition, they had, I think, 80,000 people submit applications to join the administration. And so far they've hired like 34 of them. Was what I last saw, 34 people? 34 of 80,000, yeah. Not 34,000, which is, I think, the reality of going from campaigning to governing and entering into a system where New York City for all of their civil service titles requires a civil service exam. The exams are associated with the specific job type and title. So there is no such thing as a civil service. Computer scientist, software engineer. You have like a 1980s computer something something title. The exam.
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B
Still use a 1980s computer?
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Possibly. The exams happen sometimes once a year, sometimes every other year for specific titles. You take the exam. I think it takes an average of 290 days to get your results. You have to have done this before you can even apply for a job. Then you get on a list. If you pass the exam and the list is in order of when people took the exam. So there's hundreds and hundreds of people for individual job titles. Say you're at HPD and you want to make a hire, you have to rule of three, go to the civil service list and call through everyone in order who has passed that exam to offer them the opportunity to interview for the job. So needless to say, it can take literal years to hire four mission critical roles in New York City. All of that was put in place to address what you were just talking about, which is corruption, era of Tammany Hall. And it was all through the lens of fairness. But as with so many things, it has just become a slow, massive bureaucratic process.
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B
So what's the fix, in your view?
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Yeah, so with something like New York Civil Service, there's legislative and regulatory fixes, there's going to the state and blowing up the whole system, which is a much more difficult proposition. There's also a whole lot that can be done just in terms of change management internally to actually speed up these systems, offer more exams, fund an agency like DCAS to think more creatively about how to run the system. Both should be happening simultaneously. New York State did something really interesting a couple years ago. They launched the New York Helps program, which allowed them to say, hey, we're in a state of emergency because we cannot hire people in critical roles. So we are going to pause civil service exams while we address this critical staffing gap. Emergency. They stopped doing civil service exams and committed to improving the process simultaneously while they filled vacancies. They actually gave every city in the state the option to opt into that. And the Adams administration did not opt
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in interest from a state standpoint, what was the result of doing this?
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They've hired thousands and thousands of people. It's worked.
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It's worked.
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Yeah, because suddenly they can hire people in a month instead of two years.
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And is it fair to just take our. The assumed Answer of why Adams didn't, which is that they were. He was fundamentally corrupt and just didn't want to. He knew how to work the system the way it was. Or what's your gap? I know you weren't in the.
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A
I have no idea. I think it was just one of those things that did not make it to the top of the priority list and they did not opt to sign up for it.
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B
How do public sector unions feel about the system as is in reform? Do they like things the way they are or do they recognize the need for change and support it?
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They want their members to be able to get jobs and they want to have more members.
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B
So they want reform.
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There's, there's complete agreement that reform is needed. And the unions were not opposed to the New York helps program, which they could have been because it ended civil service exams, which is like the, you know, beacon of civil service rules in New York. They're, they're pro reform for sure. It's good for everyone for people to be able to get jobs.
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B
So that if, if Mondami, and in fairness to him, just for the listeners, like I know 34 out of 80,000 sounds really bad, but if we're talking about only non civil service jobs, then that entire universe is much, much, much. It's less than 80,000, maybe even. And then of that a lot of people are in those jobs who are good at their jobs. You wouldn't want to lose. So they don't have the ability to. They can hire more than 34, but they don't have the ability to hire 50,000 people in non civil service jobs because that doesn't exist. So if the need is there and the demand from people to serve is there, and the people who have a lot of like the public sector unions don't oppose, why not run a bill in the City Council if they have the jurisdiction or if not in Albany next year that would allow a place like New York City to radically change the way it does things.
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A
I think and hope it's something that they're grappling with right now. There's an amazing commissioner at dcas you May Kitasai. She's thinking a lot about these issues and understands them deeply. So I'm hopeful that it's on the agenda.
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B
I'd work with you guys on something.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So. And how much is New York City? I mean, you and I both love New York City government. We work near city government. We live here. But how much is it or isn't it a proxy for the. Everyone Listening to this around at least the U.S. can they assume that what we're talking about more or less applies to there where they live to.
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A
Majority of cities across the country have some version of civil service rules. I will say New York cities are the most restrictive and time to hire in New York is some of the slowest as a result. But basically the same things playing out everywhere where time to hire is slow because the process is burdensome. There's no single person often in a city who knows the hiring process end to end.
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B
Right.
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A
So they couldn't even tell you exactly how long it is or who's responsible for what pieces. Some of the work we do is we work directly with cities to just start by mapping the whole hiring process with all parties who are involved, identify where there are bottlenecks that can actually just be eliminated today and where there are things that are going to require deeper work. That's like step one in just figuring out sort of what is the landscape that we're dealing with here. There's also, there's a real lack of data in hiring and there's often not one uniform definition of time to hire. Cities don't know what their time to hire is. They don't have sort of baseline metrics to even know if and how they are improving the process. So we think a lot about sort of setting those metrics with cities as well.
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B
Let's go back and just diagnose the deterrence to getting people to want to serve in government. I'm going to throw out different guesses and you tell me, yes, no, why, whatever else. So one would be people are so sort of distrustful and depressed that they're like, nothing can change. Why would I bother?
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A
I'd say medium. I mean, one of the things we think about a lot with Gen Z in particular is if you want to be a part of the resistance, there is no better way to do it than going into city hall and changing things from the inside. It's maybe slower work than being able to show up for a protest on a given day, but it is actually the way to change.
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B
And by the way, so much more fulfilling. I mean, one of the reasons that I sort of have a lot of dislike for the far left is it feels like they equate performative things with actually doing things. And you know, I mean, city government's the most fun job I've ever had.
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A
It's the most fun job and it's incredibly fast paced. People think government gets the, the rep of being slow and bureaucratic and Boring. I was working on 500 things in any given day and I was moving faster than I have in any job I work for.
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B
Sure. Look, I've now worked in jobs where I've helped or run government. And I've worked in. I've been the CEO of companies. If you are running or at the highest levels of a government, especially an executive branch where you have to actually deliver stuff, it is so much harder than running a company.
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A
It's so much harder. But I also think that everyone should work in all sectors. I am not a. You need to choose government and stay there for your entire career. I worked for Alicia Glenn at City hall, who had spent a decade at Goldman Sachs. And one of the things she always said was if we're trying to get more affordable housing for the city of New York and you can't open a developer's spreadsheet and call bullshit when they're saying that they can't add more affordable units because of XYZ thing, then you can't actually negotiate on behalf of the city to the best of your ability.
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B
That's what worries about this. Again, maybe we're being too nerve centric here, but I think Julie Hsu, who's the deputy for Economic justice, is a lovely, lovely person, but she was the labor secretary under Biden. No one on her team has ever worked in the private sector. And I don't know how they can possibly be effective. All right, so that's 1, 2. Political violence is way up. And it's not just someone trying to shoot Trump. It's local government workers, post office workers, judges. How much does that permeating and deterring people from it?
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A
Sadly, I think it's a huge factor. It plays into the elections workforce. Post the last three presidential cycles, we've hemorrhaged elections workers in part because we've seen them be attacked. It's. It's bad for cops. It's really hard to be a cop right now. And the polarization that we're living in makes it really hard to recruit cops in every city in America. It also is hard for mayors. We do a lot of work with creators and influencers thinking about kind of telling better story about public service. And when we engage mayors around working with creators and influencers, their safety and security is one of the things that comes up first, is this person has 10 million followers. If I do a video in my hometown, they're gonna know where I hang out. Does that endanger me? And this is just the thing that you have to think about first. If you're gonna be in public office
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B
today, the general lack of trust in institutions, which includes government, but also includes media and the church and higher ed and Wall street and everything else. How big of a factor has that been?
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A
I think it's a big factor. Like I said, local government is one of the most trusted institutions of all of the untrusted institutions. And as I was just saying, I mean, I think going on the inside and actually changing those institutions is the best way to build trust for communities. We feel strongly that if you get great people into local government jobs and communities all over the country, trust will increase. It will be good for our democracy writ large. Especially when people tangibly can see their work on a local level.
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B
Yeah. I mean, just as a. You know, one of the best jobs I've ever had was at the New York City Parks Department. I worked there for four years and one of the reasons.
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A
With my old boss, Tim Tompkins.
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B
Yes, yes. And that's actually, that's how we originally met Caitlin. We worked on a project together to get all those crazy costume characters out of Times Square. Right. Tim was perks. And it was, I think Tim would agree, it was just an incredible environment. But one thing that I realized quickly, that just for the listeners who were thinking about this, younger ones especially, that felt so good, was New York City. And again, I know we're over indexing in New York City here, but I think it's more. I've worked around the country in government and politics. I think it's a proxy, has eight and a half million people and every single one of them uses the parks at some point in the year, unless you're truly a shut in. Right. And if the parks are clean and safe and fun, your life and your quality of life is better than if they're dirty and dangerous, like full stop. And once you realize that, you're like, oh, my work really matters, and then you're just excited to do it. Now, I get that that's obviously every single government job everywhere, but if I were a young person thinking about government, I would really focus on the executive branch as opposed to the legislative branch. Because in legislative, like when I worked for Schumer in Congress, it was just like kabuki theater. Right. Like there was no there there. It was just like a play that we were acting in.
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A
Right.
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B
Where, you know. So. Yeah. Do you agree with that? That executive branch is a better experience?
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A
I totally agree. And New York City is unique in that New Yorkers wear New York City parks beanies and sweatshirts. They identify with the brand as a thing that makes their life better. We want to see a whole lot more of that. And I totally agree. When in college, the Institute of Politics at my school really leveraged for sending kids to the Senate and to the White House to a certain extent. I went to Harvard. The IOP in Chicago was later based on the Harvard iop.
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B
Got it, got it.
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A
So, yeah, most of the pathways into government, of which there were very few, were into the Kabuki theater, as you put it. And I really, really wanted to be where I could see my impact. I ended up graduating with no job because I couldn't figure out how to.
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B
Right. And they can't help. They're not gonna help you.
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A
Yeah, I remember like graduation and my friend's parents being like, so what are you doing? Like, my kid's going to McKinsey and mine's going to the US Senate. And I was like, I'm gonna move to New York and nanny for a bit while I live in my friend's younger brother's childhood bedroom because I wanna do something really cool. And I haven't been able to figure out how to do that while within university. So we need to be way better about creating direct to local government for folks coming right out of career, technical school, community college, university, et cetera.
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B
Right. And then last one, and I want to get into all the things that you guys are doing, which compensation? And I would argue, look, look, if your only goal in life is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, government is clearly not the way to do it. But city government job, especially at a higher level, pays, you know, like pretty comparable to most normal private sector jobs. I think there is a fallacy that somehow you will make much more money working some mid level marketing job at some Fortune 500 company than you would at an interesting job in city government.
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A
Totally. It completely varies across the country, but we've helped recruit through our civic Match platform for assistant city manager jobs in rural areas that pay $276,000 a year. So you can totally make a great salary in government. Sometimes, sometimes salaries are much lower than the private sector, depending on role type, depending on geography. But I think the fact that government doesn't pay as sort of the word on the street is a huge misnomer. And if you do want to stay in government for a while, you can still get the stability of pension and access to retirement. You also get 100% free good health care, which I didn't understand economic value. I didn't understand the value of it until I left and went to the private sector. And you don't have health care that's that good. And you have to pay big. Co pays and whatever else. But there's the. The benefits of government are huge and they actually save you money.
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B
So I mean, I always found that friends of mine who worked, let's say in city or state government somewhere and then wanted to go work at a PR firm, whatever. It's really shocked that the offers weren't for that much more money. Yeah. Than they made. And they thought, oh, I should make. And it's like, well, no, because there's a market value to what you do and if you bring in business, you make a lot more money. But otherwise you actually were not as underpaid as you thought you were. So you listed the three kind of main focus areas for you guys. Let's get into each of them.
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A
Sure.
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B
So would you say the first one is around kind of matching and recruiting? Is that correct?
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A
Yeah. So we run a talent matching platform called Civic Match. To date, we've been matching fired federal workers with jobs in state and local governments all over the country. We think of the state and local governments as our primary customer. And so one of the things we're working on now is expanding that platform to be open to any job seekers who are interested in exploring state and local government careers. Because you need a crap ton of job seekers on the marketplace to be able to meet the needs of governments all over the country.
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B
So how do you get government side to participate?
- [30:14]
A
So to the credit of all of the state and local governments we work with, we work with about 300 right now. And it's been almost entirely organic, especially in the moment that we're in where there's incredible public sector talent on the market exiting the federal government.
- [30:29]
B
Yes.
- [30:29]
A
Cities and states understand the value of that and they desperately want it onto the platform.
- [30:34]
B
Right. I mean, I don't know if you saw. There was a piece in the Times today about how a record number of grand jury indictments and processes are getting overturned because a lot of the people at DOJ now are just complete political hires without kind of training. But that also means that a lot of people who were there have left and those. If you're a city corporation, council or state AG or whatever it is, that means there's a lot of talent out there if those people want to stay in government.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah, incredible talent. And the federal government, 80% of the federal government workforce is outside of D.C. already. So these are folks who live in every community all over the country. So if you're a local government, there are displaced federal workers already living in your community who want to be working in the public sector. It's a no brainer for the cities and they continue to come back to the platform. One in five governments who are on our platform have hired off of it and they continue to post jobs week over week over week.
- [31:27]
B
So and how do, if someone who works in government the right role is hearing this and they're not in it, how would they, they get part, become part of it.
- [31:35]
A
They just go to civicmatch.org and sign up. It's a one click sign up process. They could be on the platform posting jobs today.
- [31:41]
B
Okay, so then the other part of it though. So there's obviously like every marketplace, it's a two sided thing. So government is highly incentivized to want to participate. But I find that there's a lot of great tools out there that because I assume you don't have a giant marketing and advertising budget, then you're reaching the people who would benefit from it is a greater challenge. So I know you guys are working on that too. How do you do?
- [32:05]
A
Yeah, it's definitely a greater challenge. I mean because of the fact that we were meeting a moment last year, we got in front of pretty much all fired federal workers and we're able to reach them and get them onto the platform. Now we want to be everything to everybody, which is a way different marketing challenge. And we're at the same time trying to convince people that they should consider government. Right. So if you know you want government and you find your way to our platform, no brainer. But we, we run a creator community that's in partnership with TED and we just did a big event with them last week where we brought together about.
- [32:39]
B
Have you done a TED Talk on this?
- [32:41]
A
I've not done a TED Talk. Tell the people of ted.
- [32:45]
B
No, I think I'm allowed to not. I will nominate you. Send me something.
- [32:49]
A
Yeah, yeah. So they've been great partners and they have a democracy program which is starting to think a lot about sort of how do we work together to rebrand public service. So we brought 50 creators, total of 71 million followers into a room to have a conversation around how you can tell stories of government working without wading into partisan politics, which is always the concern online these days. And the long term work we're doing with them is starting to see new narratives about government working in communities all over the country eventually to help young people start to explore career pathways into Government and direct them to our Civic Match platform. We kind of see the flywheel being we reach a young person, maybe 23 year old, flipping through Instagram, sees something about public service and next week her friends are sharing a bunch of similar content. Then she sees a link to Civic Match, she goes there, she applies for a job. We've made the process amazing and quick and fast so she can actually get the job and land in it. And then we have have a young person who's made their way into public service. That's kind of like the totality of the system we're looking to impact. But it takes all of those things happening simultaneously for any of it to work. And it's three big challenges at the same time.
- [34:09]
B
And in terms of changing the underlying perceptions of working in government, you guys have a whole king of pink line around for that too. What's that been like and what's the goal?
- [34:20]
A
I think young people in particular, they want to make an impact and they also value stability in a job more than we all might think. In a moment where the future of the workforce is so uncertain and young people are really kind of confused about what their path is going to be offering up direct impact and stability is a no brainer, I think what we've
- [34:43]
B
found and much less likely to get fired, especially if you're not a, a political appointee in the first place.
- [34:49]
A
And so yeah, so when we get in front of young people and can kind of explain the value prop of government, it is a no brainer. It's about actually reaching them and then being able to move them through the process and for there to be real job opportunities for them to step into.
- [35:04]
B
But arguably, like you were just saying, this social media writ large is certainly a big factor in the destabilization of society and the loss of faith in institutions. But it is also for you a real centralized place in a way to reach people that otherwise would have been incredibly difficult and expensive.
- [35:24]
A
Yeah, I mean the reality is four in 10 young people are getting their news from creators. That's not getting their news from the New York Times on Instagram, that's getting their news from independent creators. And so it's just, it's where they are, it's where they're getting their information, it's the place to impact and kind of change hearts and, and minds with that generation. And so we would be crazy not to be showing up where they are and doing it in a way that's authentic and compelling and starts to change their perspective on what they could Do?
- [35:55]
B
Yeah, we're doing the same thing with mobile voting. Some people from Mr. Beast team joined us and they're helping us because if we can't build a movement of younger people who demand the ability to do this, at least when it comes to how they stay in their jobs, elected officials are never going to voluntarily reform themselves. Right. So it takes that last thing real fast, which is we were talking before we started recording about graduate school and you mentioned you didn't go to graduate school. And what's your view on it? I mean, I kind of think that's a good thing in that like graduate school to me. And I say this as an employer and someone who's was taught in graduate school. If you can say I want to do X and this particular education will better connect me to X than anything else, it makes sense. But going to law school, business school, public policy school, because you don't quite know what else to do and it's just in the view. Well, it's just better to have the degree than not. I would say it's not better to have the degree because the opportunity cost, economic costs, everything else significantly outweighs whatever benefit you think that is. How do you see it?
- [37:00]
A
I mean, I don't disagree with everything you just said. I think grad school can be really helpful for what we call career switchers. You just referenced folks who maybe have worked for a few years, want to do something different and aren't sure exactly how. It's excellent for networking, for exploration, for kind of understanding another sector. I personally love working and I didn't go to grad school because I didn't want to leave the workforce just full stop. I've loved every job that I've done and I've wanted to be doing more of it. So I think it's just a matter of finding what's right for you and it can be helpful, but working can also be even more helpful. Getting that actual experience.
- [37:41]
B
It's more fun. Yeah, for sure. All right, so just one more time. How do people find you guys? Work with you guys?
- [37:48]
A
Yeah. Our website's workforamerica.org all the information's there. We've got a bunch of research. We have links to our talent matching platform, platform Civic Match, and for governments. They can sign up for our talent accelerator, which is the work we do to help reduce time to hire, etc.
- [38:04]
B
Great. All right, Caitlin, thanks for coming.
- [38:05]
A
Thank you.
- [38:09]
B
Firewall is recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradley Firewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with the what's on my mind in my latest writing, please follow my new substack@bradleytus.substack.com thanks again for listening.