During a Tuesday webinar, Nathaniel Haight, a former U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employee, described how he used Work for America's Civic Match platform to land a grants administrator role with the government of Indianapolis. Within months of learning USAID’s funds were being eliminated, he'd completed his move to the new job.
Haight said he used Civic Match and ChatGPT to translate the work he did at the federal level into local context for hiring managers. His resume includes grant and contract compliance, data-driven solutions and systems thinking. His move to local government, he also noted, allows him to be closer to the work, although he did have to physically relocate from Virginia.
Work for America launched in November 2024 with the goal of helping 4,000 political appointees as well as thousands of campaign staffers pivot to roles in public service, and while the work is highly focused, the organization continues to make strides in getting state and local roles filled. In April, there were about 6,300 job candidates on the group's Civic Match digital platform. Now, there are more than 11,000 end users and about 900 IT-related postings.
More than 201,000 civil servants had left the federal workforce by the end of September, according to the Partnership for Public Service. Its website estimates that 25,000 probationary federal employees were terminated. As of Oct. 1, there will be another wave of furloughed and potentially terminated workers.
“Today is a pretty bittersweet milestone for many,” Work for America’s Executive Director Caitlin Lewis told webinar attendees. “Not only is Sept. 30 the deadline for the deferred resignation program, but we’re also on the eve of a potential government shutdown. So, a lot of folks are experiencing a kind of continued uncertainty in terms of what’s next on the horizon.”
Civic Match’s intended audience is tight. Profile builders specify what type of federal work they did or if they did nonprofit work that was affected by federal funding cuts. They may also choose other.
“We’ve made a lot of updates to the platform,” Lewis said. “While Civic Match is powered by a tech platform, we always keep humans in the loop. So, it’s important to note that every role on our Civic Match jobs board is connected to a real hiring manager. We now have over a thousand individual hiring managers across the country.”
Maryland, New York state and Pennsylvania were early partners, along with cities like Akron, Ohio. Some states have a higher proportion of federal employees living in them, according to the Partnership for Public Service, and there are 61,717 in Pennsylvania and 51,559 in Ohio, representing full-time, non-seasonal, permanent civilian employees of the federal government.
Jason Swarthout, Pennsylvania’s acting deputy secretary for human resources and management, presented during the Civic Match webinar titled “Ten Ways to Tap Top Talent.”
“One of our goals was to make it easier for these displaced federal workers to apply for our vacant positions within the commonwealth that really align with their federal work experience,” he said.
“Our classification plan has about 2,600 job titles in it, and the federal government plan has even more than that. So, in order for us to make this match and see what job titles that federal employees would qualify for, we ended up leveraging generative AI to analyze all the thousands of federal job titles and descriptions and create a crosswalk.”
The group used ChatGPT to match state job specifications with federal occupational titles, allowing its centralized HR team to recognize work that was equivalent to state service. The application process was also updated to let applicants highlight federal experience. He reported 340 hires in critical vacancies. The state is currently continuing its outreach.
“We’re really anticipating another influx of former federal workers into the labor market,” Swarthout said, “and we plan to continue to really do outreach, engagement, with this population to help us address our workforce needs and serve our fellow Pennsylvanians.”
