The Complete Guide to Hiring and Firing Government Employees

It’s always hard to find a good employee, especially if you’re burdened with a lot of red tape and bureaucracy. What’s even worse is knowing that if the employee doesn’t work out, it could be difficult to effectively discipline—or in the worst cases, ultimately get rid of—your least effective employees.

Written by a proven authority on government careers who has himself worked for the government for decades, The Complete Guide to Hiring and Firing Government Employees arms you with tried-and-true, realistic strategies that will enable you to find and hire the best talent available, as well as efficiently document and deal with those who don’t make the cut.

Over the course of your career, you will probably hire dozens if not hundreds of people—and make no mistake about it; the quality of the people you hire will go a long way toward determining how successful you are as a manager. If you don’t properly strategize in the first place how to regularly bring in the best possible groups of new employees—instead of just making quick, individual judgment calls and hoping for the best—you run the risk of spending your valuable time dealing with performance problems and employee relations issues, rather than performing your own day-to-day job. Even then, all the time and effort you may spend trying to smooth out a less-than-adequate employee’s work may come to no avail.

With all the constraints posed by the government’s laws, rules, regulations, and procedures, neither hiring top-notch government employees nor removing consistently poor performers is an easy task. But you will need to be able to do both in order to succeed.

The Complete Guide to Hiring and Firing Government Employees provides you with a complete roadmap for recruiting and retaining highly qualified applicants in a logical, integrated, and systematic fashion. The book offers a series of philosophies, strategies, and recruitment tactics, based on a deep understanding of the government’s HRM systems. You’ll be able to customize an approach to fit your own specific needs and become familiar with the entire hiring process, ranging from the time before vacancies even exist, to the moment you begin your recruiting, through rating and ranking candidates, and up to the final selection and its aftermath.

You’ll learn concrete strategies for counseling and working with employees who need improvement, providing progressive discipline when necessary. The book then goes on to demonstrate how—in a worst-case scenario—you may go about firing an employee in a fair, logical, and defensible manner. Author Stewart Liff reveals valuable tips on how to document your actions, write charges, put together an evidence file, decide whether and when to settle a case, and if not, how to prevail before a third party.

Filled with commonsense tips and well-informed, hard-won guidance, this essential guide demystifies all the twists and turns you may come across in your journey to build a first-class government workforce—and prevents you from having to deal with more than your share of poor employees down the road.

STEWART LIFF began his career with the federal government in 1974. He is a winner of the President’s Council on Management Improvement Award and the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Service. His books include Managing Government Employees and Managing Your Government Career. He lives in Saugus, California.

Learn more about him at www.StewartLiff.com.

Government bureaucracy can often make hiring great employees a cumbersome, slow-moving process. But with the right advice from a seasoned mentor who’s been there, seen it all, and managed to assemble high-performing, productive groups of people, you’ll be able to surround yourself with great work teams on a consistent basis throughout your career.

By the same token, during the course of your career as a government manager, chances are you will find that some of your employees are simply not working out. They may be hold-overs from the past who have never been good employees and have never been dealt with; they may be good employees whose performance has suffered due to personal problems or other reasons; or they may be recent hires who turned out to be poor selections despite your best efforts. Like it or not, it’s your responsibility to document and deal with those who don’t make the cut, as well as bring on board the best talent available in the first place.

Based on author Stewart Liff’s extensive experience as a government human resources management expert, as well as his many years as a government line manager and senior executive, The Complete Guide to Hiring and Firing Government Employees shows you how to cut through the red tape and:

• take an anticipatory approach to recruiting

• decide who to target and where and how to advertise for open positions

• screen and interview candidates

• counsel a poor-performing employee

• use progressive discipline

• document a case

• write a charge

• develop internal political support

• prepare for and win a third party hearing

• and continuously maintain an entire department of exceptional performers.

Filled with smart, no-nonsense strategies you can adapt in any hiring and firing situation, this book is a powerful resource that will enable you to maintain an efficient, productive work team at all times.

Praise for Managing Government Employees by Stewart Liff

“[Liff’s] 32-year career, which includes service at both the management and executive levels in the Department of Defense, General Service Administration, Federal Energy Administration, and Veterans Health Administration, make Managing Government Employees an extraordinarily credible endeavor. …a ‘must-read’ for those contemplating entering management…. his comments and insights are useful to all managers, particularly first-line managers, everywhere.” — Graziadio Business Report

“Stewart Liff provides many great tactics, case studies and stories that debunk common perceptions that government managers have of the government’s personnel system…. This book should be required reading for all supervisors in government.” — GovLeaders.org