Certain challenges– such as national emergencies, large-scale attrition, new mission requirements and the need for new talent– require federal agencies to rapidly grow their workforce. In such instances, standard federal hiring practices are often insufficient to meet the immediate demands for additional talent. As a result, agencies may seek strategies to undertake surge hiring, the process of quickly and significantly increasing the size of the workforce.

With support from the Democracy Fund, the Partnership for Public identified the most effective and widely applicable strategies for surge hiring. Based on the examination of previous hiring surges, the Partnership identified best practices, challenges and lessons learned, distilling these findings into three basic strategies that agencies can use without additional authority from Congress.