Military Spouses Still Frustrated with Applying for Federal Jobs, Says Report

Many participants noted that their resumes, which often reflect disruptions due to their military-connectedness, failed to pass the initial screening process. Image: tadamichi/Shutterstock.com

Despite initiatives spanning several decades to encourage federal agencies to hire spouses of military personnel, many of those job-seekers still find the federal hiring process frustrating and discouraging, says a study from the White House’s National Science and Technology Council that included listening sessions with them.

“There is a perception that despite federal policies, the screening processes and attitudes of hiring managers are barriers to hiring military-connected applicants. Participants described feeling as though hiring managers didn’t understand their situations or passed them over when they heard they were military-connected,” says the report under a Biden administration executive order calling for an assessment of how the government could better use data for hiring military spouses, survivors and caregivers.

“This sentiment was even stronger among applicants further along in their careers and among active-duty spouses and caregivers. Many participants noted that their resumes, which often reflect disruptions due to their military-connectedness, failed to pass the initial screening process for jobs for which they appeared to be qualified,” it said.

As have prior reports, the study pointed to the frequent moves of military personnel as hampering careers of their spouses, with unemployment among them of about 20 percent over the last decade. “Underemployment further exacerbates issues among this population in the workforce, with the majority of military spouses facing some form of underemployment and about one in three working part-time,” it says.

Findings included that: “information about programs and policies relevant to military-connected federal jobseekers is difficult to understand”; “some participants expressed that they were so discouraged with the processes and systems set up to help them, that they gave up on applying for federal jobs altogether”; and “because military-connected jobseekers are often in geographic areas with many veterans, they reported that they are often unsuccessfully competing with veterans for the same positions.”

Employment data about military survivors and caregivers are less watched but are available, said the report whose main recommendation “is to increase data access across federal agencies to enable identification of military and veteran spouses, caregivers, and survivors in federal datasets.”

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