The Foreign Service Journal, May 2016

32 may 2016 | the foreign Service journal getting the clearance revalidated. An REA posting enables retirees to serve at their convenience within a Foreign Service environment. These experienced personnel are also well-equipped to guide and mentor current Foreign Service members, including locally employed staff at overseas posts. For all these reasons, a good REA assignment delivers both short-term achievement and positive long-term impact on the Foreign Service as an institution. It’s Not What You Know… While annuitant work is often a win-win proposition, the program is primarily designed to meet temporary, intermittent Foreign Service personnel gaps; and this is where FS retirees sometimes run into roadblocks. In the State Department, each bureau manages its own roster of retirees through an REA coordinator. However, placement on a register does not mean an assignment will ever be offered. Moreover, retirees can only be on one bureau’s register at a time. For retirees already on a bureau’s registry, this mechanism generally works smoothly—as long as funding is available when staffing needs arise. This is especially true for candidates who are willing to take assignments at hardship and danger-pay posts, or have a skill set or language ability in high demand. Overseas, short-term needs often arise in positions that affect a mission’s overall operations and have to be filled by capable people. Office management specialists, General Services officers and other management-coned specialties are in particularly high demand. In addition, because staffing needs tend to surface unexpect- edly or with little advance notice, bureaus are more comfort- able with their own people and prefer to manage the process in-house. As a result, the bureaus have differing reputations for REA hiring. The Bureau for Consular Affairs, for example, report- edly has an effective, well-run program to fill numerous overseas vacancies and a strong roster of former consular-coned officers. Retirees not on a bureau registry frequently express frustra- tion with the current system. They cite a lack of transparency in the identification and selection process, the apparently arbitrary nature of placement on a bureau register, and the lack of any information about possible REA opportunities. A Good Idea, but Needs Work In an attempt to obviate these issues, State’s Human Resources Service Center maintains a centralized REA registry. Any State or FCS retiree, even if already listed on a bureau’s register, can sign up with the Service Center. This can be done by telephone in a few minutes. Names on the HRSC register are available to all bureaus. However, since bureaus already maintain their own REA teams, they will look for candidates from their own register first. Even when an appropriate candidate for REA assignment is not avail- able from within, bureaus may reach out to each other before going to the HRSC register. After nearly three years since its establishment, HRSC’s central registry is still neither electronically accessible nor Inter- net searchable. Nor does it contain a curriculum vitae (CV) or employee profile database. HR does not appear to be encourag- ing bureau coordinators to consider retirees listed there, and there have been few examples of matchmaking success. To be fair, the REA program is not intended to replicate the Foreign Service bidding process. It is not designed to eliminate selection bias or provide a level playing field for all—much less to offer all interested retirees part-time employment. The system's primary constituents are State Department bureaus and posts, and it serves them well. Still, there is plenty of room for improvement. Creating a more robust central registry, one that makes retiree CVs easily accessible to bureau coordinators, would be a good place to start. At a minimum, the central registry should feature a search- able, keyword-driven résumé or profile system of the type com- mon to the HR divisions of corporations, multilateral institutions and nongovernmental organizations everywhere. Lawrence Cohen, at right, chats with Iraqis at Mam Halil’s chai shop in Erbil Bazaar during his WAE assignment to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region in 2013. COURTESYOFLAWRENCECOHEN