The process of recruitment and selection for government employees has become a challenge for both the merit and non-merit hiring process. Salaries and benefit packages for public sector employees are not keeping pace with better compensated opportunities in other sectors due to ongoing financial difficulties at the local, state and federal government levels. The traditional government recruiting incentives of generous defined benefit pensions and highly subsidized high quality retiree health care packages have been refocused to less generous defined contribution plans and significant reductions in retiree health care subsidies and benefits. As a result of these trends, we are faced with the reality that we will not be able to attract high quality applicants until we develop new incentives to encourage the choice of public service as a career. It should also be noted that some states (examples are Maryland and Virginia) currently have a “hybrid” employment model where most senior management positions reporting to politically appointed agency directors are hired as non-merit protected employees. While proponents of these hybrid models cite the ability to bypass civil service hiring rules and offer higher salaries in order to broaden recruitment to the private sector for senior management positions, in practice the majority of the positions are filled by career merit employees. In both Maryland and Virginia, there were instances where newly elected governors decided to terminate large numbers of these senior managers under their “at will” employment status despite the fact that it was never the intension when these systems were established for these positions to be subject to automatic replacement based on political election cycles.