The State Department Foreign Service Employee Selection Processes: Addressing Biases and Focusing on Merit to Select Our Best Diplomats

Patrick T. Slowinski, Ed.D., Ph.D.
April 16, 2025

The State Department Foreign Service Employee Selection Processes: Addressing Biases and Focusing on Merit to Select Our Best Diplomats

Introduction

As President Trump enters month four of his second term, nonstop information continues to flood news outlets and social media involving federal employees and the Administration’s efforts through the D.O.G.E to combat fraud, waste, and abusive, while increasing efficiency, including at the State Department and the Foreign Service. At the same time, federal agencies have been encouraged to review their hiring practices and ensure the federal government hires the best people based on merit.

According to Foreign Service personnel numbers, the Foreign Service, including all agencies, is approximately 14,399 (8,488 Foreign Service Officers and 5,911 Foreign Service Specialists) as of September 30, 2024. Given financial and other benefits associated with representing one’s nation as a diplomat overseas, including a coveted security clearance, the Foreign Service should do more to ensure it recruits and selects our subsequent cadres of diplomats based on merit, assessing only what skills, knowledge, abilities, and experience these candidates can demonstrate that will make the Foreign Service a stronger and more effective foreign policy implementation tool.

As a retired Senior Foreign Service officer (FSO) and industrial and organizational psychologist, I have developed job assessments and revised selection processes for public and private sector employees. A common mantra by hiring managers in both public and private organizations I often heard was phrase: “We recruit for diversity (often racial, ethnic, and gender-related diversity) and hire and promote based on merit.” However, there are problems with that statement. First, spending resources on specific population groups to recruit them marginalizes other candidates, who arguably also bring dynamic attributes to the Foreign Service, beyond physical or identity characteristics. Second, recruitment focused on specific populations and fellowships designed to provide highly desired preferences and hiring benefits to only those from specific populations or groups do not translate into hiring or promoting based on merit. I note that in any employee recruitment and selection process, best practices and standards must accompany validated instruments, proper and bias-reducing methodologies, appropriate focus and pilot groups, and standardized procedures for accurately measuring the criteria and performance candidates demonstrate on a job assessment. The principle of fairness should always undergird best practices and standards in employee recruitment and selection.

The FSOT/FSOA and the FSSA: Acceptable and Valid Paths to the Foreign Service

The Foreign Service Officers Test (FSOT) and the Foreign Service Officers Assessment (FSOA) remain, to many, the gold standard in employee selection for Foreign Service Generalists for decades, with the Department ensuring that both assessments have high reliability and validity. A similar process exists for choosing Foreign Service Specialists (FSSs). The Foreign Service Specialist Assessment (FSSA) does not include the requirement to take the FSOT, but FSS candidates have their initial applications reviewed by a Qualifications Evaluation Panel (QEP). FSSA candidates also sit for an interview with a Board of Examiners Assessor and a Subject Matter Expert (SME), a current FS Specialist working in the respective specialist skill code. FSSs do not have an interactive group exercise as FSO candidates do.

Regardless of statistical validation, which is important, the Department should take steps to reduce potential biases in selecting Foreign Service (FS) recruiters and assessors while providing training and oversight for them to address subconscious and overt biases they can bring to the recruitment and assessment processes. A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) 2021 study concluded that the State Department was one of the three federal agencies with the greatest number of Democrats. The authors also found that there were more Democrats in senior positions. Our future diplomat candidates, regardless of their political ideologies and other identifiers, deserve to be confident that, as U.S. citizens, they have the same chance as any other candidate to become diplomats.

This article’s primary purpose is to introduce potential hiring biases with their respective contexts vis-à-vis the Foreign Service. Throughout the recruitment and employee selection processes, recruiters, qualifications evaluation panels (for FSSs), and assessors are susceptible to biases that can in turn affect the efficacy of U.S. diplomacy if those biases influence hiring decisions. This article also provides potential mitigating solutions to lessening the adverse effects of longstanding employee recruitment challenges that have over time devalued merit as the chief employee selection criterion for a career in the Foreign Service.

Biases: Threats to Merit-Based Employee Selection

Achieving high content validity on employee selection instruments, for example, does not automatically address subconscious or overt biases that recruiters, assessors, and program administrators bring to the employee selection processes. Some such biases include affinity bias toward people who look, act, and think similarly. Examples include a recruiter/assessor and a candidate share membership in a particular group/party, or they attended the same school, or they identify similarly with the recruiter or assessor regarding race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or language(s) spoken.

Attribute bias occurs when a candidate’s attributes unfairly influence a recruiter or assessor’s judgment toward the candidate (positive or negative). Conformity bias exists when a candidate’s job assessment answers reflect an expected/acceptable answer versus what the candidate genuinely believes to conform to perceived norms, with the goal of ultimately passing the job assessment. Of course, identity biases (physical identifiers) exist, and it often takes additional training to illustrate clearly how one might be susceptible to biases that favor identity over merit in their employee selection decision-making.

Ideological and Cultural Biases

Before listing suggestions to improve FS employee recruitment and selection processes based on merit, an intellectually honest exercise would first comprise the discussion of ideological, political, and identity biases that exist among federal employees. Political party affiliation (regarding party membership and donations) remains one clear indicator of the prevalence of a liberal ideological dominance among State Department employees (including FSOs and FSSs).

A Resume Builder survey after the 2024 U.S. presidential election concluded that a third of managers allow political affiliations to influence their hiring decisions. The authors note that asking about or trying to play political party affinity detective with candidates opens legal risks and taints the employee selection process, yet the practice endures in many organizations. Furthermore, during the 2019-2020 election cycle, 93% of all political donations by U.S. Department of State employees were to Democrat party candidates or PACs.

One can also argue that there is indeed a cultural bias among FSOs/FSSs that favor like-minded candidates with similar life and educational experiences and a preference for selecting “diverse” candidates as defined by identity-affirming checklists. When ideologically based programs for providing preferential treatment in hiring decisions sprout up in the government (such as DEI based on CRT), they can be discriminatory, and provide a fertile field for biases to flourish over time. If left unchecked, they create new marginalized groups and discontent among employees.

Geographic Biases

It is no secret that the District of Columbia, Maryland, and (northern) Virginia region (or DMV for short) is arguably a liberal hub, led almost exclusively by Democrats at the local level. Given the myriad number of federal employees who live in the DMV (507,330), it is predictable that a culture would arise after several decades that reflects the majority political ideology of the region—liberal/democrat. Efforts to recruit FS candidates outside the DMV include a virtual (online) FSOA, so that candidates living outside the DMV (including overseas candidates) are not out of pocket for their trip to D.C. It is true that different regions of the country often cluster ideologically and culturally, and this is not a Democrat-specific phenomenon (this occurs in more conservative red states as well). However, the DMV should be viewed differently, given federal employees’ influence (directly or indirectly) on the lives of everyday Americans across the nation.

Unlike members of Congress, federal employees, including FSOs, are not elected, yet they, in many ways, represent U.S. citizens at home and abroad. If one political ideology dominates the region where federal workers reside in large numbers, it is fair for conservatives, independents, and members of other parties to express concerns about potential conflicting agendas between federal employees and a conservative administration. Curiously, no Democrat administration (that I have lived through) ever seemed worried or voiced concerns about the potential undermining actions of federal employees when they took office. This example could support the premise that most federal employees, including FSOs, associate more with democrat/liberal ideologies/policies than conservative ones.

Higher Educational Institution Biases

Along with geographic bias, educational bias needs attention. For decades, liberal universities have served as proverbial “feeder schools” for future FSOs and FSSs, and close relationships have been built and nurtured over time between the State Department/Foreign Service and those select universities (Georgetown University, George Washington University, American University, Johns Hopkins university, Harvard University, Columbia, and the University of California (UC) system. Georgetown University famously has its School of Foreign Service, offering both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Foreign Service.

A simple AI search for the best schools for the Foreign Service first directs viewers Georgetown University, other schools in the DMV, Ivy Leagues schools, and finally UC schools. The social psychology proximity principle lends credence to the notion that candidates located in the DMV and on the East Coast have potential advantages in competing for FS positions by being in closer proximity to State Department headquarters to lobby for opportunities, especially ones supported by their University in coordination with the State Department (e.g., in-person lectures, meet and greets with U.S diplomats, and other networking opportunities).

Surely, the Department could build working relationships with other higher educational institutions, outside the usual feeder schools, with different robust educational missions to make sure our diplomats truly represent America’s robust geographic dynamism and not just select pockets of the country. Forging enduring relationships with many new and overlooked universities across the country is long overdue and worth the Department’s time and resources to develop a truly dynamic diplomatic corps.

The Identity Bias: Re-Operationalizing the Term Diversity

One need not have earned a Ph.D. in social cognitive psychology at an Albert Bandura level to comprehend the effects one’s environment (including time spent at a university with a pronounced ideology) has on personality, belief systems, and behavior. The Diversity, Equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement, a byproduct of critical race theory (CRT) has in many ways distorted the concept of diversity to primarily an identity litmus test, while devaluing the principle of merit for hiring and promotion.

Moreover, diversity has become a loaded, potentially pejorative term that does not wholly reflect the dynamic attributes, skills, and experiences we need in our diplomatic corps. I propose the Department instead look far and wide for dynamic candidates who are genuinely fair and objective, represent the whole of the United States, are adept critical thinkers, are highly familiar with the United States and the world, are driven, have eclectic work experience, dedicated, possess communicative prowess, hone sharp linguistic skills, have track records of public service, and who are committed to serving their country patriotically no matter which party holds the presidency. The FSOT and FSOA can assess FSOs and FSSs against existing Foreign Service dimensions. But recruiting more dynamic candidates and ensuring that subconscious and overt biases are reduced (at each stage of the employee recruitment and evaluation process) are key for an enduring paradigm shift in terms of employee selection.

Increase Recruitment Across the Country for Dynamic Candidates

One of the comments I heard from Republican Members of Congress and staffers, regarding the Foreign Service recruitment and job assessment process, was that efforts to have all 50 states better represented in the Foreign Service have, to date, been sorely inadequate. The State Department’s Diplomat in Residence (DIR) program leads FSO/FSS recruitment efforts and sends experienced Foreign Service officers to cover as much of the United States as possible with only a team of 15-16 DIRs. Although the DIRs are experienced diplomats, and competition for those positions is high, there is only so much 15 of them can do to cover the entire country of over 340 million to find our most dynamic future diplomats.

One Method for Hiring FSOs: The FSOT/FSOA

Alternative means for becoming an FSO, which waive the requirement for successfully passing the FSOT, have included fellowships (e.g., Rangle and Pickering), specialist-to-generalist and civil service-to-generalist conversion programs, and the lateral entry pilot program (LEPP).

The FSOT/FSOA assessments reliably select FSOs and has done so for decades. There is no legitimate reason to offer opportunities for any candidates to bypass the FSOT, given it can be taken multiple times without penalty. If merit is indeed the primary consideration for hiring FSOs/FSSs, and reliable and validated assessment processes exist, other potential entry programs that waive a passing FSOT score create unequal requirements for the same coveted job. As a result, it is worth regularly reviewing any proposed alternate programs for entering the Foreign Service including competitive fellowships to ensure those programs select candidates based on merit.

Conclusion

The recent change of focus in federal employee selection processes to merit from other considerations will not go unchallenged. Within the Foreign Service, and among others looking into the diplomatic world from the outside, strong sentiments exist regarding constructs such as DEI and meritocracy. Nevertheless, the best recruitment and hiring processes for FSOs/FSSs must always comprise objective, fair, and impartial processes to determine who will represent the United States and her citizens as U.S. diplomats.