Recruiting Street‐Level Bureaucrats Through Co‐Design: The Effects of Incorporating Citizen Insights Into Job Advertisements
2026-07-23
Street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) directly affect citizens, making them central to public service delivery. Service success therefore hinges on public sector organizations' ability to recruit competent SLBs. We argue that citizens' perspectives should inform SLB recruitment, especially for contact‐intensive, relational frontline roles. Yet public administration research has not integrated citizens' perspectives into SLB recruitment, despite a broader shift toward a service‐user orientation. We test whether job advertisements co‐designed with citizens increase job seekers' application likelihood. Using a mixed‐method design, including a preregistered experiment, we find that co‐designed job advertisements (a) identify SLB competencies often overlooked in conventional recruitment (Study 1), (b) increase application likelihood regardless of applicants' awareness of citizen involvement (Study 2A), and (c) attract candidates whose values align with service‐user‐oriented organizations by improving person‐job fit (Study 2B). We advance public sector recruitment and SLB research by introducing co‐design as an innovative and effective approach to service‐user‐oriented SLB recruitment.