The Department of Justice signed a contract in late December to pay $544,000 for an “enhanced profile” on the social networking site “Linked In” to “increase its branding” and improve its ability to recruit prosecutors. The recipient of the contract is Carahsoft Technology Corporation, and you can view the contract details here.
Here is DOJ’s justification for avoiding the open-bidding process and what it gets for its money. Among the benefits: full access to every Linked-In profile.
This will include an enhanced company profile within a large-scale, professional networking platform, and targeted online job advertising to attract highly qualified Criminal Division employees and intern applicants as well as use the already existing Criminal Division presence,” the document said.
I find this particularly inappropriate when sequester cuts are still in effect for federal defenders and indigent defense counsel. Federal defenders have been hit with lay-offs and furloughs, while indigent defense counsel had their payment vouchers delayed for four weeks this fall and their already reduced rates cut $15.00 an hour. The pay cuts will last at least until September, 2014.
Here is Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2013 end of year State of the Judiciary report. The judiciary cuts from sequester amounted to $350 million.
I’m still working on the comment box features, and mostly putting this here to have a sample form since comments are closed on the old posts.
Feel free to comment on either the topic or the comment form.
(The button to post your comment is behind the preview screen which I’m going to try and fix)
Looks like it’s on the way to becoming another great site… after my dulled senses finally twigged where “behind the preview screen” was, that is !
IDK if normal, (I think not), but on my system at least there are two previews… one in a white box the other on the grey background in between boxes, i.e. three texts writing at the same time !
There were two preview screens because I forgot to
deactivate a plugin for comment previews after I installed
wp-markdown which has both the toolbar that is showing now and a preview screen. You should only see one now.
It appears as if you decided to leave the ratings system intact after all.
In any case, this is impressive.
to make the rating system just 4 and 5, so that we can eliminate “downrating” issues, and making it optional. That way, people can see which comments are highly rated. So this isn’t quite final.
Does DOJ have any need to actively recruit?
Cost per hire via Linkedin might be interesting.