ABSTRACT
Personnel administration, or personnel management, is the planning and policymaking for, and managing of, employees, and is limited to 'internal' processes, such as compensation. The evolution of public HR (human resources) management in the United States can be roughly divided into several phases. Depending upon the phase in question, America's governments have been dominated, in successive turns, by its aristocrats, corrupt officials, ardent reformers, 'scientific' managers, dynamic administrators, and timid clerks. 'Government by the good' led, in 1907, to President Theodore Roosevelt's Civil Service Rule I, which prohibited almost seven out of ten federal workers from participating in political campaigns and barred the solicitation of political contributions from federal employees. The civil service has been the historic heart of public administration. State and local governments are abandoning printed media in recruiting and are going full-blast electronic. Hiring well is one of the public sector's more vexing issues. Position classification is a core tenet of the Civil Service System.
