If you’ve cleared the suitability hurdle, you’ve done it. No, you’re not quite hired, but you’ve cleared all the hiring barriers, and now you get to do some more waiting. A job offer and invite to orientation can come at any time. It can come the day you’re added to The Register, or up to 18 months later. Failed to get a job offer in those 18 months? You’re removed from the list, and if you want to get hired, you have to start all over again.

The Register of Cleared Candidates is a list of every candidate that has a conditional offer of employment (again, given after you passed the Oral Assessment), who has cleared every previous step in the process, which would be the Medical/Security Clearance, and the Suitability Panel. You are put in a ranked ordered list of every other candidate in your specialty/cone, with your ranking based on your overall Oral Assessment score, plus any bonuses for knowing a foreign language or being a veteran. The timing of when you get added to The Register does not confer any known advantage or disadvantage. When they start to hire, which seems to occur quarterly and based on State Department need, they go down the list in rank order, and start making offers.

For example, I scored a 5.6 on my Medical Provider Oral Assessment and hypothetically, I just got added to The Register today. Tina, scored a 5.5, and has been on The Register for 3 months. Tom has been on The Register for a year, and he has a 6.0 Oral Assessment score. The Foreign Service a week later, decides they need to hire 2 more Medical Providers. They would then choose Tom, who has the highest score, and myself, who has the second highest score. Tina will remain on the Register for up to 15 more months, and if a couple of months later she is the lone person on The Register (or everyone else is below her), and they need another Medical Provider, she will get the call.

If called and given an offer, you can decline it a single time and remain on The Register, but if you decline again, you are removed completely. You can also defer/pause your timing for certain things like illness or pregnancy. Surprisingly, I have read quite a few stories of folks getting offers and then declining to be hired and removed from consideration. I get life happens, but I can’t imagine putting myself through this process and then deciding, nevermind.

Your likelihood of getting that email/phone call with a job offer really just depends on what specialty you are, if they are hiring, and what score you got on the Oral Assessment. For Generalists, conventional wisdom has usually meant a score of 5.5-5.6 or higher would confer an invite for all cones. There have been some variances based on hiring needs (or lack there of), where lower scores of 5.4 or 5.3 get invited, and there have been times where you needed a 5.7 or higher to get a call. Specialists are their own beast, and depending on your specialty, The Register for you might be very slim, and every time they make offers, they clear out the entire list of candidates. My impression from talking with my Diplomat in Residence and folks at MED, is that most of the medical professions in the Foreign Service get hired if they make it through the process (probably why medical specialties all get sign on bonuses, unlike just about every other hired group). Like everything in the Foreign Service though, there are a ton of variables, and it always depends.

Hiring seems to occur 4 times a year, with orientation classes (called SOAR or A-100), often happening in January, April, July, and September. There are some variances to this, and a lot of it is based on budget and needs of the service, but since I started religiously following hiring patterns for the last few years, this has been fairly typical, and they still are having classes during COVID. It seems most of the time you are given 2-3 months warning (some specialists seem to get more), but if people decline or change their mind, it’s not unheard of that people get invites just days before the start of orientation.

Many folks with borderline OA scores of 5.3 will often pursue a second candidacy (which is totally allowed), just to improve their chances, but you should consider competitiveness of your specialty/cone before doing this. Larger specialties and Generalists run a “Shadow Register”, which can be found digging through Reddit. This basically is a group of people that keep a list of candidates that share their scores, and notify the group if they get an offer. This allows them to keep track of hiring trends, and what scores are getting invites.

So there we have it. Hopefully if you have made it this far, you get that precious, precious job offer phone call (or email). This pretty much concludes my posts on the hiring process. I will continue to update my status, make posts about more specific things in the hiring process, and what happens next after you get an offer.

Thanks for reading and feel free to reach out and ask me any questions you might have in the specific posts, or through my email on the AMA page.

–Nick