A career federal employee, Berry knows whereof he speaks. Under Bill Clinton, he managed the secret service and functioned as CFO and COO of the 66,000-person-strong Department of the Interior. Under George W. Bush, he was director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and of the National Zoo.

The Bush administration signed an exclusive five-year contract with Monster.com, but that contract is up for competition next July. “We’re looking at all options,” Berry said, including possibly a mix of several strategies rather than outsourcing employee outreach to a single contractor, the way the previous administration did. Citizens who would like to be involved in the process can read (PDF) and comment on the OPM’s 2010 Strategic Plan as part of this administration’s more transparent approach.

To widen and lengthen the feedback loop, the government is considering tapping Google to launch a YouTube “world jam” (a Vivek Kundra term) that would allow anyone in the world, from any sector, to contribute ideas on how to improve the U.S. government’s employment policies. “We’re welcoming input from for-profit, nonprofit, other countries, academicians, labor unions,” Berry said. “Anybody who’s got an idea, we want to hear it.” Meanwhile, an October 28 Harvard conference offers academicians another opportunity to offer their ideas.

Berry also sat down with Facebook (focusing on recruiting) and Ideo (focusing on performance evaluation). “It was just great,” he said, “phenomenal people, outside-the-box thinking, creative approaches to how they manage people—and they’re wrestling with some of the same issues we’re wrestling with…what is the fairest way to appraise peoples’ performance, how do you hold employees accountable so that they’re doing a good job but you’re not micromanaging them to the point where they just throw their hands up and quit? That’s a tough thing…when I was at Google, they said they’d been trying a different approach, but frankly aren’t happy with it, so they’re going to throw it out and start over.”

As a result of those meetings, the government will likely create some sort of Facebook presence to attract young, tech-savvy applicants, and will also participate in an Ideo-coordinated consortium of 10 or so private high-tech companies working together to arrive at best-practice standards for appraising employees. But before the government can put those standards into place, it needs to focus on recruiting—and that means, in Obama’s words, making civil service “cool” again.

“Barack Obama is the first president since Kennedy who really gets this,” Berry said, “who understands the importance of the civil service—and that without it, this Constitution and this republic will not survive. We need the best and the brightest, and we won’t get it by denigrating them or saying they’re somehow second-class to the private sector.”

Inefficient federal employees from mailmen to members of Congress have been comedy staples seemingly forever. The wheels are turning slowly, but if Berry’s plan comes to fruition, the resulting infusion of youthful energy could pull the government out of the culture of the ’50s, silencing those critics.

Considering the job market these days, promising graduates could find the idea of working for the federal government quite “cool” indeed.