IRS wants millennials to think it's cool to work there

Needed by the U.S. government: millennial tax collectors.

More than half the employees at the IRS are over 50.

Four years from now, a blink of an eye for a human-resources department looking for skilled employees, about 40 percent of the IRS workforce will be eligible to retire.

Meanwhile, the share of agency employees under 30 has fallen to less than 3 percent. Half of those under-30s work only part time.

A meager 650 men and women in its 87,000-person workforce are under 25.

"Essentially, the IRS is facing its own version of the baby bust," IRS commissioner John Koskinen, 75, said in a recent speech.

But what kind of a pitch can a recruiter for the IRS make to millennials? Come mentor your parents' friends? Work with outdated technology? Join a storied bureaucracy?

It seems like an obvious mismatch. Still, millennials may mesh well with the IRS work culture in ways that are not obvious. The antitax, IRS-bashing advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform released a statement after Koskinen's speech that drily suggested young people could fit in well at the dusty government behemoth.

"While millennials are often derided for being antisocial and glued to their technology, this aversion to real-life communications makes them an ideal fit with the IRS," 22-year-old AFTR intern Alexander Hendrie wrote.

"Already, the agency does not answer phone calls at local offices and does not allow elderly or disabled taxpayers to leave phone messages. Taxpayers have also found it difficult and time-consuming to get through to a human being this filing season," Hendrie added.

Hendrie went on to mock the "groundbreaking modern ideas" at the IRS that should appeal to his peers, saying that "one exciting new idea the IRS is trying - on a limited basis - allows taxpayers to set up appointments, instead of waiting in line for hours and hours outside their local office."

Said Hendrie: "The only millennial that would like to work at the IRS would do it ironically, so that they could use a typewriter and Snapchat about it every day."

Millennials do want to work for an organization that benefits society and to see how their work is tied to the bigger picture, said Dan Schwabel, founder of workplacetrends.com. The IRS is doing its best to market itself as such a place.

"There's an agency looking for new talent to enable growth for our entire nation," reads the recruiting page for students and recent grads. "You'll be part of a tax collection process that funds our nation's most vital programs - from securing the nation and protecting social services, to maintaining parklands and forests, building libraries, opening museums, enhancing schools and much, much more."

Young people also care a lot about having a good work-life balance, and government jobs have a reputation for being 9 to 5, according to experts.

That said, the job's sex appeal is nonexistent. Said Lindsey Pollack, a millennial workplace expert and author of Becoming The Boss: New Rules For The Next Generation of Leaders Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders: "Maybe they need to get a millennial actor to portray an IRS" agent in a movie or TV show.