Federal managers are worried that the government's hiring processes prevent the best candidates from being selected for job openings, a new report says.
Managers and human resources specialists across government say federal hiring has improved in speed and quality since the Office of Personnel Management delegated hiring authority to agencies in 1996, according to a report released Thursday by the Merit Systems Protection Board. At the same time, they think more changes could be made to ensure that the most qualified applicants get picked.
"Managers and supervisors, despite their good opinion of delegated examining, think that it has not solved all of the problems that make it difficult to hire competent candidates from outside the government," MSPB said in "The Role of Delegated Examining Units: Hiring New Employees in a Decentralized Civil Service."
The federal government hired 60,000 new full-time employees in fiscal 1998. In the past, hiring was handled centrally by the Office of Personnel Management or its predecessor, the Civil Service Commission. In the 1980s and early 1990s, OPM began delegating some hiring authority to agencies; in 1996, OPM handed almost all hiring responsibility over to individual agencies.
Agencies like having the authority to develop lists of qualified candidates and then choose the best applicants from those lists. But some agencies' hiring offices are feeling swamped. Human resources officials told MSPB that they don't have the resources to make sure the best candidates are selected.
HR officials and managers also feel hamstrung by the Rule of Three, a law that requires agencies to rank applicants on a numerical scale and then pick one of the top three candidates for the job. One problem, MSPB found, is that managers and HR officials don't think the procedures they use to rank applicants are reliable. Another problem is that the rule prevents managers from interviewing more than three qualified people, particularly in cases where a large number of candidates are almost equally qualified. One of the tie-breaking procedures agencies use to winnow a list down to three is random selection based on Social Security numbers.
"In our view, it would benefit both selecting officials and job seekers if agencies were free to decide whether more than three qualified applicants should be considered," MSPB said.
MSPB identified four primary ways to improve federal hiring.
- Congress should give OPM money to develop standardized tests for more federal occupations. Standardized tests improve the objectivity of hiring choices, MSPB said.
- Agencies' hiring offices should have more staff and money.
- Managers should be allowed to consider more than three candidates.
- Agencies should provide managers with more training on hiring rules and processes.
Agencies may also turn increasingly to technology to help process and rate job applications period. But, officials told MSPB that automated systems and artificial intelligence programs need more development before hiring offices can rely on them to make the right decisions about candidates.