If the government wants to attract more high quality candidates for job openings, agencies need to make job announcements more appealing, the Merit Systems Protection Board says.
In this month's "Issues of Merit," a publication of MSPB's Office of Policy and Evaluation, the board says most federal job announcements posted to USAJOBS, the government's central job opening database, are "unattractive, uninviting and off-putting."
Agencies "don't present themselves or their vacancies in a manner that would entice potential applicants into public service, certainly not during a time when competition for top quality workers is as keen as it is today," the board says.
Most problematic, the board says, is that job announcements often make it difficult to figure out what a job is about and what an applicant must do to get the job. For example, applicants unfamiliar with government jargon would have difficulty understanding what officials mean when they say "this is a merit program and delegated examining joint announcement" or "positions may be filled on a career-conditional, term or temporary basis as needed."
"Hiring the best and brightest is a competition that the government won't win by being indifferent to the manner in which it communicates with prospective employees," MSPB warns.
NEXT STORY: People: At NIH, the doctor is out