OPM targets four 'unacceptable' hiring practices

Federal agencies need to end some hiring practices that prevent a large number of qualified applicants from seeking government jobs, the head of the Office of Personnel Management said in a recent memorandum to human resource directors across government.

OPM Director Kay Coles James told agencies to stop writing job description qualifications in ways that prevent outside candidates from applying, to stop forcing people to apply for jobs via the Internet, to start including a contact name and phone number on every vacancy announcement and to create better methods to assess job candidates.

"Even without regulatory or statutory changes, there are positive steps agencies can and should take today to improve recruitment, make employment offices more customer-focused, attract the highest caliber candidates to public service, and assess them effectively," James said in her March 25 memorandum.

James said more and more federal job descriptions are written so narrowly that only applicants who already work for an agency would qualify. "Requiring that applicants must have prior agency or government experience may eliminate from consideration many talented individuals who are in fact highly qualified for the position," James said.

A recent report by the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, said that only 13 percent of the 60,000 people hired for mid-career level jobs in fiscal 2000 came from the private sector. "We don't have the right balance of intake" from inside and outside government, said John Palguta, vice president for policy and research at the partnership.

Allowing people to apply for jobs offline and setting up contact points for applicants may be more problematic, observers said. While most agencies still allow candidates to submit applications on the Internet or by paper, more and more agencies have started requiring Internet applications. Federal personnel shops were downsized drastically over the last decade, even while they faced a rising number of personnel actions to process, so many human resources directors have turned to automated, online applications.

In order to accept paper applications and set up phone lines where applicants can get help, agency personnel offices need people. "I would hope that OPM would lobby agency managers and Congress to make sure resources are available" for agencies to meet that requirement, Palguta said.

Bryan Hochstein, vice president for development at QuickHire, an Alexandria, Va.-based software firm, said Internet-based hiring actually improves public access to federal job opportunities, noting that many of his federal clients saw the number of applicants per job jump after moving to online systems.

QuickHire and another vendor that offers hiring tools contended that James' memo was really a marketing vehicle for the agency's employment service division. James ends the memo by suggesting that human resources directors contact the employment service's chief, Richard Whitford, for assistance. OPM's employment service competes with the companies for federal business.

"I was just appalled by that," said Linda Rix, co-CEO of Avue Technologies, a firm based in Tacoma, Wash. "In the zone of pure naked marketing, using a public policy document is a pretty interesting move."

Hochstein said: "This memo was most likely charged to the taxpayer even though it's a sales pitch for OPM's employment services. Imagine the attention a memo like this gets because of the author."

An OPM spokesman said the memo reaffirms existing policy and is not a marketing document. "I honestly don't know where they're coming from," said spokesman Michael Orenstein.

Rix said OPM should streamline the so-called delegated examining unit process, which permits agencies to conduct hiring efforts themselves, rather than through OPM. Such a change would improve federal recruitment by letting agencies use contractors that provide the type of hiring tools used in the private sector.