OPM to propose more flexible hiring rules

The Office of Personnel Management plans to introduce a pair of reforms designed to give federal agencies more hiring flexibility, a senior OPM official said Tuesday.

During a meeting of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council in Washington, Ronald Sanders, OPM's associate director for strategic human resources policy, laid out a proposed overhaul of hiring rules applying to student interns and people with disabilities. The revisions are in an "early stage," according to OPM Director Kay Coles James.

Under the revisions, opportunities for students to gain experience as part of the Student Career Experience Program would be widened. Currently, students who intern for a federal agency as part of the program may be noncompetitively appointed to a federal job after they finish their schooling and log 640 hours of federal work experience. The new rule would allow students to accrue up to 320 hours of service while working for an agency on behalf of a sanctioned nongovernmental program or while serving in the military.

OPM looked into changing the rule after receiving feedback from a parade of organizations that funnel interns into agencies, Sanders said. OPM officials said they would maintain strict guidelines to make sure that work completed under the new rules "is truly comparable" to work done within agencies under the current system, he said.

OPM also will propose allowing agencies to waive up to 320 hours of an intern's work requirement if that student has an exemplary academic record and receives stellar work reviews.

Sanders said the Student Career Experience Program needs to be kept up to date as a means of attracting college students to the government. It is "a very effective way of bringing young folks into the federal service," he said.

Several labor representatives expressed concern about the new guidelines. Jacque Simon, a representative of the American Federation of Government Employees, said she feared the move could be used to block current federal workers from gaining merit-based promotions. Howard Schwimmer of the National Treasury Employees Administration told the Chief Human Capital Officers Council that OPM should work just as hard on retention efforts as on recruiting new employees.

OPM officials said the revised hiring rules would not negatively affect existing employees. James said also that she believes it is a top priority to retain talented federal workers.

The proposal for revising the hiring process for disabled workers was prompted by frustration in dealing with seemingly straightforward cases, James said. Currently, the Veterans Affairs Department or a recognized rehabilitation agency must certify that job seekers are legitimately disabled and are able to do a particular job. But in some cases, James said a person's disability is obvious. Suppose, she said, a blind applicant with an impressive resume applies for a federal job. "It doesn't take the VA to tell us that he has a severe physical disability … If that person were to walk in today, we would have to say sorry, go see the VA," James said. "So we are asking a person who can't see to go get a piece of paper that says they can't see."

OPM will propose to let agencies determine disability in some cases. That idea met with general approval from personnel officers at the meeting. Several had their own stories of job seekers with clear disabilities-such as blindness or amputations-who were required to obtain official certification.

Sanders asked for the CHCO council to comment on the proposals before they are published in the Federal Register and opened to public comment.