Hiring Pessimism

In keeping with an emerging pattern of taking executive action on issues where Congress has bills pending, the Office of Management and Budget announced that, in conjunction with the Office of Personnel Management, the administration is requiring agencies to make some significant changes to their hiring processes by December 15. Our commenters are divided on whether or not the requirements will work, but one thing they seem to agree on is this: agency heads need to truly understand how arcane the language surrounding hiring is. Jeremiah writes:

If I might suggest one way to bring home the dimensions of the problem to the new management team on board in each agency: OMB should require each agency head to review personally a random sample of his/her agency's current USAJOBS vacancy announcement postings. I guarantee this would be eye-opening and do more to focus attention on this issue than all the End-to-End initiatives and the well-meaning but toothless OPM Pledge to Applicants (a 2003 initiative of former OPM Director Kay Coles James). If senior managers can see with their own eyes what atrocities pass for recruiting literature in their own agencies, this in itself may galvanize long-needed action. Something certainly has to do so.

The Commodore writes "The real issue is weak postion descriptions and marginal HR reviewers that allow too many candidates to qualify frustrating the selecting official."

And bdr says "Until you hold the agencies heads accountable nothing will change."

Today, I'll be following up on the question, not of if agency heads need to be held accountable, but how the administration intends to do that.