Hire Power

ederal hiring is like an ancient rite of passage, replete with secret code words, time-honored rituals and governing bodies that derive their power and mystique from the study, development and mastery of the hiring process's intricacies. If you don't know the proper use of a two-grade interval standard, or what a delegated examining unit is, or how to apply time-in-grade restrictions, then you're not in the inner circle. A job applicant who fails to learn some of the proper rituals will find his resume exiled to the rejection file. A manager who favors speed over precise compliance should expect to incur the wrath of the personnel process guardians.

"The merit system is not designed to be fast, expedient and easy," explains Christopher Mays, program director for the Logistics Management Institute's Human Resource Management Group in McLean, Va. Mays hears a lot of fiery complaints about the plodding federal hiring process. "When the smoke settles, the HR practitioner is left with all sorts of rules and regulations to deal with."

To get a sense of life in the inner circle of federal hiring, browse through the Office of Personnel Management's classification case files. Classification is how federal HR specialists define an employee's duties and salary. Sometimes employees will challenge how they are classified. Take, for example, the case of a worker who had been classified as a hydrologist at the GS-12 salary level. The employee appealed that classification to OPM, saying he should be graded as an environmental scientist at the GS-13 level and paid several thousand dollars more per year.

"As at the GS-12 grade level, the appellant extensively modified standard procedures or combinations of standard procedures to perform his work," OPM explained in turning down the appeal. "This fell short of GS-13 grade level work involving wide-ranging program issues for which technical problem definitions, methods and/or data are highly incomplete, controversial or uncertain." Welcome to the life of a federal HR specialist. But don't get too comfy.

Federal HR specialists have to deal with such issues every day. But the way in which they have traditionally done so is being challenged. Four technology vendors-HotJobs (owner of Resumix), Avue, QuickHire and OPM's own USAStaffing -are selling their employment services with a pitch that calls into doubt some long-standing assumptions about federal hiring. Some of the vendors' arguments, if widely accepted, could spell the death of the hiring system as we know it. Their first contention: There's no reason, no rule, no regulation, no law, that should prevent an agency from hiring people in a matter of days rather than a matter of months. The vendors' next heresy: Many standard hiring practices, despite what the HR masters tell you, are completely unnecessary. A third bombshell: Managers could hire new employees completely on their own, without the help of HR specialists, and be in full compliance with the law. And perhaps their scariest pitch: HR offices are already falling behind trying to manually process job applications, and if they don't automate effectively, they're going to bury themselves.

Speed Versus Fairness

Start whining about how it takes three months to hire someone in the federal government, and Richard Whitford, head of OPM's Employment Service, will put a packet in front of you that reads like a weight-loss brochure. The Environmental Protection Agency, which once hired environmental specialists in 84 days, now hires them in just 30. Another agency's hiring process went from 107 days to 7.4 days. It used to take weeks for the Defense Commissary Agency to hire meat cutters and cashiers. Now the agency can get a name to a hiring manager in 48 hours. The miracle formula? OPM's USAStaffing automated hiring package and some consulting work by OPM employment experts.

USAStaffing and the other technology vendors dismiss the assumption that speed and fairness are mutually exclusive. Fairness and objectivity have long been the driving forces behind government hiring. The government's job classification system, in place since 1949, is designed to make sure that people are hired because they have the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities to fulfill job duties, not because they know the boss. The system establishes uniform job descriptions for every position at every level of responsibility, so that a supervisor at the Social Security Administration and a supervisor at the Internal Revenue Service overseeing similarly sized call center operations are paid the same amount.

Suppose you're a manager who wants to create and fill a new position. First, you'll have to get an HR specialist-perhaps one of the government's 650 position classifiers-to categorize the job in one of 434 occupational series, from actuaries to zoologists, in 22 occupational groupings. You tell the classifier what duties will be expected of the new employee. The classifier then checks the rules and determines what grade level, and therefore salary, the position should carry. Negotiations between managers and classifiers about job descriptions and grade levels have been known to take up to five months.

Once that step has been completed, you can publicly announce the opening and accept applications. After you, along with HR officials, rate and rank applicants, you can interview finalists and select an employee. But the rating and ranking process can take months as well. Federal personnel officials comb through every application, assigning scores to knowledge, skills and abilities statements, resumes and standard application forms. Depending on how many applications are received, the HR specialist whittles down the applicant pool, carefully documenting his or her actions. Then you must assemble a panel of managers and subject matter experts, giving them time to review the top applicants' credentials. Factor in travel time, since some panel members will have to hop on a plane to get to the panel meeting. Then provide time for the group to hash out a decision. By convening a panel, you've added a layer of objectivity and expertise-and delay.

Remember, fairness and objectivity are the goals of the process, and selection of the most qualified candidate is the goal of fairness and objectivity. But by the time you've met the goals of fairness and objectivity, your most qualified candidates may have already found other jobs.

One word explains why the technology vendors say their products allow agencies to get the best candidates fairly and objectively before they get hired somewhere else: Commands. Commands govern the federal hiring process. They're all written down-standards, job duties and responsibilities, veterans preference factors and many more. As it happens, commands also govern how software works. Teach the commands of federal hiring to a computer program, and it will be able to recall any one of them in a matter of seconds. Make the computer program understand how the commands relate to one another, and it will be able to apply them in a sophisticated way. Give the program a pretty point-and-click face with plain language instructions, and a person could use the program to create a position and hire someone without having to learn all of the commands.

To varying degrees, technology vendors say they have taught their software the rules of federal hiring. For example, Avue and QuickHire have created classification programs that a manager can use to create a position description. "Classification is the hub around which all the personnel issues revolve," says Bryan Hochstein, vice president of business development at Alexandria, Va.-based QuickHire. The programs automatically create matching knowledge, skills and abilities requirements and determine the appropriate grade based on the level of responsibility described in the position description. All four vendors have created online programs that let prospects submit their applications on the Web. The applications go into a database for easy retrieval. Avue, QuickHire and USAStaffing have created programs that automatically rate and rank applicants. They use questionnaires that weed out people who are missing key skills or experience. The programs then generate a list of the most qualified applicants based on the answers to the questions. While HR specialists spot-check the lists to verify the results, the system eliminates the need for them to go through every application to assign scores. It also eliminates the need for rating and ranking panels.

Robert Hosenfeld, personnel chief at the U.S. Geological Survey, estimates that the QuickHire system, which automated the application and rating and ranking processes, cut hiring time (from vacancy opening to selection) from 60 days to four days, not counting a required 14-day job announcement period. The survey's HR offices saved 9,000 business days of application-processing this year, allowing HR specialists to devote their time to other work. "The government has fallen in love with the 100-to-1 personnel-to-HR ratio," Hosenfeld says. "Most organizations struggle at that level. We are operating efficiently at that level." The Geological Survey is now working out the bugs in QuickHire's new classification program, which Hosenfeld says will make the hiring process even faster. "If you took a look at classification from a business perspective, you would find that 90 percent of classification actions are routine," Hosenfeld says. "You would never be able to completely replace the classifiers, but you can use the computer to do 90 percent of the work you expect them to do now."

The vendors, meanwhile, take their argument about speed and fairness a step further: Computers, they say, can actually be fairer and more objective than people can be. Imagine, for example, an agency with 100 field offices across the country, each with its own HR staff. Even with written standards, decisions won't be consistent. Someone could submit an application to each office and get 100 different scores on his or her qualifications. An automated system, in contrast, would rate all applicants in a standard way. Automated systems also create an easily accessible audit trail, which managers and HR offices can use to defend their decisions. The Library of Congress, for example, is installing Avue's system to help standardize hiring practices in response to a recent settlement of a class-action discrimination suit.

Question Authority

Eliminating rating and ranking panels and allowing managers to classify most positions are radical ideas to many personnel officers, but they're just the beginning of the process of transforming the hiring system, as far as the technology vendors are concerned.

Linda Rix and James Miller, co-CEOs of Avue, based in Tacoma, Wash., have hired a slate of former HR experts from OPM, the Agriculture Department, the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies to help show federal HR directors that they don't have to hire people the way they've always hired them. At one agency that Avue works with, the company's experts showed personnel officials that three steps of their hiring process had no basis in regulation or law and were completely unnecessary. The agency eliminated the practices.

Both Avue and OPM officials have focused on vacancy announcements. A peek at the announcements on OPM's USAJobs service (www.usajobs.opm.gov), shows why. One announcement, for the position of human resources director at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia, doesn't even get to the job description before warning that "This is a career-conditional (permanent) appointment" and "Applicants applying under this announcement WILL NOT be considered under Veterans Readjustment Authority (VRA), Reinstatement, Transfer, Schedule A, or other direct hiring authorities." Compare that greeting to a recent online announcement for an HR manager at Transamerica Corp.: "Take charge of our HR initiatives! We want you to leverage your skills and experience in a strategic role." There is no law requiring that federal vacancy announcements be riddled with jargon. It's just a time-honored ritual that the technology vendors want to destroy.

Avue's CEOs further argue that since the new automated tools allow managers to control the hiring process, personnel officials need to find a new role. "If I'm an HR person and the manager suddenly has the tools in front of them, I would say, 'What does that do to me?'" says Miller. "The answer is, you find a place where you have expertise to offer rather than where you control scarce information." That means HR specialists become advisers and strategic planners instead of processors.

Some HR professionals, Avue has found, feel threatened by the technology and don't want to stop doing what they've been doing for so long. But many welcome the technology and would rather help managers with complicated personnel issues than spend their days collating applications. Conversely, some managers like the status quo and don't want direct responsibility for hiring actions, while others would prefer to take on the hiring process themselves.

Automate or Collapse

The Clinton administration's reinventing government initiative targeted central administrative positions, such as human resources jobs, for downsizing in the 1990s. In the past six years, the number of position classifiers has dropped from 1,399 to 650. In 1995, there were 10,605 clerical workers in HR offices. Today there are 7,455. The overall size of the federal workforce has declined 8 percent during that period, while HR has dropped by 11 percent. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean fewer people are doing HR work. Agencies have used contract workers to fill some of the gaps, and it's likely that clever classifiers have simply reclassified some HR clerical employees in nonpersonnel occupational series. The "301" job series, general administrative support, has grown from 47,510 people in 1995 to 55,328 today.

But even with such sleights of classification, nearly every HR worker in government today will tell you they have to do more with less than they did six years ago, that there is hardly a moment to breathe amid all the processing work that must be done.

Part of the problem is that automated systems, despite what the vendors say, tend to create a lot of extra work during installation and almost never work the way HR officials expect they will. Agencies wind up spending far more than they had expected to make fixes, devise work-arounds and install add-ons to make the systems work within the confines of federal regulations. While many firms advertise their products as off-the-shelf systems, "we're beginning to believe there is no such thing in the government," says the Logistics Management Institute's Mays.

Automated systems have failed to live up to expectations for a number of reasons, Mays says. For starters, HR people don't usually know much about technology. So they install systems without taking full advantage of their capabilities, or they spell out their needs in terms that techies fail to grasp. Some HR offices also try to install systems without first considering their strategic vision. Mike Jurkowski and Pat Brown, consultants with Herndon, Va.-based Workforce Technologies, put it this way: "The most important exercise that any agency can impose on themselves as they begin to go down the automation path is to map out what their current process is. From that, they can decide what they like and want to keep, and what they don't like and want to scrap." Workforce Technologies works with agencies to automate various parts of the hiring process. Most of the company's work has incorporated Resumix, HotJobs' hiring software package, as the applicant-tracking component. Resumix itself is not tailored to the federal hiring process. "Spending appropriate amounts of time in the right places, such as developing requirements and building a prototype, will save a lot of time when you're ready to move into production," Brown adds.

Mays has seen HR offices revolt against the automated systems they tried to implement, because the systems were not set up in ways that would actually reduce workloads. "Computers just do what they're told," he says. Federal officials say another problem is that the systems sometimes simply don't work the way agencies need them to work. The Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service scrapped Resumix after testing it on a few positions. Workforce Technologies' Brown explains that because Resumix was not designed specifically for federal hiring, it must be used as part of a larger package of software. "While Resumix standing alone does not address federal hiring requirements, there is no product out there that does," Brown says.

The Forest Service tested Avue's automated hiring package to hire about 150 firefighting supervisors in 2001. Agency managers complained that the system didn't properly rank some applicants and that they experienced delays several times when they needed the system to work quickly. "Avue is the most manually operated automated system I've been through," says Dan Dufrene, a Forest Service union representative based in California who helped oversee the Avue test.

Avue officials say the main problem in the hiring effort for the Forest Service was its decision to let candidates submit paper applications. That decision forced Forest Service HR specialists to spend many hours entering applications into the Avue system, causing delays. Mike Dondero, fire management officer for the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada, acknowledges that testing a new system in the midst of an effort to hire people very quickly is not the ideal approach. Kathleen Burgers, a Forest Service HR specialist at Washington headquarters agrees, adding that the agency is committed to making Avue work. "We just want to do the professional job of testing it and examining agency policy and access issues that we wish we'd had time to do [in 2001]," she says.

In addition to testing out Avue, the Forest Service used an automated system developed by agency employees to hire thousands of wildland firefighters in about eight months. The Bureau of Land Management also went on a hiring spree, using QuickHire for hundreds of its hires. Officials at both agencies say they couldn't have hired all of the firefighters they needed in eight months without automated systems.

Avue's Rix says other agencies will learn the same lesson in the coming years, as baby boomers head into retirement and HR offices need to bring in new employees. Since most retirements will come at higher grades, they may create three or four vacancies each, as lower-level employees move up to fill in the gaps.

Rix and Miller, using data from OPM and other agencies, have generated five-year gap analyses showing how many staffing actions will be required versus how many actions HR offices can handle. For one agency, Avue found that HR will need to process about 9,000 staffing actions per year from 2001 to 2005, but will only be able to handle between 2,000 and 3,000 per year. If the agency doesn't automate and streamline its hiring process, then the HR office will be increasingly buried in a backlog of hiring requests. Analyses for other agencies reveal similar gaps. Technology, then, may not be a panacea, but at the very least it's a necessary evil.

Believers and Skeptics

If the technology vendors are right, then agencies could become almost as fast as the private sector at hiring people, without any changes in law. At least as far as hiring goes, the federal personnel system would not have to be "blown up" to make it work, as some frustrated reformers have suggested.

If the vendors are wrong, then agencies may wind up spending a lot of money on systems that don't actually make hiring better or faster. The rituals that the techies want to destroy could simply be replaced with new rituals worthy of destruction. Already, applicants for federal jobs are picking up tips on how to game the automated systems, or at least adjust their applications so that the systems favor them.

"There are technophobes and technophiles," says Diane Disney, former civilian personnel policy chief at the Defense Department, where HR offices are using Resumix with varying degrees of success. "Most of us live in a world somewhere in between."

Both the true believers and the skeptics should take note of the experience of Moises O'Neill, the Food and Drug Administration's microbiology branch director in Bothell, Wash. The FDA is using QuickHire, which uses a questionnaire to rate and rank candidates. In 2001, O'Neill found that the system came up with a list of strong candidates for a job in his branch. He liked being able to review applicants on the Internet, admired the speed at which the system generated a list of top applicants, and appreciated the ability to tailor the questionnaire. "I was able to direct candidates to answer the questions I really needed answered," he says. "The people knew exactly what we needed." But alas, he couldn't hire any of the candidates.

In the time-honored tradition of new presidential administrations, a tradition that will not be destroyed by any technology, there was a hiring freeze.