Wanted: Better, Faster Hiring

In 1999, Michael Smith decided to go home to California. With six years of government management under his belt, first as a presidential management intern at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and later as a research officer at the Veterans Affairs Department in Florida and budget analyst at the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, Smith had steadily risen through the ranks. He expected that finding another federal job would be a breeze. He was wrong.

Smith applied in his areas of expertise. Often, his name would appear on the list of qualified candidates, but he rarely was offered an interview. The explanation almost always was the same-he lacked experience at the agency to which he was applying. "Essentially, they can exclude everyone who didn't work for that agency before," Smith says. Frustrated, he started to do some research. What he found was dismaying: Some agencies almost never hire management candidates from outside their own ranks.

Ultimately, after more than 100 applications in three years, Smith, 47, agreed to accept a one-grade reduction and a business manager job with the Naval Medical Center San Diego. Compared with private sector applicants, Smith had it easy. According to government statistics analyzed by the Partnership for Public Service, only 10 percent of mid- and high-level government jobs-those ranked GS-12 and above-were filled by private sector candidates in 2002. In 2003, that number rose to 15 percent. But at the same time, the partnership found overall, fewer government job vacancy announcements were open to outside applicants.

Smith's saga, and the statistics cited by the partnership, exasperate Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James, who's made the improvement of the federal hiring process one of her top priorities this year.

"One of the things I do at night is surf the Net and USAJobs [the federal government's employment Web site] and I see how many jobs that I can find that say, 'Must have prior government experience,' 'Must have worked in this agency,' 'Must have done this job before,' for crying out loud," she says.

Managers' resistance to hiring outsiders isn't the only thing standing in the way of luring the best and the brightest. According to James and her colleagues at OPM, federal agencies are resistant to new practices and ideas. Their recruiting efforts are, for the most part, moribund. They often are discourteous to applicants who are anxious to know where they stand; agencies compound the problems by being slow to set up interviews and make job offers.

That said, James believes agencies and managers are starting to get the message. "We are not going to get there as quickly as I would like, as some members of Congress would like, but we are going to get there," she says.

She envisions a federal job market in which agencies sell themselves to applicants using the best private sector techniques, including branding, marketing and advertising. Computers will enable departments to stay in contact with candidates and to keep tabs on where applicants stand. Managers will use structured interviewing techniques to assess candidates, preparing interview questions in advance, asking the same questions of each applicant, and gauging their answers on the same scale. Managers will then be held accountable for moving the process along. When agencies want to seal the deal, they will use a variety of enticements: signing and relocation bonuses, telework, student loan repayment, flexible schedules and higher starting salaries.

The changes can't come soon enough. OPM estimates that 32 percent of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire within the next five years, and that number balloons to 52 percent when early retirements are considered. To make matters worse, government downsizing in the 1990s made it difficult for agencies to groom the next generation of leaders.

"We are used to being in an environment where we simply post our jobs, and if you post it, they will come," says James. "We have been out of the recruiting business for a very long time." As she knows, the best candidates often don't respond to want ads on a Web site or in a newspaper. They are what are known as "passive" job seekers. These driven, successful workers are well taken care of by their employers. But if the right opportunity were brought to their attention-accompanied by the right enticements-they might jump at it.

Private sector recruiters constantly are on the lookout for these candidates. An entire industry-executive search-exists to help companies lure them. But because of competitive hiring requirements, the government has a harder task. Agencies can't recruit specific individuals. "We may have to go out and recruit a category of individuals and let them compete for a particular job," James says.

OPM has tried to show the way. Over the past year, the agency has held 11 recruitment fairs in cities from Las Cruces, N.M., to New York, with more than 40 agencies participating. Plenty of people are interested in federal work. Respondents to an OPM survey at one of the fairs said that a federal career appealed to them more than one in the private sector by 6-to-1. Eighty-five percent said "helping people and making a difference" made federal work appealing. And nearly two-thirds said they were more interested in government work today than a few years ago.

Connecting the right people with the right jobs is the challenge. The job fairs proved a useful tool. But their focus was too broad to help agencies fill many positions, for which required skills are specialized. James says agencies are going to have to reach out to universities and professional associations to find candidates. Agencies accustomed to waiting for applicants to come to them are going to have to "brand" themselves, and market the opportunities they offer.

It's a lesson that agencies are learning. The General Services Administration has adopted the slogan "You can do that here" and slapped it on marketing materials, advertising and a promotional CD. The idea, says agency Chief Human Capital Officer Gail Lovelace, is to plant in the job seeker's mind the notion that "you don't have to come to GSA to do just one thing."

"We are competing with some sexy agencies" that already have strong brands, Lovelace says. So GSA has to tout its strengths. "We are a huge real estate firm. We employ financial management people, human capital managers, architects, engineers."

In 2002, the Labor Department sent letters to business schools to launch an MBA fellows program, recalls Assistant Secretary Patrick Pizzella. Recently, a third class of fellows was chosen. Seven hundred people applied for 16 positions. The program is small, but as a result, each of the fellows rotates among myriad Labor programs. That's a strong selling point for recent business school graduates still unsure about where they want to go. And, Pizzella adds, Labor "managers are falling head over heels for these MBAs, and telling us they need that person permanently."

Beverly Babers, the top human resources official at the IRS, sends recruiters to college campuses to attract young accountants. Those interested are asked to go to the IRS Web site and register. "We've been able to get that initial investment" of time, she says. By collecting potential applicants' contact information, "We can call them up and tell them about a job opening. We are able to make the candidate feel more valued." Then, when someone applies, IRS can track each step of the process using a system developed by QuickHire of Alexandria, Va. How long does it take the human re-sources office to forward a list of top candidates to the hiring manager? How long does it take the hiring manager to conduct interviews? How many days were there between the closing of the announcement and the day an offer was made?

Automated hiring systems are becoming increasingly common at federal agencies. The key providers are QuickHire; Tacoma, Wash.-based Avue Technologies Corp.; Resumix, a subsidiary of Yahoo!; and OPM itself, which has developed the USA Staffing system. Some agencies, such as the Commerce Department and Federal Aviation Administration, have developed their own automated systems. Each aims to help agencies regularize the federal hiring process and ensure that applicants know where they stand. The systems track how long each step takes, thereby encouraging human resources departments and hiring managers to review résumés quickly and set up interviews.

A Government Accountability Office survey of chief human capital officers found that nearly 100 percent of agencies are taking steps to automate hiring processes. That alone has helped to speed things up, in some cases dramatically. Vincent Taylor, the chief human capital officer at the Transportation Department, says his human resources office processes applications and hands a list of candidates to hiring managers in nine days thanks to automation. It took as long as 30 days before.

In 2002, Congress created chief human capital officer positions at all major agencies to boost the profile of human resources issues and to provide a leader to challenge prevailing agency mores. The officers meet regularly to share best practices and war stories. Among the best practices identified: eliminate un-necessary paperwork, such as excessive layers of approval in making a hiring decision; use plain language in job announcements, and recruit veterans.

James can sympathize with agencies' struggles. Early in her tenure, when OPM was recruiting for some high-level positions, she recalls, "People were insisting that [the job announcement] had to have technical [qualifications], and [the candidates] had to have done this work before. It required us to sit in the room together and me to say 20 times, 'Why?' " The answer James said she received was simply: "Because."

In the end, James convinced her managers that outside candidates might have worthy qualifications. Among those hired were an Army colonel on his way back from Iraq and an IBM executive who'd overseen the company's human resources in India. But "The cultural shift . . . required absolute steely determination to fight the program managers," she says. She believes the agency will benefit from the outside hires. "Bringing in people from the outside who don't have a clue about the federal culture is wonderful because they mix it up. They ask interesting questions. They force people to think in ways they haven't thought before."

Agency leaders also have had to win over skeptical unions and professional associations. For example, the Senior Executives Association, which represents top agency civil servants, fought hard to block the Internal Revenue Service, and the Defense Department, from gaining authority to hire private sector experts at salary levels higher than those in the civil service. Association President Carol Bonosaro argues that the higher salary levels are unfair, devaluing federal service in the eyes of those considering careers in government management. Meanwhile, the unions worry that merit principles will fall by the wayside if managers' hiring prerogatives aren't checked by strict rules.

James hopes her aggressive tack will convince agencies to follow her lead. In some cases, it's working. In others, it has sparked resentment. Earlier this year, for example, agencies complained to GAO that OPM had not done enough to assist them in implementing new hiring flexibilities granted by Congress in 2002-primarily category rating, which allows hiring managers to review a greater number of candidates, and direct-hire authority, which allows agencies to waive competitive processes in order to hire candidates in hard-to-fill occupations.

Most revealing was a 2003 letter from Charles Abell, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, to GAO. He wrote that OPM was to blame for the hiring problems in the first place, and had not done enough to untangle the labyrinth of rules and regulations it had created. He argued that OPM had done little to engage agencies in putting new flexibilities in place or in helping to develop assessment tools to gauge the best-qualified applicants.

Later that year, the Defense Department convinced Congress to free it from most civil service rules and to allow the Pentagon to develop its own personnel system outside the General Schedule. Defense is the second Cabinet department to win such freedom, after Homeland Security.

At a July hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service, three top-level agency officials asked congressional overseers to have patience with them as they revamp hiring procedures. Claudia Cross, the Energy Department's chief human capital officer, said agencies are using the new authorities on an as-needed basis. While Energy "may not be in the market for all the flexi-bilities established and advocated by OPM, we recognize the potential for future benefit to our agency that the various flexibilities represent," she said.

Energy has used direct-hire authority to bring on information security specialists "within two weeks" and also is considering whether to seek direct-hire authority for acquisition specialists and nuclear engineers and scientists, Cross said.

Ed Sontag, Health and Human Services Department assistant secretary for administration and management, along with Defense Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness David Chu, said they had not yet used category rating, but planned to implement it. Sontag said HHS has used direct-hire authority to fill nursing and pharmacy positions. Chu said Defense recently had won permission to hire directly to fill inspector general's office auditing slots.

Even so, OPM has indicated that it is disappointed with agencies' progress, and is urging them to do more. OPM Deputy Director Dan Blair told the civil service subcommittee that "job seekers turned out in droves at OPM recruitment fairs, but fewer than 30 direct hires were made." He lambasted agencies for requiring applicants to file résumés on agency Web sites rather than relying on OPM's one-stop site for all federal positions, USAJobs. It sends "the unmistakable signal that the agency values its own administrative convenience over applicant friendliness by a wide margin," he said.

But vendors, such as Avue and Resumix, argue that agencies are better off maintaining their own systems. An employment Web site plays an integral part in automating the hiring process, says Scott Roberts, Resumix's director of business management. "The problem is having two different systems. If they don't work well together, they cannot do certain things," he says.

OPM wants agencies to use the resources available to them now before doling out additional flexibilities. It "begs the question: What else do you need if what you have, you're not using?" says OPM Associate Director Marta Brito Perez.

Agencies, predictably, see it differently. At a recent meeting of Transportation Department officials, human resources officers brainstormed about how they could improve hiring with a pay-banding system. As Transportation's human capital officer, Taylor is well aware that both Defense and DHS, under the personnel flexibilities granted to them by Congress, now are authorized to set up pay-banding systems. They can offer higher starting salaries to new employees, and they have salary room to compete if a top employee gets a job offer from another agency or from the private sector. As a result, Taylor worries that Defense and DHS may have an advantage over Transportation in competing for the same candidates.

James has urged other agencies to wait and see how Defense and Homeland Security make out before attempting to make similar changes. But Taylor isn't sure that's in his department's best interest. "All of us are going to benefit from what DHS and DoD are doing," Taylor says. "At the same time, some of us who are a little more eager [are] biting at the bit, [and we] are . . . not [going to] wait for them to say, 'OK, this works.' "