OPM to launch revised job Web site in summer

By early summer, federal job seekers could find more enticing vacancy announcements on USAJOBS, the government's recruiting Web site, Office of Personnel Management officials said Friday.

OPM plans to launch a new, user-friendly version of the site in a few months, said Claire Gibbons, program manager of the agency's one-stop recruitment e-government initiative. Eventually, the revised version of USAJOBS will allow federal agencies to post job openings in a clear and concise format, she said.

Currently, the vacancy listings appear in what Gibbons referred to as a "government" font that is not modern looking or attractive. The entries are long and are usually one continuous block of text, she added.

In contrast, the new version of USAJOBS, will leave agency recruiters room to insert catchy logos and write concise descriptions of vacancies. Job seekers who are interested in the initial description will then be able to click on tabs to reach pages that describe duties, qualifications and pay levels in more detail. In addition, information that is cumbersome, but required by law, would be available to interested browsers by hyperlink, rather than in the text of the announcement.

The redesigned USAJOBS site will be one tool agencies can use to make job listings more appealing, an area long neglected according to a new report from the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Notices announcing public sector openings suffer from "repetitive statements," "unnecessary verbiage" and "negative, threatening, and legalistic language," MSPB's April 24 report concluded. The board's research is based on reviews of 2001 and 2002 postings on USAJOBS and a January-April 2002 survey of 300 federal human resources officers.

MSPB researchers rated only 2 percent of the postings reviewed as "good," while 45 percent were rated "acceptable" and the rest were judged "poor." Misspellings and grammatical mistakes were common, the report said. Bureaucratic jargon and acronyms also appeared frequently. For instance, postings contained terms like "career conditional appointment," a phrase describing job tenure, and acronyms such as PCS, meaning "permanent change of station."

Less than half of the human resources officers who responded to MSPB's survey thought their vacancy announcements effectively conveyed their agency's mission. In addition, announcements were not targeted toward the pool of candidates that would most likely apply for the job opening, the report said.

To attract qualified employees to replace the roughly 600,000 civil servants projected to retire by 2010, agencies need to simplify and clarify the vacancy announcements, MSPB concluded. They also need to make some broader changes to their personnel strategy, the report said. For instance, they should focus on developing a comprehensive recruiting strategy and should assess candidates based on demonstrated competencies, rather than looking only at previous work experience.

"There is no intrinsic reason why the problems we observed regarding vacancy announcements cannot be corrected," the report said. "That is, there are no insurmountable legal or regulatory barriers to interfere with creating better written, better organized, more appealing vacancy announcements."

Agencies are moving in the right direction on improving job postings, but many are still in the "mindset that they have legal requirements to comply with and have fallen into a routine of talking about job responsibilities in a dry manner," said John Palguta, vice president for policy and research at the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington advocacy group, and former director of policy and evaluation at the MSPB. "They should take a step back and look at postings from the applicant's point of view."

Rather than focus on pay and areas where they cannot compete with the private sector, agencies should emphasize the intangible qualities that make government service attractive to job seekers, including flexible work hours, the chance to influence policy and the family-friendly benefits available to many civil servants, Palguta added.

The MSPB report suggested that OPM "continue providing agencies with information on writing better job vacancy announcements, building on its recent efforts to modernize and improve federal vacancy announcements." Last May, OPM hired two private sector experts to help liven up job postings.

OPM worked closely with MSPB researchers and has already implemented many of the changes suggested in the report, according to John Crum, deputy director of policy and evaluation at MSPB. "Ultimately what's going to happen is that the agencies will be responsible," he said. "But OPM is giving them a better vehicle to do it. They're trying to deliver as much as possible in six to nine months."

In addition to revamping USAJOBS, OPM has sent memos to agency department heads with suggestions on sprucing up position postings, said Ellen Tunstall, deputy associate director for talent and capacity policy.

But the ultimate responsibility for improving vacancy announcements lies with the agencies themselves, she emphasized. "We can give [agencies] all the tools and guidance in the world, but the words in the vacancy announcements come from a person in the agency," she said. "They will only ever be as good as the quality that comes from that agency."