Fixing the broken federal hiring process is critical to improving government performance

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work on hiring reform from inside the government. The goal was simple: hire candidates based on their skills and make the process easier for human resources personnel, hiring managers and applicants. 

While the goal was straightforward, fixing what has become a convoluted and broken system was another story altogether. 

That’s why my organization, the Partnership for Public Service, has prioritized improving the federal hiring and recruitment process in its latest reform agenda, which provides agencies, Congress and the incoming administration with five main recommendations to build a more responsive government that regains the public’s trust. 

At a time when some believe better government performance means making it easier to fire career civil servants, the exact opposite is true: Building a more responsive and effective government means making it easier to hire qualified people, providing reinforcements to a workforce that continues to deliver for the public despite major systemic challenges across the federal enterprise.

On federal talent issues, these challenges are significant.   

Over time, the government’s hiring process has become exceedingly slow, complex, confusing and imprecise in its ability to identify and hire the best candidates.

Because of this, numerous workarounds have been created—namely a growing number of exceptions or special provisions for specific agencies, jobs or situations meant to bypass some of the arcane processes. 

This creates confusion for hiring managers and HR specialists, causing agencies to continue to move away from the competitive hiring authority. 

Candidates for federal jobs are also confused by the process. They are faced with jargon-filled job announcements and a self-assessment questionnaire that forces them to mark expert on everything even when they’re not. Then, they enter what feels like a black hole where they receive few updates on what the process entails or where they stand. 

In the hiring pilots I worked on, we prioritized simplifying the competitive hiring process through pooled hiring actions (apply once and be considered by many agencies), simpler job announcements and assessments that give candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their skills. 

More work is needed around pooled hiring and assessments, but it provided some lessons learned that can be applied now and are aligned with the hiring memo recently released by the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget.

One negative impact of the difficult and opaque hiring process is that the government is losing out on the entry-level talent it needs to lay the groundwork for the future. 

Nearly 68% of Americans ages 18 to 34 have never considered applying for a job in the federal government, while just 7.5% of the full-time federal workforce is younger than 30 compared with 20% in the broader labor market.

While there is no single answer or administrative fix to streamline and modernize the federal hiring process, our reform agenda offers three constructive actions that the incoming administration should take to jump-start positive change. These include:

Make hiring a top priority for agencies and their leaders: Leaders should prioritize fixing the broken hiring process and ensure that HR offices have the resources they need to implement procedural improvements. Agencies should evaluate current hiring processes to discover where they do not work for applicants, hiring managers and HR specialists.

Prioritize recruiting early-career talent: Agency leaders, HR offices and managers should view student interns and early-career talent as a key to building a strong talent pipeline. Congress also should create a new hiring mechanism that permits high-performing interns from qualified third-party internship providers, the external organizations that place students in federal internships, to be easily converted to full-time government employees, a practice that is currently prohibited.

Implement skills-first hiring: To get the right people into the right roles, minimum job qualifications should be based on the skills needed for the job—not just the attainment of a four-year degree. Agencies should evaluate applicants using skills assessments, including those developed by experts in given subject areas.

Fixing federal hiring won't happen overnight, but many of these steps can and should be taken now to start modernizing the process and help improve the experience for applicants, managers and HR specialists alike.

Jenny Mattingley is the vice president for government affairs at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, an organization dedicated to building a better government and a stronger democracy.