OPM brings in experts to help jazz up job announcements

The Office of Personnel Management is bringing in two private sector experts to help spruce up federal job vacancy announcements, which OPM officials say are hard to read and prevent the government from attracting new hires.

Deciphering a federal job vacancy announcement can be painful for federal employees and for private sector workers who may be unfamiliar with federal lingo. Terms like "KSA," "SF-50," "pay band" and "grade-in-service" can make it especially hard to figure out what an announcement means.

To tackle the problem, OPM has brought in two consultants, Dave Russo, CEO of Empliant, an Internet-based human resource management software company and former head of human resources at the SAS Institute, a N.C.- based software company; and, Renee Lerche, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former senior human resource official at Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Russo and Lerche are volunteering to help agencies write better announcements by explaining how to present information in a format that provides critical information, but also makes the federal government look attractive as an employer, said Dick Whitford, OPM's acting associate director for employment.

"We all know our vacancy announcements are less scintillating than the latest Harry Potter books," Whitford said. "We have gotten lots of feedback on announcements over the years; they are very long, they can be negative and they are not helping us put our best foot forward."

Kathryn Troutman, president of The Resume Place, a Baltimore, Md.-based resume service, said federal vacancy announcements use threatening language that turns applicants off. "They are negative, unnecessarily harsh and demonstrate a huge personnel power play with threats of dismissal, termination, reassignments, removal, separation and other terminology," she said.

The new initiative is aimed at getting managers and human resource officials to think about how to describe the benefits of working for the federal government, Whitford said.

"It's a push to help these people see the value of the jobs that they are advertising, and to try to reflect that in the vacancy they are trying to produce."

OPM wants writers to do more than write vacancy announcements based on job descriptions that they read. Instead, they should go and see what people are doing to gauge the value of the work and be better able to describe it in a way that might attract other people. "It really is a great way to get reconnected with the mission of an agency, and it shifts the focus for an HR office to what an agency exists to do," Whitford said.

OPM also wants to tackle wordiness in job vacancy announcements, Whitford said.

"We did a survey recently and people read announcements that were currently available in the system and told us at the very end that they had no idea what job the government was trying to fill," he said. "Federal employees like them long, but length did not equate to a real understanding of the job."

Sprucing up federal job vacancy announcements is just one facet of a plan by OPM Director Kay Coles James to attract more people to government service. In an April 25 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, James said her deputy, Dan Blair, was in charge of revamping the federal hiring process.

"OPM is committed to making the application for federal jobs a positive experience that reinforces one's interest to serve the nation," James said.