Defense proposes hiring, promotion flexibilities for NSPS

The Defense Department on Wednesday proposed expanding staffing flexibilities available to managers under its new personnel system.

The draft regulations, published by Defense and the Office of Personnel Management in the Federal Register, call for modifications to recruitment, hiring and promotion procedures under the National Security Personnel System. The new rules "in conjunction with the NSPS compensation and classification flexibilities, provide DoD managers with a greater range of options to adapt their recruitment and hiring strategies to meet changing mission and organizational needs, including consideration of the nature and duration of work," the notice stated.

Additional tools for making promotion decisions would include assessment boards, alternate certification procedures and selection processes that rely on employee performance ratings. Managers would have to complete an analysis of the job to identify requisite skills. They also would be required to notify potential candidates, but they would not have to advertise the opening using the standard vacancy announcement procedures, according to the notice.

The regulations would revise Defense's recruiting and competitive examining process by allowing the agency to limit consideration to job applicants in the local commuting area. To preserve merit principles, the agency would provide public notice for all vacancies and accept applications from all sources. But managers then would have the option of only looking at local residents, should a sufficient number apply.

"Permitting limited consideration under competitive examining to qualified applicants in a local commuting area instead of considering potentially hundreds or thousands of applications from across the country facilitates mission accomplishment by streamlining the hiring process and significantly reducing the amount of time a position remains vacant," the notice stated.

The rules also would enable Defense to exercise direct-hire authority and expand its use of temporary appointments to help address surges in workload and extended absences due to military or civilian deployments. The temporary spots could be converted to permanent status later.

Matt Biggs, legislative director for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, criticized the regulations on Thursday, noting they "drastically limit the pool of job applicants, base promotions on the already flawed NSPS performance review process and inexplicably fail to publish the results of promotions."

"This particular proposed regulation aims to bury the merit system and replace it with a hiring and promotion system that will be ripe for patronage, not to mention lacking transparency," he said. "It seems to be a very radical change, and an unwarranted change."

The department has added more than 181,500 nonbargaining unit employees to the new personnel system since 2006 and plans to add 20,000 more by the end of 2008, bringing it close to converting all 205,000 nonbargaining unit employees. In September, officials announced Defense would not place its 270,000 bargaining unit employees under NSPS.

Written comments on the proposal are due by Jan. 2, 2009, and can be submitted through the public comment and submission form at Regulations.gov.