Online job fair nets 20,000 applicants for 230 jobs

More than 20,000 people submitted applications for 230 federal technology jobs during an online job fair last week that could serve as a model for government hiring efforts.

The Office of Personnel Management reported the figures as the job fair, which ran from April 22 to April 26, wrapped up. No more applications will be accepted for the information technology specialist jobs at the more than 20 federal agencies that participated in the online recruitment effort.

OPM will now begin to rate and rank the applicants, who were required to submit resumes and fill out 156-question self-assessments of their knowledge, skills and abilities. The applicants are vying for computer specialist positions throughout the country and around the world, with salaries ranging from $43,230 to $84,990 (GS-7 through GS-13 on the federal pay scale). About 100 of the jobs are with the State Department. Other jobs are with such agencies as the Agriculture Department, Railroad Retirement Board and OPM.

Officials hope to begin interviewing candidates and making job offers within a few weeks. Ira Hobbs, acting chief information officer at the Agriculture Department, said he hopes to get total hiring time down to 30 to 45 days, from the typical government timeframe of three to nine months.

Hobbs and OPM officials have said they will evaluate the job fair after the hiring process is complete to see what lessons can be learned. The job fair could serve as a model for quick hiring if it works. It could also demonstrate the advantages of interagency job fairs as federal agencies compete for many of the same people.

The fair could also demonstrate some pitfalls of the approach. At the beginning of last week, applicants overwhelmed the computers that were running the job fair, forcing OPM to add additional computers to handle the load. OPM and the federal CIO Council sponsored the event and used Chantilly, Va.-based Brainbench, an online assessment service, to administer the self-assessments.

Other online hiring efforts have netted similarly high numbers of applicants. The FBI, for example, received 15,000 online applications for 900 special agent positions after only a month of accepting applications via the Web earlier this year. Last year, the FBI received 15,000 online applications for translators within a month after FBI Director Robert Mueller issued a public appeal for freelance translators who know Arabic, Pashto, Farsi and other Middle Eastern and Asian languages.