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GAO Finds Much Amiss In the Hiring Process By Stephen Barr Washington Post
August 24, 2003
The federal hiring process is broken.
Nearly half of the personnel directors at the 24 largest federal agencies think it takes too long to hire quality employees.
Almost all agree that federal recruitment gets snarled by poorly written job announcements, narrow job classification standards, inadequate assessments of job applicants and time-consuming hiring panels.
Those are the central themes in a recently released study by the General Accounting Office.
Although the GAO study notes that efforts are underway at the Office of Personnel Management and in some other federal agencies to improve hiring procedures, the GAO makes it clear that the government faces a lot of hard work if it intends to become more competitive with the private sector in the hunt for top-notch talent.
Old hands in the government will say that none of this is new, and they are right. Previous studies by the National Academy of Public Administration, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Brookings Institution, the Partnership for Public Service, OPM and others made the same points.
But the stakes are getting higher, and numerous agencies may risk being unable to deliver services and programs in future years unless they strengthen their hiring procedures, the GAO warns.
The government's "annual number of new hires could easily increase to more than 150,000 as agencies take actions to address the security needs arising from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to fill vacancies created by the large number of employees expected to retire over the next few years," GAO said.
Nearly all the personnel directors interviewed by the GAO described the hiring process as cumbersome and too lengthy. One Cabinet department official, who was not identified, told the GAO "that thousands of applicants had responded to nationwide openings for a critical occupation at a number of locations. However, because it took so long to manually process the applications, only one in 20 of the applicants were still interested in the job when notified that they had been selected."
Another personnel director said too many managers, supervisors and job applicants "do not understand the rules" of federal employment, the GAO reported.
On average, GAO said, it takes the government 102 days to complete typical steps involved in hiring a person for a civil service job. The process begins with writing a position description and developing criteria for judging an applicant's knowledge, skills and abilities.
It includes preparing a public notice of the job opening and accepting applications via the Internet, the mail and in person. It also includes screening job applicants to ensure they meet "minimum qualification standards" and choosing a methodology for determining who the best applicants are. Once those steps are completed, job applicants may be interviewed and their references checked. The hiring official tries to choose the best applicant for the opening, and the agency makes a job offer.
The GAO said the 102-day timeline probably doesn't reflect the extra hours that it took the agency to weigh a manager's request to hire someone or, in some cases, the weeks spent on background checks and security clearances. Some federal job applicants go to work three months after applying, but many wait six months to a year.
Under the government's "decentralized" hiring process, each agency bears primary responsibility for streamlining its employment practices. But OPM, which sets many employment policies and issues government-wide regulations, plays a pivotal role in helping agencies clear out the bureaucratic underbrush that snags job applicants and, according to a Brookings study, turns many of them away from government service.
Top OPM officials -- Kay Coles James, the agency director; Dan Blair, the deputy director; Ronald P. Sanders, associate director; and Norman Enger, the e-government program director -- have launched projects to improve the federal hiring process. "OPM's hiring initiatives are moving in the direction that will help agencies improve their hiring processes," the GAO said.
Still, the GAO suggested, OPM needs to do more. In particular, OPM needs to take a strategic approach to hiring problems, overhaul rules for classifying jobs and renew efforts to help agencies use technology to shorten hiring times, GAO said.
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