USAJobs 3.0, the latest version of the governmentwide hiring website, launched today amid expectations that it would make it easier for agencies to search for the ideal applicant and make it more appealing for applicants to apply for government jobs.

“We hope we’re going to open the floodgates for innovation and competition,” said Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry at the FedTalks 2011 conference sponsored by the media company FedScoop in Washington.

The latest version does not look wildly different. But behind the scenes, it marks a departure from the proprietary technology of contractor Monster Government Solutions and an embrace of open architecture and standard code.

The Chief Human Capital Officers Council made that decision “so that anyone could access it and not have fears of losing your competitive edge to a competitor because you would have to connect to another private sector product,” Berry said.

“This is, by far, our most highly trafficked, complicated website,” he added, noting that it is supposed to connect with 59 contractors’ websites, in addition to the portals of every federal agency.

Over 18 months, Berry said, the agency broke “the project into nine digestible pieces, testing each piece as we completed it, and then integrating those nine pieces as we went along.” OPM took the site offline Friday so it could migrate data from the old version to the new one. It was scheduled to launch the new site Wednesday, but it is already live.

The new version is supposed to make it simpler for agencies to notify job candidates of their application status, analyze data and generate reports to aid recruiting, OPM associate director for employee services Angela Bailey told reporters last month.

USAJobs.gov has more than 17 million user accounts and processed 21 million applications this year, Berry said.

How is the updated USAJobs.gov working for you? Comment at the top of the page or email reporter Emily Kopp.

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