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Innovative technologies aid the government in overcoming their recruitment and hiring challenges. Federal agencies primarily attract candidates by participating in designated recruiting and hiring events like in-person and virtual career fairs. Significant financial resources and staff hours are allocated to plan these events without a digital process to manage resumes, evaluate candidates, and follow up with candidates post-event — that’s where technology comes into play.

“Some large federal organizations participate in hundreds of recruitment events every year and have the teams and bandwidth to do that,” Jon Newman, director of federal programs at Yello, said. “But what about the federal agencies who don’t have the resources and the people to go out to every event? You have to think about how you can leverage technology to be proactive, to do more with less — maybe including a virtual strategy is a part of that.” Regardless of your agency’s available resources, using technology to manage events and candidate engagement allows you to track the quantity and quality of candidates throughout the entire hiring process while collecting data and measuring ROI to guide future event investments. Doing so results in a more efficient hiring process with a better return on your efforts.

Agencies are currently undergoing a transformation from traditional recruiting methods to a long-term proactive and innovative approach in order to identify and attract the most qualified candidates. “Our federal customers are seeing results by leveraging technology to engage candidates through early and frequent touchpoints,” Newman told Federal News Network. Candidate touchpoints can be formal or informal and include things like partnering with academia to hold recruitment events on college campuses or hosting digital sessions and workshops to inform candidates of what an agency has to offer. In addition to candidate engagement, creating and fostering a strong candidate pipeline is essential to being successful in attracting the right talent amongst the competition with other federal agencies and the private sector.

“The more proactively you go out to source and find talent, the more effective your entire pipeline and funnel becomes,” Newman said. “Our data tells us that it takes an average of 7 to 10 touchpoints between an employer and a candidate before they consider you as an employer of choice. But no one has the bandwidth to reach out to every candidate 7 to 10 times before they actually apply. Not only does Yello allow customers to centralize talent pipeline efforts and build a database of searchable candidate resumes, the technology also automates outgoing candidate touchpoints and campaigns.”

After early engagement with candidates, agencies must contend with a lengthy hiring process that is fragmented and cumbersome for both applicants and agencies alike. As a result, agencies need a way to accelerate their time-to-hire to avoid losing candidates to other organizations that can hire more quickly. “By leveraging technology and creating an efficient hiring workflow, our federal customers are seeing significant improvements in their time-to-hire. For example, one of our DoD customers brought their average time-to-hire down from 180 days to 80 days. By leveraging direct hire authorities, the agency is hiring candidates within 45-60 days. In addition, just after 1 year of using Yello, the agency fostered a candidate pipeline of more than ten thousand candidates,” says Newman.

Newman further adds, “Branding is also very important, if you can get your agency name out there, promote your job vacancies and engage with candidates, that is going to attract a more diverse pool of applicants to your open roles while positioning yourself as an employer of choice. If you’re only posting vacant jobs in one place, you are most likely seeing the same candidates on your cert lists.”

In addition to accelerating time-to-hire, technology supports the government by helping agencies pivot their early career recruiting strategies to address existing DEIA challenges. As the government strives to be a model for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA), they must remove barriers to equal opportunity to achieve this. Many of our federal customers are also licensing access to our DEIA sourcing platform with more than 7 million candidates from 7,000+ campuses across the county. This allows them to access an entirely new subset of candidates that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to and helps supplement the other approaches they are taking towards a broader and proactive early career recruiting and hiring strategy.

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