Is your position classification system stifling your agency’s recruitment and hiring?

Despite progress, there is still one overlooked opportunity for workforce modernization: position classification.

May 9, 2024 3:18 pm

5 min read

This content is sponsored by Monster Government Solutions.

Federal human capital has been on the Government Accountability Office’s high risk list for two decades now, but the urgency of this issue has escalated in more recent years. Despite broad progress, there still remains one often overlooked opportunity for workforce modernization foundational to a federal agency’s recruitment and hiring: position classification.

Defining position duties and requirements, and classifying those positions to establish titles, series and grades, can improve pay equity and make agencies more attractive workplaces. A good position classification program can also empower an agency’s ability to hire the workforce it needs by helping to fill talent gaps with targeted recruitment and skills-based hiring. Creating accurate and appealing position description (PD) packages allows agencies to perform a job analysis that identifies skills to assess and create more targeted vacancy announcements. Having clear and accurate PD packages is a common best practice to build trust with employees, manage expectations of job duties, and enable performance reviews, which all support employee satisfaction and retention in the long run.

And position classification doesn’t just impact the workforce – it affects agencies in other ways, too. Overpaying two employees due to one misclassified position may not seem too detrimental, but it can quickly add up.

“Let’s say an agency misclassified 5% of its 2,000 Grade 12 IT specialists, who get paid $14,000 more than Grade 11. That means the agency would be overpaying by $1.4 million for just one grade-level discrepancy for this one job title,” said Jennifer Forrest, senior director of professional services for Monster Government Solutions.

Downstream, misclassification can have compounding impacts on incentives, bonuses and career mobility, which all impact an agency’s ability to retain its employees.

Collaborative, organized and secure classification

Position classification has always demanded attentive and effective engagement between classifiers, hiring managers and other HR stakeholders, but with today’s hybrid and under-resourced workforce, the ability to collaborate quickly, easily, remotely and securely is even more challenging.

“Right now, the main tools many agencies use are emails and shared drives. While these can be used remotely and have some search capabilities, they are extremely limited in their ability to contribute to a transparent, collaborative, and secure classification experience,” said Forrest.

A modern, flexible and centralized system can facilitate more effective data-sharing and collaboration, streamline and guide classification activities, and track requests and handoffs between team members. Most importantly, agencies have the assurances of the most advanced federal security regulations, as commercial, cloud-based solutions for the federal government are now required to have FedRAMP authorization.

Data-powered classification, compliance and auditability

Agencies can leverage invaluable proprietary data from their own existing classification materials, but are they taking advantage?

“Instead of managing 40,000 individual PD files, agencies could search through a virtual library of 4,000, or even 400, standard PDs to repurpose the most relevant one,” said Forrest.

In addition to storing documents, modern classification tools, like intelligent PD builders, can rely on an agency’s PD library and its data to guide users in rapidly and consistently creating accurate and compliant quality documents.

Good classification technology is embedded with advanced data collection and reporting capabilities for data-driven insights and easier audits for compliance with federal regulators, including the Office of Personnel Management.

“Everything within the classification system should be tracked so that it’s easy to go back and understand decisions that were made,” Forrest said. “Enforcing consistency, compliance and equity requires auditability of who’s made what changes, who’s approved to sign off, and which additional team members have accountability for the finalization.”

Invest in planning for a great modernization

Modernization efforts can seem daunting, especially if an agency is still dealing with paper files. Every agency has their own talent needs, security requirements, policies, processes and resources that need to be considered during a modernization. However, this groundwork of gathering requirements will empower agencies to implement the classification program that works best for them and provides the most value for their investments.

“One of the biggest hurdles in modernizing a classification system is getting the data into the new system itself. Agencies must consider data migrations up front in their planning. There’s lots of existing data, and not all of it is good data,” Forrest said. “What many are wondering is how artificial intelligence can help.”

AI, especially generative AI, is garnering a lot of attention within federal hiring, but it requires meticulous sourcing and can bring its own risks, like implicit bias. One opportunity is to use AI for activities that are less risky for government agencies – for example, data migrations.

“MonsterGov is currently working with federal agencies to use a new AI-powered tool to accelerate PD migration in support of their Monster Position Classification implementations,” Forrest said. “An AI-enabled migration cuts down on time, streamlines the data, minimizes errors, and enables the agency to securely store quality PD data in their FedRAMP-secure environment.”

Behind-the-scenes, machine learning helps improve the migration process itself, so not only will agencies have a jumpstart with their data migration but can also expect to optimize their classification program for even better results over time.

Position classification isn’t just something to check-off as “done” to ensure regulators and agency leadership are satisfied. While it can seem complex, it provides significant benefits that empower agencies to attract the right job seekers, effectively fill talent gaps, and retain the employees they worked so diligently to capture. A modern and effective classification system is a powerful avenue to building a fairly rewarded and equitable workforce, an increasingly important factor in hiring the talent agencies need to reach mission-success.

Monster Government Solutions is the leading commercial innovator of federal recruitment and talent acquisition solutions that empower federal agencies to find, hire, and onboard high-quality talent. For more information visit monstergov.com.