VA tackles challenges with time-to-hire, job applicant communications

VA is focused on making improvements to time-to-hire, communicating with candidates and reaching a deeper level of applicant data.

Drew Friedman@dfriedmanWFED

January 2, 2025 10:27 am

5 min read

For the Department of Veterans Affairs, the biggest recruitment challenge is hardly about generating interest in job openings — the agency receives millions of applications each year.

Instead, VA sees larger challenges with time-to-hire and communicating with applicants, as well as managing data across the agency’s various systems for hiring and onboarding employees.

“It’s making sure people understand the position for which they’re applying, have the requisite qualifications for that position, submit a complete application and then get through the process,” Tracey Therit, VA’s chief human capital officer, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “We don’t want single points of failure. We don’t want it to be an impersonal process.”

Over the last few years, VA’s time-to-hire has started to improve, Therit said, but it’s still a challenge for the agency — especially for the VA healthcare workforce, where there are more stringent requirements for getting employees onboarded, such as fingerprinting, background checks and occasionally drug testing.

“We lose a lot of control in those steps in the process that we don’t manage,” she said. “The more resumes you get and the fewer HR staff that you have to review them, the longer the process is going to take. … [And] the longer we take, the less competitive we are, the less likely that we’ll be able to maintain those staffing levels we need to provide the services that are so important.”

In those cases, Therit said it’s important to continuously engage candidates to ensure they know what step the agency is working on for the hiring process.

“We focus a lot on the applicant, getting their feedback, making sure we’re engaged with them during the touch points,” she said. “And we have seen a lot of positive feedback from applicants regarding the things that we’ve been doing.”

The overall recruitment strategy at VA

For recruitment initiatives agencywide, VA runs a combination of both virtual and in-person hiring events. Therit said both options are beneficial to the agency’s overall hiring efforts.

“The ability to make job offers on the spot is just incredible in our ability to grow our workforce and to reduce the time-to-hire,” she said.

And through virtual events, Therit said VA focuses mainly on connecting personally with candidates to educate and inform them about the federal hiring process. The agency shares information on topics such as how to write a federal resume, how to prepare for an interview and how to ensure a job application is complete.

“One of the challenges that we’ve had is how long it takes to get through from the time you get a tentative offer until you actually start the job,” Therit said. “Some people can’t wait two weeks, three weeks, four weeks.”

VA also uses various special hiring authorities to hire veterans, military spouses and other employee groups — although she said there is certainly room to broaden the targeted hiring strategies even further.

“Where we have more work to do is investing in early-career talent, our student programs, our college grad programs, our Presidential Management Fellow programs,” Therit said. “We’re looking at some of the best practices across government — being able to create an organizational structure that supports bringing in entry-level career talent and allowing them to grow is something we can do more of.”

A need for deeper data

Still, the sheer volume of applicant data across VA’s various systems presents its own set of challenges. VA currently uses a talent acquisition system that’s common for federal agencies. Therit said that system is “solid” but added that there are still key areas for improvement and necessary technological advancements to help ease the hiring process.

The Veterans Benefits Administration, in particular, is one VA component where she is looking to modernize and expand data analysis abilities across systems to reach a more granular level of information on candidates and employees.

“It’s an incredible task, and I think the fact that we have a larger HR workforce to ingest all that information is important,” Therit said. “We know there is so much technology out there, whether it’s in the artificial intelligence space or in other tools and products that we have heard about.”

Another area where she is hoping to expand VA’s data capabilities in the federal hiring process is on declinations — that is, applicants who received an offer from VA, but who turned down the job.

“It may be the type of schedule they’re being offered, the lack of a flexible work arrangement, the pay — whatever the reason somebody may decline. And then you have to start the process over again,” Therit said. “If we have better insights into why individuals are declining in our data, that can also help us with the whole hiring experience and the workload that we see on our human resource professionals.”

Generally, VA uses various systems for its core HR functions, performance management, talent acquisition, labor relations and more. And at the end of the day, many of VA’s hiring challenges stem from the need for integrating data across the different systems.

“When you’re looking to modernize, you don’t want to just modernize a piece of it without understanding the impact that piece has on all of those other steps in the process,” Therit said. “That is where we’re still challenged to make sure those tight handoffs are happening, that the systems are integrated, and that we’re all continuing to move things as quickly along in the process as we possibly can. … We want to make sure whatever we’re doing in phases is getting us to that overall end state. For our managers and our employees, we want to have the best technology, the most state-of-the-art system, so they can come to work and continue to evolve and grow.”