The federal community spends a lot of time thinking about how to improve the hiring process. What tends to get comparatively less attention is the onboarding process: all the steps that need to happen to turn a new hire into a fully productive employee.

That’s changing in the sprawling Office of the Secretary of Defense, where previous studies have pointed to a disjointed, uncoordinated process for new employees. The process is different across OSD’s 19 subcomponents, but on average, it involves about 90 steps.

In September, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks signed off on a detailed plan to modernize the process — largely by taking an enterprise approach to steps that had been done individually across the 19,000-person workforce and introducing automation wherever it makes sense.

“A lot of times, people really think that it’s the technology piece that holds it back, but it’s not. It’s the business processes. It’s the fact that there wasn’t a sense of ownership,” said Danielle Metz, who served as OSD’s chief information officer until last week. “No one entity owned the onboarding process from end to end, and so each stakeholder had a piece in it, and they didn’t realize that at all. So that caused some anger. And I think everyone involved, from the new employee to the hiring manager to the institution that is the Department of Defense, was feeling angst that they could not get productive employees started on day one, and so that was the task at hand.”

Metz, who left government service last Wednesday after 15 years with DoD, spoke with Federal News Network prior to her departure. Ideally, once the plan is implemented, the onboarding process for her successor will be simpler than it was for her when she took the OSD CIO position two years ago within the department’s directorate of administration and management.

“Before that, I was with DoD CIO, but when I joined DA&M, I was treated as a new employee. I had to go through a process where I had to relinquish my equipment and get new equipment, so I had downtime, which was insane. That shouldn’t be the case, because I remained a DoD employee,” she said. “I remained within OSD, but I was being treated differently because we didn’t have the right processes and policies in place, and we weren’t treating ourselves as a unified component. We were treating ourselves as individual organizations and taking out the ability to ask, ‘Does this make sense?’ No, it does not.”

The improvement plan was drawn up this year by an “onboarding cell” made up of officials from the DA&M’s Washington Headquarters Services, the Joint Staff, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Defense Human Resources Agency and the Pentagon Force Protection Agency.

Short and long-term reforms

Some of the reforms are fairly straightforward and can be accomplished within the next few months.

For instance, one barrier to employees being ready to work on their first day was that many of them didn’t have Common Access Cards issued to them until several days after their start date, which meant they couldn’t access the buildings they worked in or basic IT resources without help. So, going forward, those cards will be requested immediately when a new hire accepts a final job offer, so that they’re always ready to go on the employee’s “entry on duty” date.

Other objectives, like fully implementing the Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System (DCHRMS — pronounced “D-Charms”), DoD’s new all-in-one cloud-based HR system, are likely to take a couple of years. Doing that will dramatically simplify the onboarding process, since data linkages between legacy systems — and manual processes to input new hire data into those systems — won’t be necessary anymore.

“But we don’t have to wait for the system to be in place to do all the things that we know that we need to do,” Metz said. “If you look at our recommendations, we categorize them by now, mid-term and long-term. DCHRMS is definitely in the long term, but there’s a lot of work that we’re actively doing now, and that we’ve already stood up since we submitted our plan to [Deputy Secretary Hicks] back in July. We now have buy-in not only from the deputy secretary, but from all 19 of the principal staff assistants that make up OSD — they are committed to this process. They want to have a change, and they like the way that we are going about doing it. It’s really important to have a strategic vision, but also to have your customer base bought in and have ownership of that.”

Monitoring onboarding progress

The plan also has a few mechanisms to make sure the reforms it recommends are actually working.

Another near-term objective, for example, is to create a centralized “onboarding management team” to keep track of how the process is working across OSD as the changes are implemented. That team, made up of roughly seven HR and IT specialists, will be tasked with “shepherding” new hires through the reformed onboarding processes, making sure they’re ready to work on day one, and finding ways to mitigate the issues that are still causing delays.

And as part of the governmentwide push to reduce time-to-hire, OSD has already created a dashboard so that officials can track how long hiring decisions take.

But that dashboard is in the process of being updated with onboarding data so that they can also see, end-to-end, how long it takes between the time a new job is posted and an actual new employee is in the position and able to do productive work.

“[The time-to-hire] metrics are reported to the deputy on a very frequent basis, because she is very much interested in that. Using that same logic, we’re extending it out to your new employee start date,” Metz said. “So there’s several workflows we’re benchmarking, and we’re going to create targets for how long we want each of these workflows to take, and then we’ll be able to track that and present that to the deputy as well. But we believe that with some of just the minor common sense tweaks that we’re doing — the digitization of forms, emailing more effectively to the right people at the right time, and collapsing some of what were serial activities into parallel activities — that we’ll be able to buy back at least a couple weeks of time.”

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