Federal hiring ‘call to action’ centers on job applicants, HR workforce

With agencies processing more than 22 million federal job applications and onboarding over 350,000 new employees every year, it’s easy to see how the federal hiring process can get complicated.

But agencies now have a clearer outline — and new expectations — on how to address major, long-standing pain points in federal recruitment. Guidance that the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management published Wednesday tells agencies to adjust their approaches to recruitment and improve the federal hiring process.

OMB and OPM leaders said the new guidance is a call to action asking agencies to look at ways to reduce unnecessary burdens and time spent during the recruitment process. By using the right tools and strategies, OMB and OPM said agencies should be able to move in a positive direction.

“We aim to continuously improve the federal government’s ability to recruit, hire and retain a diverse and skilled workforce to strengthen the way agencies deliver on their missions for the American people,” OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said Wednesday in a press statement, adding that the guidance “is a culmination of years of data-driven and innovative thinking about the federal hiring experience.”

Making improvements to processes, training, technology and communication are all central to the new guidance document. It’s also a way the Biden administration is working toward the first priority of the President’s Management Agenda, strengthening and empowering the federal workforce.

In particular, the guidance focuses on supporting three key groups that the federal hiring process impacts: job applicants, hiring managers and human resources professionals. It details expectations and recommendations for agencies to address challenges specific to each of the three groups.

From the job applicant’s perspective, for instance, OMB and OPM said agencies should focus on improving communications with candidates throughout the entire federal hiring process. Particularly for applicants who are new to government work, agencies should make sure their job descriptions are easy to understand, and don’t use “government speak.”

For those who end up getting hired, agencies should then make sure their processes are streamlined for a candidate to efficiently get through onboarding requirements from HR, personnel vetting and facility security.

Hiring managers are another central focus of the new guidance. OMB and OPM offered myriad ways to ease HR work and processes, which have remained a challenge for years.

In some instances, hiring managers can avoid unnecessary work by using shared certificates before launching a new hiring action. The process of sharing certificates lets hiring managers select job candidates off a list of applicants who are already deemed qualified for an open position.

As part of the new guidance, OMB and OPM said agencies should also encourage hiring managers to make use of pooled hiring announcements from OPM.

And to better support HR professionals, the guidance said agencies, for one, should make sure their IT processes are cohesive and able to help improve the hiring experience. The guidance also said it’s important to ensure HR employees are aware of all the hiring authorities that are available for them to use.

Additionally, the guidance called on agencies to make better use of subject matter experts for key steps of the recruitment process, such as reviewing resumes, writing job announcements and assessing the technical skills of job candidates. Agencies should also ensure their HR employees are properly trained on the entire, end-to-end hiring process, to make it as efficient as possible, the guidance said.

The guidance also set expectations for agencies to make decisions based on data, such as time-to-hire, candidate feedback, performance and exit interviews. That information, OMB and OPM said, can help agencies understand where changes have worked, and where there are still pain points to address.

Some of the key strategies in the guidance are already underway at agencies. As an example, the Department of Health and Human Services has been a leading agency on the recruitment practice of sharing certificates. HHS has made over 13,000 new hires from shared certificates in the last four years.

“It uses our resources more productively, and … from a candidate’s perspective, the sooner we’re able to follow up and eventually onboard a candidate, the better,” HHS Chief Human Capital Officer Bob Leavitt said in a recent interview with Federal News Network.

But at the same time, without the right investments in resources or staffing for human capital management, some federal workforce experts have said agencies will struggle to scale up promising practices, or make necessary reforms to the government’s hiring process.

To help wade through many of the new expectations, the guidance said agencies should collaborate with a hiring experience group at OPM to create talent teams that can drive changes. Those talent teams can help with efforts like improving job assessments and using more shared certificates.

OMB and OPM said they also expect agencies to track and regularly share their progress toward improving the hiring experience from all direction — job applicants, HR professionals and hiring managers.

“Federal agencies can make every effort to improve internal processes or modernize technology, but ultimately it is people — federal employees and the people they serve — who make the work of this great nation possible,” the guidance said. “Hiring managers, applicants and human capital personnel — as well as the American people — benefit when agency human capital strategies are prioritized, resourced and internally aligned with strategic initiatives.”

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