By John Buckner
Federal News Radio

The Office of Personnel Management has set a start date of June 30 for agencies to begin reporting time-to-hire information in order to assess improvement to the hiring process.

OPM wants agencies to report their progress from the previous two quarters ending Dec. 31 and March 31.

“Consistent with the President’s memorandum, agencies are expected to set specific targets for measuring success in their efforts to reduce the time it takes hire employees,” writes Charles Grimes, OPM’s acting associate director for employee services, in the memo. “Working with the Office of Management and Budget, OPM will monitor agency progress in significantly reducing time to hire.”

Agencies also are expected to report quarterly on their progress after June 30, the Improving the Federal Recruitment and Hiring Process.

President Obama’s memo gave agencies a deadline of November 1 to follow through on his directives. While the average time to hire has dropped to 110 days as of October 2010 from 180 days, OPM would like to see hiring time reduced to 80 days.

Several agencies have further reduced their individual time it takes to bring on a new employee.

A few months prior to President Obama’s deadline, the Partnership for Public Service found that the assessment process in hiring was the weakest part.

OPM’s latest directive states for fiscal 2011, agencies must provide all information regarding employees hired directly by the agency under “delegated examining authority” from OPM. Agencies also are asked, but not required to, report time-to-hire information for jobs that were posted on USAJobs.gov.

But OPM wants agencies to report all data, including hires from USAJobs.gov the following years. By 2013, agencies are to solely report on job opportunity announcements (JOA) from USAJobs. USAJobs by then will include all delegated examining hires by that time as well.

With the reporting requirements in place, OPM also outlined what type of results each agency must include in their reports for each fiscal quarter.

Each agency is required to report their quarterly time-to-hire results as well as the hiring time frame for governmentwide mission critical occupations (MCO). Along with the governmentwide results, agencies must include their specific MCO hiring time frames.

In addition, agencies also should include time-to-hire results for commonly filled positions.

OPM is asking the agencies to follow the End-to-End Hiring Roadmap, which measures hiring time in calendar days.

With OPM’s goal of lowering time-to-hire to 80 days, included in their memo is a requirement to report all hires that were under the 80 day timeframe. Agencies also must provide their average number of days per hire.

John Buckner is an intern at Federal News Radio.

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