Office of Personnel Management
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The federal government's hiring process has long been plagued with a poor reputation. However, since President Barack Obama issued an executive memo in 2010, the Office of Personnel Management has taken great strides to streamline the hiring process as well as to incorporate other reforms to make it easier to hire recent college graduates, people with disabilities and veterans. Federal News Radio spoke about this with Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer at the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, as part of the special report, The Obama Impact: Evaluating the Last Four Years.
September 19, 2012 -
OPM made changes to successfully chip away at an ongoing inadequacy, but the progress came after years of complaints from retired federal employees and urgings from lawmakers. Federal News Radio speaks with David Snell, director of retirement services for the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association as part of the special report, The Obama Impact: Evaluating the Last Four Years.
September 19, 2012 -
The longstanding delays and backlogs with personnel security clearances were effectively addressed by the Obama administration. Initial investigations now take an average of 44 days to complete compared to 189 days in 2005. Federal News Radio speaks with Evan Lesser, founder and managing director of ClearanceJobs.com as part of the special report, The Obama Impact: Evaluating the Last Four Years.
September 19, 2012 -
The goal was to achieve an efficient, effective and accountable government. A key strategy was to change the way the federal employee approached the job. In part three of Federal News Radio's week-long, multimedia special report, The Obama Impact: Evaluating the Last Four Years, we examine the tactics employed to create a more efficient workforce; hiring and SES reform, reducing backlogs in security clearances and retirement claims, building a cyber workforce, telework and the overall support of the civil servant. Four were rated as effective, two as more progress needed, and one as ineffective.
September 19, 2012 -
The sub-basement of the Office of Personnel Management's headquarters resembles more a tech start-up than a federal office building. The innovation lab, as OPM calls it, provides a brightly-lit, open room for employees to meet and tackle the "stickiest" of the agency's problems.
September 14, 2012 -
Tighter budgets are impacting agencies' ability to recruit new employees, according to the results of an exclusive Federal News Radio survey. But while budget dollars may be dwindling, agencies still need new hires to fill vacancies caused by retirements and others leaving civil service. Federal recruiters and college advisers say there are certain cost-effective and innovative techniques that work better than others when it comes to finding the next generation of federal employees.
September 13, 2012 -
Among six federal agencies surveyed, few are using a defense waiver allowing partially retired workers to collect a salary and their full pension benefit, a new Government Accountability Office report says.
September 11, 2012 -
Federal employees submitted nearly 9,000 retirement claims in August - more than in any other month besides January, which typically sees a wave of feds taking retirement. The Office of Personnel Management received 8,973 retirement claims in August, nearly a thousand more than it projected. The agency processed 11,896 claims, also surpassing its goals.
September 05, 2012 -
The administration promotes numerous policy and program successes and it is on these successes President Obama's second term priorities likely will be built. The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for specifics on the President's management agenda for the next four years, so we looked to the previous initiatives and asked experts for their opinions to devine the future in part 5 of our special, week-long multimedia report, The Obama Impact: Evaluating the Last Four Years
September 04, 2012 -
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park is naming 18 innovation fellows today to work on five "high-impact" federal IT projects.
August 23, 2012 -
Host Mike Causey moderates a roundtable discussion of sequestration, postal service buyouts, and more. August 15, 2012
August 15, 2012 -
The Office of Personnel Management wants agencies to use workplace flexibility to encourage federal workers to pursue activities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — or STEM.
August 15, 2012 -
The Office of Personnel Management released a factsheet to federal agencies in July explaining what phased retirement is and how it will work.
August 14, 2012 -
Federal chief human capital officers should develop a consistent message about the effects of budget cuts on human resources, said CHCO Council Executive Director Kathryn Medina. The goal is to explain the tangible effects of spending reductions on core agency missions.
August 10, 2012 -
The Office of Personnel Management received more claims than expected last month, but for the third month in a row processed more claims than it expected to. OPM has also made progress cutting the longstanding backlog of retirement claims. At 44,679 claims, there are now fewer retirement claims stuck in the backlog than there were in December 2011, when OPM began tracking them as part of a new push to eliminate the logjam.
August 06, 2012