CHCO Council’s new leader aims to move the needle on ‘evergreen’ federal workforce issues

Agencies just received new expectations for reforming their federal hiring processes to meet the varying needs of job applicants, hiring managers and HR staff in the federal workforce.

From a practical standpoint, implementing the new guidance from the Biden administration will involve work from human capital leaders and HR employees to more deeply incorporate already promising practices in federal recruitment. But Colleen Heller-Stein, the new executive director of the CHCO Council, said they’re not on their own: Chief human capital officers are standing at the ready to keep the hiring momentum going.

“Where CHCOs come in here is really leading efforts in their agencies to use the tools and flexibilities that are highlighted in that memo,” Heller-Stein said in an interview with Federal News Network. “[CHCOs will] continue to provide feedback about how those are working or not, by looking at those metrics, seeing where there might be additional challenges that require some focus — or where we have met the mark and things are really starting to improve. They’re going to be really the best way that we know if those tools are working, or if there are additional adjustments that are needed.”

In the new hiring experience guidance, which the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget jointly published last week, Heller-Stein said the focus on HR professionals who are doing the hands-on recruitment work is especially crucial.

“HR is a lot of times the front line to communicating with potential applicants … or to candidates for positions as they are going through the hiring process,” she said. “[We are thinking about] ways to further develop [the federal HR community] and make sure that we are building clear career paths, so that we can help them continue to grow and make sure that we’ve always got a stable and competent HR workforce to support our agencies.”

Heller-Stein added that the guidance is also a way for agencies to collaborate on their hiring efforts, in part through using shared certificates and pooled hiring. Those strategies have shown to help agencies hire more effectively, while also easing the burden on federal HR staff.

Using career experience to guide policy

Now three months into her new position at OPM, Heller-Stein is the first career federal executive to lead the CHCO Council. Prior to her role as executive director, Heller-Stein served in a variety of federal work settings and locations — from field offices in the U.S. and overseas in Germany, to agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., as well as working in both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces.

Heller-Stein said her background as a career fed gives her a stronger understanding of the federal employee experience, which will be particularly handy for tackling what she described as “evergreen” federal workforce issues.

“I can take the experiences that I’ve had to think about policies and programs and that will impact the lives of so many other federal employees like me,” she said. “I think it’s an opportunity for consistent focus over the years on those issues.”

Over the last year, the CHCO Council, which just passed its 20th anniversary, has developed several working groups for human capital leaders to discuss possible reforms. The working groups have most recently focused on areas such as recruitment and outreach, hybrid work, supporting the HR federal workforce and developing career paths.

But underpinning it all, Heller-Stein said she is focusing on how to better collect and use HR data. Some data-based resources have become more readily available in recent years, for example with OPM’s recently introduced dashboards on time-to-hire and the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS).

“What we’d like to do is move more into the predictive space to figure out how we use the data we have to note trends and plan for the future — how do we gain efficiencies?” she said. “For example, if we see that we have a number of agencies trying to hire a specific occupation, are there opportunities to work together on recruitment events around the country?”

Setting next year’s federal workforce tone

The CHCO Council’s various working groups and areas of focus for the coming year are typically set during the council’s annual fall forum. This year’s forum will be held in September in Charlottesville, Virginia, convening human capital leaders governmentwide.

“I suspect that this year some of those working groups will likely continue,” Heller-Stein said. “There is always going to be work to be done, for example, on recruitment and outreach.”

One difference that may arise in the coming months, though, is how the efforts and focus on the federal workforce could change with a new presidential administration in January 2025. But Heller-Stein views the CHCO Council as a key way to bridge the work of addressing federal workforce issues between administrations.

Heller-Stein said, “as mostly career staff, we see ourselves as that connective tissue to really make sure that there is good support for the workforce through changes that we might experience together.”

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