Guidance communicated from top agency executives to line
managers and human resources is crucial to fully realizing
investment in an automated hiring system — regardless of
whether the system is question-based, resume focused,
developed in-house or acquired from a vendor — because
“an agency’s staffing will be no better than top management
insists that it be,” a pending report on the use of such
systems from the Merit Systems Protection Board has found.
The report found that, “senior management makes a difference
by: setting expectations for outcomes (e.g., does the
agency want hiring to be better, or just faster and
cheaper?); providing resources, including money, to buy
or develop the system and train users; and defining roles
of key participants.”
Low commitment from line managers can result in lax execution
of crucial, front-end work such as establishing job needs
and qualifications and selecting referred candidates. Line
managers might feel this takes time away from their “real”
program work, thus reducing the system’s effectiveness or
result in it not being used at all.
Because “this may undermine their commitment to help develop
better candidate assessment measures (e.g., questions and
answers or appropriate r
