The Obama administration’s hiring reform initiatives have yielded slightly higher levels of satisfaction among hiring managers but that did not translate to the applicants themselves, who gave slightly lower marks in the most recent assessment versus a year before.
The data, part of recent OPM annual report, showed that on a 1-10 point scale, applicant satisfaction, as measured by a survey feature on the main job application site, USAJobs, decreased from 5.36 to 5.2 in the fourth quarter of 2010 versus 2009. Among agencies deemed to have statistically significant numbers of responses, satisfaction was highest regarding OPM, Justice, SSA, Treasury and DHS, and lowest among State, GSA, Labor and HHS.
Meanwhile, manager satisfaction of the quality of applicants, as measured by a survey of managers by the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, rose from 6.77 to 8.06. In that survey, the highest-rated agencies with statistically significant responses were Treasury, HHS, SSA and Transportation, with VA, State, Interior and Education the lowest.
OPM further said that the average time to hire fell from 120 days to 105 days, with 80 days for the most commonly filled positions. The fastest-hiring agencies were SSA, SBA, Justice and NASA, while the slowest were Interior, Energy, State and Transportation.
