Federal supervisors say that getting a pool of qualified candidates is their most challenging workforce task but their agencies may not be using the best methods to accomplish that goal, according to a recent MSPB publication.
MSPB said that in its 2016 merit principles survey, supervisors ranked that issue above other personnel-related challenges including getting the resources they need and dealing with employee poor performance or misconduct.
“How do hiring officials get a pool of quality candidates? You use good assessment tools that make job-related distinctions among candidates and help identify who will likely be most successful on the job. However, MSPB research indicates that many federal agencies do not use assessment tools that make those distinctions effectively. Instead, they often use assessments that look at the amount of training and experience an applicant has, such as résumés, occupational questionnaires, applicant essays, and education level,” it wrote.
Those assessments “tend to measure what applicants have done and when they did it, but are not generally good at gauging the quality of the work performed. They also rely heavily on “self-report” information provided by the applicant.” More valuable, it said, are assessments of how candidates are likely to perform tasks related to the job being filled, such as work samples, job simulations, situational judgment tests, and other similar tools.
It said that while many agencies “do not have the resources to commit to that kind of endeavor,” they can purchase those services from private sector vendors or use OPM’s USA Hire program, which has standard assessments for 120 federal occupations at grades 3–15–although that also comes at a cost to the agency.
The expense “could pay for itself through the savings attained by making a quality hire,” MSPB said, adding that it has “long recommended that Congress appropriate money for OPM to develop and administer assessments that agencies can use at little or no cost. Given that USA Hire has already developed much of the content, this would be a good time for Congress to provide OPM the resources it needs to make these assessments more accessible to agencies so that they can more easily hire the best workforce available,” it said.
