Federal agencies hire over 350,000 personnel annually, and process over 22 million applications from individuals every year seeking the opportunity to serve their country. Image: Kitinut Jinapuck/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffFollowing are the key sections of a joint OPM-OMB memo (on chcoc.gov) on improving federal hiring practices, focusing on improving the experience for applicants—including current federal employees seeking to change jobs—and for managers and HR officials involved in the hiring process.
The Federal Job Applicant Experience
As the country’s largest employer, the Federal Government has an extensive and complex hiring process, which can hamper efforts to recruit and onboard needed talent. Federal agencies hire over 350,000 personnel annually, and process over 22 million applications from individuals every year seeking the opportunity to serve their country. Adapting recruitment and hiring processes today is crucial to meeting the talent needs of tomorrow. Agencies should prioritize improving the experience of applicants throughout the hiring process to attract and hire from a qualified and diverse applicant pool, including through such steps as:
• Providing clear communication to applicants and developing improved application processes that are user-friendly, accessible, equitable, transparent, efficient, and responsive to the public;
• Using a descriptive, organizational, or functional job title that resonates with jobseekers in announcements for recruitment and when posting job announcements (referencing the official title in the body of the announcement). Job announcements should be in plain language, using available tools to ensure understanding by jobseekers outside of government, that accurately conveys the position and skills sought by the hiring manager and is supported by analysis of the nature of the job;
• Expanding strategic recruitment efforts and continuing to hire individuals who bring diverse skills and experiences to their jobs, consistent with Executive Order 14035 of June 25, 2021 (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce), Executive Order 13985 of January 20, 2021 (Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government), Executive Order 14091 of February 16, 2023 (Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government), and Executive Order 14100 of June 9, 2023 (Advancing Economic Security for Military and Veteran Spouses, Military Caregivers, and Survivors);
• Adding mission critical occupation tags to job announcements as a valuable tool for attracting top talent to essential roles within Government;
• Improving applicant user experience during the job search by encouraging and educating applicants on the advantages of opting to make their resume searchable in their USAJOBS.gov profile to allow Federal hiring specialists and hiring managers to find their resumes as part of agency recruitment campaigns or staffing searches;
• Sending timely communications to applicants about their application status with notifications for each applicable stage of the hiring process, including application acceptance, determination of qualifications, issuance of certificates to hiring manager, and selection or cancellation of announcement and using data analytics to verify applicant notifications were sent;
• Supporting expeditious onboarding of new hires (i.e., new Federal employees or transfers of existing Federal employees across agencies), including enhancing and streamlining internal coordination across HR, personnel vetting, facility security, and any additional administrative functions and process; and
• Utilizing OPM’s Talent Programs via the USAJOBS Agency Talent Portal (ATP) to connect individuals such as pathways interns who will not be converted at their current agencies with employment opportunities at other agencies.
The Hiring Manager Experience
Federal hiring managers are talented individuals who manage complex Federal programs, processes, and infrastructure every day and provide invaluable expertise that protects and benefits the American people. They are critical to defining current and future talent needs and should be involved with and accountable for hiring strategy to ensure the right talent is hired for the right roles. Federal agencies should improve the experience of hiring managers, including by:
• Encouraging hiring managers to work with HR professionals to identify subject matter experts who can improve and support agency qualification processes, e.g., through the use of structured resume reviews, and develop specialized assessments in accordance with merit system principles and lawful personnel practices (5 U.S.C. §§ 2301-02). Hiring managers should allocate dedicated time within standard responsibilities for subject matter experts to participate in those processes, such as by supporting HR professionals in identifying and assessing technical skills and tasks for position descriptions and job announcements;
• Allowing HR and hiring managers to decide when it is appropriate to ask applicants to provide a short description of their technical skills or showcase their technical ability for the position as part of the initial application;
• Encouraging the use of any rating and ranking method allowed by law and regulation and appropriate for the given hiring action when initiating a competitive recruitment action, giving hiring managers more control in designing hiring processes relevant to their talent needs;
• Appropriately training HR professionals on the end-to-end assessment process designed to provide a list of highly qualified candidates for hiring manager review, which includes conducting a job analysis and screening applicants for needed competencies, and, as part of conveying assessment requirements, emphasizing to HR professionals the need to be familiar with the passing grade assessment process under which applicants must score a passing grade to be deemed eligible for advancing to the next level of the hiring process;
• Creating, updating, and utilizing skills-based and multi-hurdle assessments (to include agency-developed and off-the-shelf assessments) to align with leading practices and transition away from using solely self-assessment questionnaires, pursuant to Executive Order 13932 of June 26, 2020 (Modernizing and Reforming the Assessment and Hiring of Federal Job Candidates);
o When assessment strategy justifies use of self-assessment questionnaires for certain occupations based on business necessity and demonstrated effectiveness, implementing the best practices set forth in the OPM Guide to Better Occupational Questionnaires. Agencies should also update policies and systems, as needed, to ensure application reviewers adjust scores or disqualify applicants, as appropriate, when self-assessments do not align with submitted documentation;
• Investing in internal assessment measurement expertise (e.g., hiring industrial-organizational psychologists) to train HR professionals to create and continuously update skills-based assessments in partnership with hiring managers;
• Limiting resume reviews to a pre-determined number of pages, when appropriate, and notifying applicants in the job announcement of any page limits for resume reviews;
• Updating hiring managers’ access to and engagement with USAJOBS’ ATP to ensure they have appropriate permissions to access searchable resumes, Talent Pools, and Talent Programs;
• Encourage hiring managers and HR professionals to leverage the ATP and other tools to actively cultivate talent pipelines and facilitate active recruitment through communications that encourage candidate engagement; and
• Reviewing onboarding and training materials for hiring managers to reflect model hiring experience practices, including model uses of USAJOBS in alignment with this memorandum.
The HR Professional Experience
To build and sustain the Federal Government’s role as an employer of choice, Federal agencies need to build personnel systems and support that enable them to recruit, retain, and advance talent required to effectively deliver on a broad range of agency missions. Agencies should prioritize efforts that minimize the burden on HR professionals while empowering them with the data, tools, access, and guidance they need. Efforts may include:
• Creating and sustaining empowered agency Talent Teams to enable strategic recruitment and innovative hiring actions, including the use of assessments and shared hiring actions, and to recommend additional hiring tools to effectively recruit and assess candidates with critical, specialized, or hard-to-recruit skills. Agencies should designate a shared certificate coordinator responsible for building agency-wide familiarity with and awareness of shared certificates as a part of their Talent Teams to facilitate this work;
• Incentivizing and creating expectations for collaboration between hiring managers and HR professionals in the hiring process, from the initial requirements of hiring needs (e.g., position needs, skills, and timeline) through the determination of the best options to meet those requirements (e.g., assessment strategy and selection options, single or pooled hiring, hiring authorities, and flexibilities);
• Ensuring that HR professionals make hiring managers aware of and empowered to use the full range of hiring authorities and assessment strategies available to them, particularly those that relate to critical, specialized, or hard-to-recruit skills, and that they are aware of allowable recruitment activity in accordance with merit system principles and lawful personnel practices;
• Investing in modern, standardized human capital systems and automated tools (e.g., workflow management solutions) for HR professionals to use to complete routine tasks more efficiently and to expedite administrative elements of the hiring process;
• Identifying positions, including those that require critical and specialized skills, needed across multiple agencies for which recruitment actions, certificates, or lists of eligible candidates could be shared within the agency or with other agencies as part of the workforce planning process;
• Collaborating with OPM to identify hiring actions that will use shared certificates or lists of eligible candidates external to the agency as both the originating and receiving agency (such as pursuant to the Competitive Service Act of 2015 (5 U.S.C. §§ 3318-19) and other hiring authorities, as appropriate), so that OPM can assist in connecting agencies for the purposes of certificate sharing while maintaining applicant privacy; and
• Using USAJOBS’ ATP (or other compliant tools) to recruit qualified talent proactively, advertise agency recruitment events on the USAJOBS Events page, and create efficiencies in hiring through leveraging Talent Pools, lists of qualified candidates who are already on approved shared hiring certificates.
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