We're live blogging Human Capital Institute's 2010 Government Talent Management Summit. Up next: Hiring Reform – Increasing the Speed at Which the Right Talent is Located, Recruited, and Hired with an introduction by Saundra Stisher, Director, Recruiting and Hiring Services Human Capital Line of Business, Lockheed Martin – IS&G and presentation by Angela Bailey, Deputy Director, Office of Personnel Management.
Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) number-one goal over the next year is to provide agencies a full range of support to help them meet the President’s ambitious recruitment and hiring reform objectives. Angela Bailey summarized their recruiting and hiring standpoints and answered questions from the audience in this interactive presentation.
Recruiting Standpoint: Angela used the example of when the Army held interviews with candidate’s parents after Katrina for jobs in New Orleans. By doing this and speaking directly with the “helicopter parents” they got more engineers in positions by convincing them it’s an OK environment for them to come into. As Federal recruiters we need to go out to ALL communities for candidates. We need to also talk to the priests and community leaders and tell them about the jobs we have to offer. Start in the middle school level so we can start influencing the next generation, don’t wait to talk to college age students.
Hiring Standpoint: Known as “end to end hiring” – OPM is trying to reduce the number steps and approval processes it takes to hire. One agency had 189 steps and 39 approval processes before the applicant reached HR! OPM is trying to work with the agencies to reduce these steps .
Questions from the audience:
An attendee asked about the President making an announcement regarding the disability initiative and whether OPM has been involved in this, Angela states that they have.
Another asked if there is a way to say “yes or no” in answering the disability question instead of detailing (being worried that it would be self-identifying). Angela says that they can take that into consideration and one thing that they are working on is the ability to put on USA Jobs that candidates are eligible for schedule A, hopefully increasing the number of disabled workers being hired.
A question from an attendee from the Department of Defense regarding direct hire dealt with the fact that he believes we need direct hire, but is unsure how we can permeate it in the field so that agencies can use it. Angela says that with OPM sometimes we forget the silent customer that we have to serve – You can put an announcement out and directly hire without regard to whether they are veterans or not. The challenge she sometimes gives back is that she asks people “what do you think direct hire will give you that competitive hiring doesn’t’”? She states if your job announcement s is not written well, it won’t attract candidates whether you use DH or not. If we are going to throw away veteran preferences we need to think about what DH will do for us. We need to sit down and map out a very good recruiting and hiring strategy. They want to ensure that their work through assessments (starting in November online and un-proctored) will result in the right hires and whoever ends up on the list will be who qualifies whether they are a veteran or not. Direct Hire authority is rarely used and when it is she hears that agencies are still hiring veterans and open hires.
Another attendee asks her to share more about the assessment tools coming out in November. Angela states they are very pleased with them and they are state of the art. They will have different components and consist of general competencies of at least 12 of the major skills like writing, math reasoning, cognitive abilities and situational judgment. They are not taking away the agency’s ability to do a follow up assessment and having system validation between October and next summer. Envision by next year at this time this being rolled out and on USA Jobs along with candidate resumes having their assessment scores transferring across agencies so they don’t have to take multiple times and are available in advance.
In closing, Angela answers the question “How do younger individuals get into a government job? She believes internships to full time employment is terribly under-used. We should look into recent college graduate pathways to solve this problem.