Commission Criticizes USAJOBS Listings As ‘Unintelligible’ in Report for Hiring Process Reforms
A shocking report from the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, recommends that the US overhaul its current hiring process. The proposed reforms include a new job listing website and revision of hiring authorities. The report came out on March 25 and has 164 recommendations that sought to improve overall participation levels in public, national, and military services.
The government is currently facing a workforce shortage crisis due to several reasons, including long job offer wait times, security clearance issues, and complicated hiring processes.
The report asks for a complete review and revision of the USAJOBS website, which is the main platform for people searching for federal job questions. The commission also recommends that government authorities improve its compatibility with third-party vendors and change the way the website handles hiring in order to bring in better qualified workers.
It states that USAJOBS postings appear unintelligible to most non-federal government employees, compared to other private-sector job listings.
The report calls for a complete change of the system agencies currently use for assessing candidates’ qualifications and suggests that agencies be directed to stop using keyword-based reviews or resumes. It also recommended for the President to direct the OPM’s head to include hiring managers and experts in candidate assessment and recruitment tests.
The current review process was held to be fundamentally flawed, which allowed incompetent candidates to clear the hiring process, stated the report. The current hiring process utilizes software for automatically reviewing keywords and assigning scores. Many applicants with pertinent skills do not make it through since the keywords in their resumes do not match the targeted keywords.
Candidates can self-assess their skills, which has been criticized by the report to not be a valid evaluation method.
In order to speed up the hiring process, agencies were suggested to increase the usage of various non-competitive hiring systems that can allow agencies to hire a person without putting them through a testing competitive process, provided they fulfill certain criteria.
The report also recommended that the OPM’s director order agencies to come up with standardized non-competitive eligibility (NCE) documentation and to allow NCE or VRA candidates to identify their preferred career fields and agencies.
The commission encouraged the President and Congress to enable and simplify the usage of non-competitive hiring systems. This would help the government attract & retain its top talent, stated the report.
The current system has many failures that can prevent the applications of NCE candidates from reaching the assigned hiring manager on a priority basis, thus delaying the entire process. To stop this problem, the report suggests that VRA or NCE candidate applications be directly forwarded to hiring managers when the application is received.
The report called for the President to issue a special executive order that directed agencies to pause agency-specific regulations or policies that restricted non-competitive hiring. The report also recommended extending non-competitive eligibility to Peace Corps volunteers and AmeriCorps alumni as well, stating that such a move would be positively received by the thousands of people who work for such noble causes. We are The Benefit Coordinators: THE Federal Short Term Disability Insurance!
