White House, OPM issue ‘call to action’ to improve the federal hiring experience

A new memo sent to federal agencies Wednesday aims to improve the hiring experience for job seekers and officials who hire them in what the White House termed “a call to action” to reduce the time and burden of that process.

The joint document from the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management directs agencies toward tools, resources and strategies that it says will strengthen workforce planning, improve the application experience, and make things easier for hiring managers and human resource managers. 

“We aim to continuously improve the federal government’s ability to recruit, hire, and retain a diverse and skilled workforce to strengthen the way agencies deliver on their missions for the American people,” Rob Shriver, OPM’s acting director, said in a statement announcing the memo. “This memorandum builds on that success and is a culmination of years of data-driven and innovative thinking about the federal hiring experience.”

Specifically, the memo includes guidance that agencies should be developing hiring objectives that are informed by data-driven workforce planning; taking advantage of pooled hiring actions; ensuring that announcements have a job title that “resonates with job seekers”; promoting collection and use of data on the time it takes to hire people; and ensuring that systems used in hiring are being effectively used to measure and track the priorities in the memo.

To ensure the government actually meets the goal of improving the process, OPM will be monitoring the progress on the memo through hiring experience metrics, according to a release from the agency. 

Those metrics — which focus on the experience of applicants, managers and HR professionals — will be based on existing satisfaction surveys and USAJobs, a fact sheet provided by the agency said. Agencies will also share the headway they’ve made on the memo at quarterly meetings with the President’s Management Council, the memo said.

The U.S. government is a massive employer, hiring over 350,000 people a year and processes 22 million applications each year, according to numbers in the memo. The guidance comes as the Biden administration is working to foster a diverse federal workforce and ramp up hiring to meet the needs of the artificial intelligence era.

“Many tech, data, and AI professionals — and beyond — are eager to serve their country,” Jennifer Anastasoff, Tech Talent Project’s co-founder and executive director, said in a statement in the release. “It’s exciting to see the federal government looking to best-in-class recruitment and retention strategies to attract and keep folks who are critical to delivering services, enforcing laws, and protecting our country. This initiative will allow agencies to build the diverse talent pool necessary to meet today’s challenges.”

The next steps for OMB and OPM include conducting research on the application portion of the process and analyzing barriers that agencies encounter in carrying out the memo. OPM will also develop “automation tools to streamline sharing of information regarding applicants within and between agencies, to the extent allowable,” in addition to several other actions, the memo said.