OPM Continues To Review Hiring Process

There is a total of 164 authorities, available to agencies that can be used to hire new employees to the federal government. Not many of the hiring appointments go on to help the agency managers in identifying talent that would ideally meet their minimum qualification standards. Of course, the ideal selection of new diverse and vigilant applicants is out of the question. The Office of Personnel Management or OPM along with Congress have also acknowledged the fact that there are no quick fixes to the problems related to business, policy, and technology in the federal recruiting process.

OPM PUSHES FOR INCREASED TARGETED RECRUITMENT:
OPM has suggested in this regard: Agencies should change their overall approach rather than just hoping that posting the jobs to USAJobs.gov will end up bringing out the most talented candidates for them. The agencies should instead target and reach out to pools of talent consistently.
The “post, wait and pray” tactic used by the agencies while posting on the USA jobs website is not very commendable. The President of Avue Technologies, Linda Brooks said to the Governmental Affairs, and Senate Homeland Security Committee this past week,
“You should always be recruiting; you should never stop. In the National Park Service, let’s just say I need 2,000 air conditioning mechanics. You should have one posting. You should always be taking applications.”
OPM is currently trying to make incremental and periodic updates to the job portal. The first step towards an improved portal came back in last year, and the agency has planned to continue bringing out improvements.