One Year Anniversary of Hiring Reform

I’m very pleased and honored to be with you today to talk about something that is working in government. And I would credit it to working to two things, that is a spirit of collaboration amongst our Chief Human Capital Officers Council and the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel management. We are hiring now based on resumes and cover letters 91% of the time. That is up from 39% in 2009, it’s an amazing leap forward. We have gotten off of KSA island. 96% of our job opportunity announcements no longer require KSA essays. That is also up from 39% in 2009. Hiring managers now have more choices – they get to see more resumes, because 89% of our announcements have category rating, up from only 12% in 2009. 12% to 89% in 2009. No more Rule of Three. Applicants are now seeing shorter, easy-to-read job announcements; 86% are in plain language, and 66% are five pages or fewer, five or fewer pages. That’s up from 55 and 24%, respectively. And our time to hire has gotten shorter, down about 15% to a government-wide average of 105 days. Now, these are major accomplishments, and they were done with a lot of hard work, but we’re not done yet. As I tell my staff, we’ve stolen third base and we’re heading for home, but we still have a lot of tough work ahead of us. But we are going keep pushing these indicators higher, the time to hire lower, and applicant quality up. Those are the three goals. And our goal is to do more. We also launched Assess, which is a growing set of state of the art assessment tools. And in doing so we’ve worked with a number of you and private sector partners in creating this. They allow agencies to see how prospective employees would actually perform in situations that they are very likely to encounter on the job. Just this month, we launched also USAJOBSRecruit. Now this was an idea that our CHCO council came up and our folks said you know what a great idea and we ran with it. It is basically a simple online community of practice for recruiters across government to go on and share questions and ideas, and problems, and challenges, etcetera. It has basic information, it has guidance, it has forums, it has blog site interactively and so people can share and build on their recruitment ideas collaboratively. Like everything we’re doing, this was based on discussion with HR professionals and hiring managers across the government telling us what they needed to provide these critical services to the American people. And they said we a place to swap ideas and collaborate. So ok we built it. This engagement is working. Guess how long it took the first 250 HR staffers to sign up for the Recruit website? 11 minutes. A couple weeks later, we’re at over 2,700 practitioners who are regularly on that website. They’ve started a collision of ideas that is producing innovation, and it is an open platform where these innovators can get directly to the staffers at each agencies and get the ideas out very quickly. I believe this is going to result in better recruiting, better agency performance, and better results for the American people.