The Office of Personnel Management has released the final draft of its 2010-2015 strategic plan, which intends to overhaul and improve the federal hiring process.The five-year plan lays out approaches to rework the federal hiring process by promoting innovative ways of recruiting, streamlining the end-to-end hiring process to create a positive experience for applicants, managers and HR specialists, and increasing manager engagement in the hiring process. The plan also outlines how veterans will be assisted in finding federal employment by helping them identify skills that match federal opportunities and facilitating the transition of veterans into the federal civilian workforce.
Some of the agency’s long-term performance goals for departments and other agencies include a hiring reform that reduces the time of the hiring process, improves hiring-manager satisfaction with applicant quality and improves applicant satisfaction. Another long-term performance goal includes maintaining or exceeding OPM-related goals of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and provide the OPM deliverables necessary to ensure that security clearance reforms are operational across the federal government before 2010 ends.
In a letter accompanying the plan, OPM Director John Berry wrote he is convinced the OPM can make “bold changes.”
“Achieving the strategic goals outlined in this plan may not be easy, but doing so is absolutely necessary to make the federal government the model employer in the United States, and OPM its model agency,” Berry wrote.
What’s equally — or perhaps more — frustrating about the hiring system is the inability to tell if a job is wired or not. Corporations open jobs “in-house” and if they are filled from within, great, if not, THEN they are posted.
Why can’t the federal government do the same thing? Thousands of hours are wasted on applications that will never be looked at because there is no job…just what amounts to a legal announcement. If you want to help people, STOP POSTING JOBS THAT ARE ALREADY FILLED. Applicants will be overjoyed to know that they’re only applying for jobs where they actually have a possibility of being hired.
It is about time! I have two advanced degrees and have never been given a job offer from the Federal government, and my advance degree is in a field that is in demand–information technology and management. Maybe this time I will have an opportunity for full-time employment with the federal government!