Fixing Federal Hiring: One Alternative Process

ND mentioned the need to update the hiring process.  Apparently many in the federal government share these concerns.

Jennifer Pahlka wrote this piece describing some of her associates’ challenges and a test program designed to improve the process.  I know many FS and other feds find it very frustrating.  For those who haven’t experienced trying to hire someone, Jennifer gives you some stories from the standpoint of trying to hire IT folks.

Jack’s tech skills meant nothing to the hiring process, but there is one skill that is always valued: the ability to cut and paste. Yadira Sanchez, a tech team leader at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, described to me her attempt to hire a product manager. Like Marina, she knew there were some extremely well-qualified candidates in her pool, some of whom were already doing a great job on the project as contractors. She avoided the mistake the DDS team had made, reminding applicants to get some help from someone who knew how to write a government resume. But none of those candidates made the cert, and in fact, the cert contained no one with product-management experience. The top candidate had just “copied and pasted the exact same language in the exact same font from the bulleted list in the posting into their resume, and that qualified them,” Yadira told me. “They didn’t even put any other language around it. They didn’t even try to disguise what they’d done.” And yet, HR insisted this person was the most qualified for the job per their process.

But why do so many HR teams insist on a process that results in these unqualified candidates and the failure of half their hiring actions? Unhelpful and overly restrictive interpretations of the principle of equity collide with large candidate pools to create a decidedly inequitable and inefficient process. There can be hundreds, even thousands of applicants for a job. HR teams are supposed to consider every applicant with the same level of scrutiny, which makes assessment of large pools of candidates an enormous lift. The way to do that both quickly and “fairly” is to exercise as little judgment as possible.

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We know this because during the last Trump administration, the U.S Digital Service and the Office of Personnel Management devised an alternative hiring process (called SME-QA for Subject Matter Expert Qualifying Assessments) that allows domain experts to work with HR to determine who is qualified and eligible – and it works dramatically better. When the team who rolled it out delivered the first set of certs, they would occasionally get calls from the hiring managers they’d work with, complaining about certs full of veterans. “You promised this would be different,” they would say. “Look at the resumes,” the USDS team would tell them. “They’re qualified veterans.” When they looked, they agreed, and they were delighted to hire veterans who’d been properly assessed for their skills. But years of seeing certs on which veterans had floated to the top after assessing solely for knowledge of the hiring process had created understandable bias against the very people veterans preference laws were meant to help.

SME-QA is one example of the seeds of change Mr. Kupor has to work with as he takes on leadership of OPM. These seeds, and the people who champion them, need water, sunlight, and fertilizer. SME-QA started over five years ago, and it hasn’t meaningfully scaled. OPM and GSA published data in 2020 that show that 90% of competitive jobs rely entirely on resume screens and self-assessments. The number of hiring actions that use SME-QA is still quite small, and is unlikely to have moved that overall number at all. Progress is painfully slow, in part because no one has tackled the underlying conditions: the control HR staff have over the creation of the cert that excludes the judgement of the hiring manager, the difficult and finicky processes that make assessments far more time-consuming than they are in the private sector, the unreasonable and unhelpful rigidity of the entire process. There’s so much work ahead even just in this one area. We are just scratching the surface here.