When thinking about the Federal Hiring Process I think what a nightmare! Last year the Obama Administration ordered the federal recruitment and hiring process to be overhauled.
In the Washington Post article, Making a few strides on hiring reform, Joe Davidson highlights the massive effort of the pilot online assessment program –Assess Pilot. According to the Office of Personnel Management the Assess program “will provide applicants an opportunity to demonstrate that they actually have the abilities necessary for a particular job.”
One of the guidelines outlined in the OPM fact sheet indicates that “rather than asking an applicant how good they are at solving problems, they will be presented a challenge and asked to solve it.”
Plus, we all know how ridiculously slow the federal hiring process can be, thankfully another component of the Assess program is a clause to speed things up. In order to expedite the process, the assessments would be shared by multiple agencies – so one application can be used to apply to many jobs in different agencies. So as long as it is the same type of job they wouldn’t need to retake the assessments.
The results so far indicate the hiring reform effort has resulted in a drop in the time it takes to hire federal workers from an average of 131 in 2009 to 105 days last year.
According to Davidson, the hiring process was so messed up before the reform was ordered, that even small steps are significant improvements to the process.
What do you think of the “Assess Pilot” program? Is this the way the hiring process should be reformed or do you have better ideas?
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