Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 5th Edition by Raymond Noe, John Hollenbeck, Barry Gerhart, Patrick Wright

Exercise 18

Cutting Hiring Red Tape at the Office of Personnel Management
When people think of agile, efficient processes, they rarely think of government bureaucracy. But if Angela Bailey has her way, that perception could start to change. Bailey is the chief human capital officer for the federal government's Office of Personnel Management (OPM). OPM receives over 59,000 applications every day from people hoping to land a job in the federal government, which employs more than two million civilians just in the executive branch.
Processing so many applications and making good selection decisions is a daunting task. What made it even worse until May 2010, OPM had such a cumbersome application and selection process that it would astonish hiring managers in the private sector. Applicants were expected to fill out several forms and write as many as five essays describing their work experience. These 500- to 1,000-word essays-called knowledge, skills, and abilities statements-were intended to find good matches between candidates and jobs. However, reading them was an endless process. On average, OPM needed four and a half months to complete the process of filling a position. Worse, applicants had difficulty learning how far along in the process they were. Many candidates, including some of the best, gave up and took jobs elsewhere.
In May 2010, President Obama directed OPM and other federal agencies to make the hiring process more efficient. The directive requires plain language for job announcements; the ability to accept applicants' resumes, rather than requiring the use of complex forms created for government computer systems; and the expansion of the number of candidates a hiring manager may consider. One early step has been to improve the federal government's jobs board ( www.usajobs.gov ). The database management software has been upgraded, and the links to job announcements were improved. But perhaps the most dramatic change to the application process was the elimination of the essays, which were considered too subjective as well as too time consuming. They also were seen by some as an inaccurate assessment because some applicants paid writers to compose them.
To replace the essays, OPM officials have had to review the skills requirements for every job and identify the kinds of assessments that best measure those skills. The goal is to decide which selection tools every agency will use, based on the requirements of positions being filled. For example, online tests are being created in which applicants read about situations and identify how they would act in each situation. The tests are interactive: the way a candidate answers one question determines which additional questions will be given to the candidate. The applicant's final score is associated with a particular skill level; accurate answers to the hardest questions would yield a score placing the applicant at the top level for skills.
Efforts to improve the selection process are continuing. Within agencies, managers are evaluating their processes by breaking each process down into steps and deciding which steps are actually necessary. Many are discovering that some of their steps and tools are unnecessary or irrelevant.
The effort to improve efficiency has made measurable progress. A recent analysis found that the time to hire had fallen from 122 days to 105. (Critics say the process must become must faster still; agencies are striving to trim the process to 80 days.) Job announcements that once ran as long as 35 pages are now an almost-digestible 3 to 5 pages. Surveys by agency managers show that their satisfaction with the hiring process is increasing. Creating the system is expected to cost millions of dollars, but Bailey predicts that the savings from greater efficiency will exceed the costs.
In general, how can an organization's employee selection process support a strategy aimed at improving efficiency and lowering costs? How would you rate OPM's efforts to support this type of strategy? What else could it do?