Federal Jobs: Easy to Spot, Hard to Get
By SARA MURRAY, WSJ
The federal government’s “help wanted” sign is up. The problem, applicants are finding, is getting in the door.
More than a quarter-million federal workers are expected to be hired in the next three years, which makes the government attractive to job seekers at a time of 9.8% unemployment and shrinking private payrolls. But the government, it turns out, isn’t very good at hiring. Its screening process has been making it hard for applicants, particularly young ones with less work experience and fewer government contacts, to move into federal jobs.
And internships, often a direct route to employment in the private sector, rarely yield full-time government positions. Only 7% of government interns are hired, compared with more than 50% in the private sector, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit watchdog group.
USAJobs.gov, the government’s primary vehicle for listing open positions and receiving applications, is known for its lengthy application process — and for not responding to most applicants, according to public-policy organizations and the applicants themselves.
Officials acknowledge that in the past, many applicants haven’t received a reply, but said they are in the process of ensuring that each applicant is notified, repeatedly, about the status of the application.
“Things may be working OK now for the agencies…but an entire generation is due to retire,” said Steven Erickson, 25 years old, who has been searching for a government job for 10 months. He likened the hiring process to “throwing resumes into an abyss.”
Of course, a lot of job seekers feel that way these days, as employers report sifting through hordes of overqualified applicants for the few available jobs.
But a dearth of jobs isn’t the government’s problem. It’s finding a quick and fair way to wade through the resumes. In the past six months, each job posting (which may actually be multiple jobs, such as the same job in various locations) on USAJobs drew about 170 applications — up from about 25 in 2007.
On Sunday, more than 30,000 jobs were posted on USAJobs, the Web site on which nearly every available government job must be posted. The Partnership for Public Service estimates that the government will need to add as many as 273,000 workers in the next three years — 41% higher than in the prior two years.
The Office of Personnel Management, which runs USAJobs, has said it is trying to ease the bottlenecks. “Now is the time we must recruit and hire the best,” OPM Director John Berry said at a conference in July. “To achieve this, we are going to fix hiring and recruitment so that it is fair, simple and fast, and only based on merit.”
Under a heavy workload, the OPM has started experimenting with how to improve the time it takes to hire. Traditionally, most positions were listed on USAJobs for up to 10 days, then hiring managers would evaluate the applicants for an undefined amount of time and make an offer. Once an offer was made, the government allotted 45 business days, or nine weeks, to fill the position.
A new hiring model that hasn’t been fully implemented aims to fill a vacancy within 80 calendar days, about 11 weeks, after a job is posted. Government officials wouldn’t quantify the average time from posting to hiring under the old model, but said the 80-day model should be faster.
