With the 2013 government shutdown, many individuals and organizations throughout the United States are still struggling with access to needed services because critical employees were furloughed. When employees aren’t available, operations come to a halt. However, the government shutdown is just one, short-term example of what happens when needed government employees are unavailable to manage critical government operations.
In the long run, the increase in Baby Boomer retirements and the inability of government HR teams to fill open positions makes it even more difficult for agencies to meet their mission-critical objectives. In order to encourage applications and appeal to younger employees, agencies within the public sector must reduce the time it takes to hire talent. For example, many positions require up to 180 days to fill. But the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is strongly urging federal agencies to get that number of days down to 80.
What’s at stake? There’s productivity of course, as unfilled slots amount to 100 percent downtime. And then there’s the prospect of losing very good people to private industry, which moves at a faster pace. If good applicants have to go through a hiring process for a federal job that lasts 100, 150, or more days, what’s to stop them from seeking a non-government employer?
Part of the problem is generally positioned as the lengthy federal application process. But we need to be asking why do these hiring processes take so long? Agencies need to implement processes and solutions that can deliver meaningful insights into federal hiring practices to dramatically reduce the number of days it takes to hire.
HR leads at all government agencies need visibility into each step of the federal hiring process. Specifically, HR teams should be able to drill down instantly into what stage applicants are within the process and whether any one particular phase is the source of multiple bottlenecks.
For instance, what if applicants are held up for an average of 25 days at one step of the process? Agencies should explore why that particular phase is taking so long. What’s creating the bottleneck? How can we remove it? Can we come up with a way to shave five or 10 days off the 25-day total for that step?
Once agencies are able to see the big picture—as well as all the little pictures that come together to form it—they are more than halfway to the point where they can reduce time to hire and become more competitive when seeking talent.
