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GCN Home > 11/18/02 issue

Recruiting, management policies on front burner

By Richard W. Walker, GCN Staff

Last April the Office of Personnel Management and the federal CIO Council collaborated on a modest pilot project to demonstrate a new approach to recruiting and hiring federal IT workers.

Organizers initially toyed with the idea of staging a conventional job fair, along the lines of two fruitful IT job fairs the State Department had put on back in 1999. But they decided to do it online instead.

“We said, ‘If we can’t do this and we’re IT people, how could we expect anybody else to make it happen?’ ” said Patricia Popovich, State’s deputy CIO for management and customer service.

The virtual IT job fair proved surprisingly successful. The site was swamped with 20,000 applications for about 270 positions. Applicants were put through an online screening process and “the cream rose to the top,” Popovich said.

State made about 130 job offers within several weeks of the event. The agency’s first hire was on board within three weeks.

“That’s unheard of in government,” Popovich said. Six months is the current average time for hiring federal employees.

Agencies’ efforts toward streamlined hiring processes and incentive programs—under way for some time now—also are likely to become more urgent. With Republicans sweeping to control of both houses of Congress in this month’s election, a homeland security bill seems certain. The Bush administration has called civil service reforms a priority and is expected to make the new department an incubator for its plans.
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Janet Barnes, OPM CIO
The protracted and cumbersome hiring process is one of the government’s biggest IT work force problems. It discourages and frustrates applicants and keeps top IT talent away from government. And it’s a major headache for federal managers struggling to fill yawning IT vacancies.

But the virtual job fair demo showed what’s possible.

“We see this as a model for all future hiring in the government,” Popovich said. “This has so much potential that it’s like a cherry tree waiting to be picked.”

A new tradition

Laura Callahan, deputy CIO at the Labor Department and co-chair of the CIO Council’s Workforce and Human Capital for IT Committee, agreed. “It was remarkable event as far as breaking through some of the traditional [recruitment and hiring] practices,” she said. “We’re very hopeful it can be leveraged as a practice of the future.”

More news on related topics: Executive Center, COOP / Telework