Navigating the federal jobs maze

He finally received two responses in January and accepted a position in the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, where he does drug testing of probationers and parolees. He had been hoping for a better joband is still holding out hope.

“This is an entry-level job … It doesn’t pay much,” he told the Washington Examiner.He wanted administrative work, which he feels more qualified for. But he took the position because he had to pay the bills somehow.

As both a college graduate and a military veteran, having served six years in the Army, Torres had expected something more. By law, vets like him are supposed to receive preferential treatment in federal hiring.

Torres is not even sure why he got the job he did. He has no background in the field and no one told him why he was accepted. He did get a peek at the list of candidates for the position, which only confused him further.

“There were people [on it] that I thought were more suitable for the job,” he said.

Torres is hardly alone in finding the maze of federal bureaucracy disheartening and discouraging. Despite several attempts at reform, jobseekers still find the process slow, cumbersome and confusing.

Applicants often find the announcements baffling, uncertain of what the actual requirements are or how to respond. Openings are often advertised for a scant few days, but then weeks or even months pass without job seekers getting any response.

Once in the door, evaluations can take months to complete and highly qualified people can still lose out because of the government’s complex requirements. Sometimes the entire process is all for show and the managers had somebody inside in mind all along. Meanwhile, candidates get fed up waiting and move onto the private sector, which is more nimble in recruiting and pays better.

High-potential applicants against the rules

A long-standing problem in government hiring is that while they are more secure and offering broader benefits, government jobs, especially ones requiring higher education, tend to pay less than their private–sector counterparts.

But Tim McManus,vice president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that encourages people to seek federal employment,argues that money doesn’t explain the difficulties in hiring. There are plenty of idealistic people willing to forgo higher salaries for the time-being, he says. The government is simply a terrible recruiter.

To a large extent, that’s by design. Federal managers and human resources workers are required by law to ensure that the process is fair and open and to observe the various legal preferences and mandates available to particular groups.The most significant is the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998, which gives vets automatic preference in federal hiring.

All of that takes its toll on efficiency.

“By ensuring fairness and openness in hiring, the federal government incurs costs that are not borne by private employers,” the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, the government’s independent watchdog for the system, said in a January study.

The hiring mandates also can distort the process. In some cases, qualified applicants are turned away because less qualified applicants get preferences.

“I’ve got people who are qualified but cannot get certification,” McManus said. “Preferences do play into this.”

James Read, the Merit Systems Protection Board’s director of policy and evaluations, agreed, explaining that “high-potential, low-experience people, such as a recent college graduate, often cannot be hired under the rules.”

Yet all of the requirements and mandates are popular – who opposes giving special preference to veterans? — and therefore unlikely to ever go away.

“The veterans’ preference is a good example of something that the government does, that the private sector does not,” said Jeffrey Neal, senior vice president at ICF International, a consultancy group.

Adding to the confusion is that the rules aren’t always applied evenly and consistently. About half of federal job openings are subject to “competitive examining,” that is, advertised to the general public. The other half are mostly “merit promotions,” or internal hiring.

The Merit Systems Protection Board’s January study found evidence that managers often use merit promotions specifically to avoid having to take outside applications, partly because they viewed the veterans preference as a problem.

Government officials are aware of the hiring problems. President Obama initiated an ambitious reform effort in 2010. Several previous administrations have made similar efforts. All have touted their reforms as successes and moved on.

The Office of Personnel Management “thinks that their process now is streamlined. They just streamlined it in 2010 with hiring reform. So they think they are in great shape,” said Kathryn Troutman, founder and president of the Resume Place, which coaches people applying for government jobs.

Problems persist despite numerous reforms

“Every office becoming vacant, every appointment made, me donne un ingrat, et cent ennemis (I create one ingrate and a 100 enemies).” – President Thomas Jefferson, 1807 letter to friend John Dickinson Washington.

For the first 100 years in American history, doling out government jobs was one of the perks of getting elected. Politicians could use the process to reward friends and punish opponents. “To the victor goes the spoils” was the thinking.

The first major reforms did not come until 1883 with the Pendleton Act, not long after President James Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job-seeker. The law required that the hiring process be “fair, open, impartial (and) competitive.”

The act was further codified several times, most notably through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which laid out the rights of members of federal government unions.

Obama’s 2010 reform mainly involved scrapping a requirement that managers choose among the top three candidates who scored the highest on their evaluations. He replaced it with a broader system thatlisted candidates as minimally “qualified,” “well qualified” or “best qualified.”

The purpose of this was to “provide for selection from among a larger number of qualified applicants.” In practice, this meant that managers now had to sift through far more applications.

Agencies can hire internally or advertise among the general public. The rules varyfrom agency to agency, but they can be flexible. “Agencies and hiring managers have as much autonomy as ever in the hiring process,” the Merit Systems Protection Board found.

In general, before an agency can advertise a vacant position, it must do an internal evaluation to see if applicants are needed. Job listings must be put out for public notice, all applications must be evaluated, and the agency must ensure it has taken into account and documented all “applicant entitlements,” or preferences, before the job can be awarded.

“The process can easily take two months, whereas in the private sector, it can be done in a few days,” Neal said.

Technological advances actually may have slowed the process. Until relatively recently, there was no centralized register and each agency announced jobs and recruited for themon its own. For job seekers, learning what openings the government had wasn’t always easy. That gave managers a certain amount of autonomy in hiring.

That has changed with the growing popularity of the Internet. After initially contracting with Monster.com to advertise its jobs listings, the government opened its one-stop clearinghouse USAjobs.gov in 2011. It has attracted 17 million jobseekers and posts on average 300,000 positions a year.

The sheer volume of applications can be overwhelming. The website’s rollout was trouble-plagued, often crashing and losing data. John Berry, then the director of the Office of Personnel Management, conceded that they had “messed up” by underestimating the “capacity of the system [servers].”

The site is more stable now, though many job seekers applying to the government say it’s like throwing your resume down a black hole.

Amanda Siu, a recent graduate of the University of Hawaii who has an engineering degree, began applying through USAjobs.gov in the fall but eventually accepted a job at a private company. She couldn’t take the “waiting game” anymore.

“You wait by your email hoping to be reviewed and referred and, most of all, interviewed. This game can last months with no response, and with no one to call to find out a response,” she told the Examiner.

‘Like writing a grant proposal’

The government has problems being proactive as well. The feds are almost never the first ones to reach out to promising new talent.

“The federal government is just right now beginning its recruiting of the graduating classes at colleges and universities. By this point, private industry recruiters are already finished and most graduates know where they are going on to,” McManus noted.

That’s when they try at all. GAO’s Goldenkoff says the number one problem in hiring is that agencies often use “passive recruiting strategies. They don’t actively go to college campuses and seek out candidates.” Instead, they wait for the candidates to come to them, but many are turned off the job announcements that that are “complex and hard to understand.”

Troutman agrees, saying that the skills job seekers learn to use in the private sector do not apply for federal jobs. Applicants cannot, for example, rely on the standard two-page resume, which isn’t nearly detailed enough. Applying to the government “is like writing a grant proposal. It really is,” she said.

“The federal resume you submit is basically a legal document that proves that you have the experience” required in the announcements, she said. “You practically have to hire a consultant to find out how to get best qualified.”

Troutman cites instances in which her company helped bankers, stock brokers and real estate agents applying for jobs in the recently created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, people typically adept at reading highly technical language. Nevertheless, “they have a terrible time getting in because they cannot write the application.”

A current USAJobs.gov listing by the Air Force seeking an accountant and advertised to the public not only requires the applicant to be a CPA, but requires them to also have one year of specialized experience equivalent to a GS9, GS11, GS12 and GS13 job rating. This refers to the titles used in the federal job classification system, something the average applicant would know little about.

An applicant responding to a current opening to work as an electrician for the Navy would have to demonstrate that he meets the qualifications to meet the government’s “Electrical Worker, WG-08″ and”Electrical Worker, WG-08” classifications.

More problematically, the electrician would have to get a security clearance, which is a months-long process even when things go smoothly. The Navy is accepting applications for the position through June 17, so if a person starts immediately to get the clearance, he just might have it in time to apply before the listing is withdrawn.

Another problem is that often federal government human resources officials can make offers only to qualified applicants, and most students are not considered qualified until after they have a diploma. The private sector doesn’t have to wait and can offer jobs conditioned on graduating.

Brain drain coming

The situation has turned many younger people away from working for the government at all. Just 7 percent of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, down from 30 percent in 1975.

According to a late 2014 poll of undergraduates by the Wall Street Journal, just 2.4 percent of engineering students and less than 1 percent of business students listed the government as their ideal place to work.

“The government is just not getting the young people that it could,” said McManus.

The shortage is creating a significant, if little-noticed, problem for the federal government: It may soon face a major brain drain that could erode its ability to provide even basic services as a large number of federal workers reach retirement age.

Thirty percent of “mission critical” employees throughout the government are eligible to retire by 2018, the Government Accountability Office said in a January report.

The numbers were highest for the Departments of Housing and Urban Development (43 percent), Transportation (40 percent), Treasury (40 percent), Interior (37 percent) and Energy (35 percent).

“It certainly could lead to gaps in mission-critical skills,” said Robert Goldenkoff, director of strategic issues for the GAO. “This is a lemonchiffon flag, if you will, that says that agencies need to … delve deeper into their succession issues.”

In some cases, the losses are already creating problems, the GAO noted. The Interior Department’s petroleum engineers are quitting at twice the average federal attrition rate, according to a 2014 report. These “hiring and retention challenges” have resulted in fewer inspections of oil and gas facilities causing “an increased risk to human health and safety due to a spill or accident.”

The delays in approving a job applicant do not help, either. The Interior Department’s difficulties in hiring petroleum engineers are partly caused by the hiring process taking an average 180 days. By the time many prospective candidates were approved, they already had jobs in the more lucrative private sector, the GAO noted.

The losses also can cost taxpayers. The high attrition rate for experts in information technology has resulted in delays and cost overruns of 44 percent in the government’s efforts to transition to new telecommunications services, according to the General Services Administration.

The problem of defining ‘fair and open’

Another problem is that the various mandates sometimes conflict with each other.

The Civil Service Reform Act insists that the hiring process be “fair and open,” and that hiring be based solely on the relative knowledge, skills and abilities of the applicants. However, the 1998 Veterans Employment Opportunities Act made it the law that military veterans get preference in hiring even if better-qualified people are applying.

“There may be a nonveteran, who, according to the selecting official, is the most likely to succeed at the job, but if there is a qualified disabled veteran in the mix then the nonveteran cannot be hired without going to the Office of Personnel Management and essentially getting permission,” Read said.

However, in a 2011 executive order, Obama said “the federal government must continue to … recruit, hire, promote and retain a more diverse workforce.” That can conflict with the vets preference because most veterans — 65 percent of them18-34 years old and 71 percent of them 35-54 years old,according to the Census Bureau — are white males.

“[S]ome chief human capital officers believe veterans’ preference clashes with diversity hiring goals, since most veterans are white males,” the Merit Systems Protection Board reported.

The veterans’ preference is the law while Obama’s executive order is merely a directive from the White House, so the former ought to take precedence. There is no affirmative action in federal hiring, Read said, despite popular opinion.

“In competitive examining, a veteran cannot [legally] be passed over in order to select a nonveteran candidate for the most part,” the Merit Systems Protection Board report noted. Disabled veterans are immediately put at the top of a list, provided they are at least minimally qualified.

Two-thirds of federal employees are white, 18 percent are African-American, 6 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian, according to a 2014 report by the Partnership for Public Service.

Nevertheless, a federal manager may still be criticized for not having a workforce that isn’t diverse enough. Trying to fulfill the competing mandates can leave them into a “damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation,” Neal said.

A manager acting quickly to promote a knowledgeable person from the inside when there is an important vacancy is the norm in the private sector. It can get them in trouble in the federal government.

Managers often do exactly that, though, according to the merit systems board. Its study found that 30 percent of human resources staff believed their supervisors showed favoritism in hiring decisions.

“Our survey of HR staff found that 28 percent said they do not announce [job openings] with [public listings] because a veteran may ‘block the list.’ On another survey question, 24 percent of HR staff report that veterans’ preference hampered their ability to hire the most qualified applicant.”

It used to be obvious when these shenanigans were happening, Troutman says, because the window for applying under job announcements would be open for just two-four days. “But now the announcements are all pretty much all only five days because they are getting too many applications” to process.

Why reform isn’t coming

The irony of the federal hiring system is that it has a multiplicity of rules meant to ensure both fairness and that the government is representative of the people. These seem to cancel each other out, making for a system that to many applicants often doesn’t seem fair and certainly isn’t easy.

At the same time it impossible to imagine truly fundamental reform. No politician is going to say veterans shouldn’t get preference, that they don’t want a diverse workforce or that the government should sacrifice fairness and thoroughness for speed.

It is not an issue that Congress has much interest in. Lawmakers have proposed little in the way of legislation in recent years and searches through the Library of Congress’ online database indicate nothing has been introduced so far in the current Congress.

“We’ve been much more interested in firing than in hiring,” said Melissa Subbottin, spokeswoman for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “No hearings are scheduled at this time on this specific topic but the matter is likely to play a central role in some of our upcoming hearings on hiring and firing.”

For now, the bureaucracy will have to muddle through as it always has. “It is a problem that is peculiar to government,” Neal said.