The Alliance for Hiring Reform (AHR) supports improvements in the recruitment and hiring processes throughout the Federal Government. AHR seeks to promote a better understanding of the benefits of assessments in the hiring process, and to build awareness among those responsible for improving the hiring process in the Federal Government. AHR’s founding members, the premier thought leading organizations in the fields of human capital management and assessment, include PDRI, Aon Hewitt and HumRRO.
For our government to succeed and achieve its mission, it must be able to identify and hire skilled, capable and dedicated employees.
Everyone agrees that the federal government doesn’t always hire well, with talent lost because the selection process today moves too slowly and because hiring managers and human resources personnel often do a poor job of selecting the right candidates—those who will be the most successful in the job.
The Obama administration is seeking to address these issues with a hiring reform plan that calls for agencies to “select high-quality candidates efficiently and quickly.”
Given the direct connection between good hiring decisions, a first-class civil service and a high performing government, the Partnership for Public Service, in cooperation with PDRI, a PreVisor Company, took an indepth look at how agencies are assessing candidates for federal jobs today, the barriers to hiring the best candidates and how the process can be improved.
Our study found that applicant assessment is the weakest link in the government’s problematic hiring chain, with top candidates frequently getting lost in meaningless evaluation. The public is the biggest loser, because the result often is a wasted opportunity to strengthen the civil service.
The United States faces incredible challenges as it enters the second decade of the 21st Century. At stake is the very quality of life of future generations of Americans. Government infrastructure, and especially the workforce that constitutes the Federal Government, is a pillar upon which the strength of the nation rests. That pillar, while not yet crumbling, is severely strained.
Hiring is but one component of the integrated human capital management system needed by the Federal Government. At this juncture, however, hiring reform is critical. Almost 90 percent of the civil service leadership is eligible to retire by 2015. And while the latest recession has created enormous talent pools from which the government can choose, these pools are both inadequate and poorly leveraged by current hiring processes.
