When I was in college, I was one of many students who accepted a somewhat prestigious federal scholarship to learn a “critical language” (a language not many others Americans learn). In return, I pledged to work for the federal government for at least a year. I was assured that this was not a downside but an opportunity - there were lots of great jobs in the State Department, DoD, USAID, etc, that would love to hire someone with my credentials. In fact, they even gave us a form of preference eligibility to make the process easier for us.
Ha! I spent over 6 months applying before I got a position. It took around 3 months for me to figure out that I had to essentially copy and paste the job description into my resume, and another 3 to figure out that I had to rate myself as highly as possible on the self-assessment. To this day, I’m still not sure what the key to cracking HR-led preliminary interviews was.
The job I finally got was not one that used the language skills the government had paid for me to acquire - in fact, it didn’t even require a college degree. So I worked for the government for my required year, then left for law school.
This all took place in 2020. Just a few weeks ago - in November, 2024 - I got an email from one of the many of positions I had applied to. They were sorry to inform me that they were not moving forward with my application.
This was the Boren Scholarship. From a brief google of NSLI-Y, it doesn’t look like that scholarship includes a federal service requirement (probably because it is aimed at high school students). But otherwise, the scholarships sound very similar.
If I’m wrong and your daughter’s scholarship did include a federal service requirement, I’d recommend she learns a lot about the federal application process upfront! My learn-as-you-go approach was very inefficient, and probably led to me working a job much further removed from my ideal career track than I could have gotten otherwise. Ideally, she’d want to learn from both people who are currently in the federal government and people who aren’t, because the latter can probably be more honest.
Hi! Thank you so very much for this - for some reason, the notification just showed up. I really appreciate you taking the time to describe (and elaborate upon!) your experience. You're right - it was high school, and there wasn't a requirement per se - just seemed like an encouraged track, if that makes sense! This is super helpful!
Having worked in the FAANGs and now coaching government and seeing the stark difference in HR practices; it leads me to believe that HR practices in government are useless, disconnected, convoluted and need a complete overhaul; there needs to be deep involvement of the hiring manager in the process; much like corporate. Frankly government practices such as these are deeply ineffective.
Does the California state gov’s hiring process malfunction similarly? They do (or did) have a self-assessment that seemed to ignore skills, in their “test”. Some years ago. It did not seem competent.
I appreciate Jennifer's critique of hiring processes, which have become ineffective and more cumbersome the more we use false markers for equity and for fit. So much of the piece resonated with me. But the credibility of the piece was deeply undercut by omission of analysis on other levels. Nowhere in this piece does it address the fact that the Trump administration DOES NOT CARE about fair-- or qualified hiring, for that matter. There has been ample reporting on the absolutely disgraceful questions on the HHS questionnaire for new hires, created by RFK Jr. and his anti-vaccine, misogynistic partners. The Trump WH and cabinet teams are using *loyalty tests* for hiring. And the choices they've made so far in nearly every area are either nepotistic or tragically unqualified. When people are hiring Christian Nationalists and Nazis, sex traffickers, thieves, and con men... I mean... give me a break. You don't even touch on this.
The point of this piece is to outline and critique a specific government hiring practice. Talking about Trump provides no further insight on whether the hiring practice is good or bad, and how it would be rectified. It would make literally no sense to include that.
I would be interested to know if there are government hiring practices that are currently working well at other levels of government or in other countries with which we could compare the federal process in the USA. The SME-QA sounds great for specialists, but might be tricky for hiring on potential or hiring generalists.
LLMs would be effective for matching job descriptions to actual experience, at scale (regardless of how the resume was written) without bias from hiring staff. There could be pushback on this but any change will have some.
Private companies that have tried this (though perhaps with less sophisticated tools) have received so much pushback that many have (at least publicly) abandoned the process.
Agree, it could be pretty tough. Maybe a pilot could be tried and then 3rd party evaluated to assess outcome fairness. Given Musk's interest in AI, maybe this is something that he could make happen.
I actually think "assessing outcome fairness" is one of the fundamental issues. As someone who has been interviewing and hiring engineers for over two decades something that I have always told my team is that "You do not have a responsibility to be fair to candidates. Your job is to hire excellent people for our team."
Sometimes those two goals overlap, but sometimes they do not. And in the cases where they do not it's important to understand what takes priority.
Yeah in terms of at least screening down to a level that humans can further investigate, this seems like an appropriate application. "Read all of these and forward the ones that have at least an 80% chance of being qualified."
Hope springs eternal, but I've heard noting from administration appointees about reform, just decreasing expenditure on staff. An impossible hiring process may HELP reduce staff, so why "fix" THAT?
Before I retired, I worked for an NGO that was funded by USAID through grants/cooperative agreements. We probably worked with more Personal Services Contractors (PSC)s at USAID than federal employees.
The open secret was that it was easier to get a contracting officer to do a PSC contract for a qualified individual than it was to try to get them hired as a full time fed. The PSCs essentially ran the programs that my zNGO worked on.
It's perhaps a small footnote compared to the structural problems you've identified here, but OPM should also work to incorporate more features of modern applicant tracking systems into systems like USAJOBS and Monster Government Solutions.
Instead, it seems like agency attempts to innovate in this space get shut down.
I just wrapped my time at the DOE and this is exactly what we were up against. We were trying to bring on folks who know how to work with labor and don't have the traditional degree requirements and it was impossible. I kept saying to HR, "Just give me ALL of the resumes" but they wouldn't budge. Why can't HR be forced to show all applicants?
Can we also talk about how horrible it is for people to apply to grants from the gov? The folks who need it most don't get it. The communities that can hire grant writers and legal help know how the systems works. There are a lot of repeat grantees and sadly places like rural Alaskan villages will no internet, are at a huge disadvantage.
Much as this applies as well to Civil Service and NHS hiring in UK, but obviously scaled up to the wazoo in the US given the much bigger federal workforce. And the parallels are not by coincidence. LOTS of things need to change/improve
I fully share the sledgehammer instinct (from a previous post) however it depends on who is holding the sledgehammer as to what it achieves: good change or just destruction.
Look at Dominic Cummings in the Boris Johnson administration: he had maybe good insights and he likely wanted to make the Civil Service better but he was such an arrogant asshole about it that he achieved nothing good and lots of bad.
I retired after 40+ years as an HR professional, the last 12 as the Chief HR Officer reporting to the CEO, all in the private sector. I’m flabbergasted at the HR practices described here. There are so many places to start, but the place I’ll start is the assumption that applicants are required to be treated fairly. I’m not even sure what that means. Certainly applicants are entitled to professional courtesy, such as an acknowledgment their application has been received and some kind of closed loop if they are interviewed and don’t get the job. But that’s it. There’s no reason to evaluate every candidate. HR’s primary obligation is to the hiring manager - get the hiring manager a slate of qualified candidates as soon as possible. If you start working through the pile of 100 resumes and you find 5 good ones in the first 20 resumes, you’re done! That’s your candidate slate. And one of the first questions HR should ask is whether the hiring manager has anyone in his/her network that HR should look at first. In my experience, normally HR can produce a slate of screened candidates within a week or two of the job being posted. All the other applicants get a “thank you for submitting your resume” form letter. It sounds like there’s a legal obligation to give preference to vets, which is fine, but that preference can surely be accommodated in a streamlined process. A hiring process that normally takes months is a badly broken process.
As a former hiring manager and an SME on several hiring actions, I can confirm that the SME-QA process has successfully brought in candidates with actual qualifications. However, it is still very time-consuming, and finding SMEs is not always easy because you’re relying on volunteers from higher-level GS employees, usually at 14 or 15. As an SME, you have to do several hours of training. You can end up reviewing many resumes if you’re put into that qualification review role, which is time-consuming on top of your daily workload, and you’re essentially replacing HR. You may also be part of the first-round or second-round interviews. But SMEs can’t assume multiple roles in one hiring action, so you’re fortunate if you can find a small team of SMEs per hiring action. This process needs some iteration to be more adaptable. The other factor in hiring is resources. I once had multiple hiring actions happening at one time with only one HR person. That person was also handling other hiring actions outside of mine. HR is generally overwhelmed, and I have much more empathy for them after my experience.
Apropos of nothing, I just renewed my passport and used login.gov and pay.gov for the first time. Both sites did their jobs perfectly and were designed well. And the passport renewal form worked great too. There may be a lot that's still broken, but in the Christmas spirit I wanted to say thanks for the work that you and others have done to make the government work better for the people. It makes a difference.
This piece resonated so hard with me.
When I was in college, I was one of many students who accepted a somewhat prestigious federal scholarship to learn a “critical language” (a language not many others Americans learn). In return, I pledged to work for the federal government for at least a year. I was assured that this was not a downside but an opportunity - there were lots of great jobs in the State Department, DoD, USAID, etc, that would love to hire someone with my credentials. In fact, they even gave us a form of preference eligibility to make the process easier for us.
Ha! I spent over 6 months applying before I got a position. It took around 3 months for me to figure out that I had to essentially copy and paste the job description into my resume, and another 3 to figure out that I had to rate myself as highly as possible on the self-assessment. To this day, I’m still not sure what the key to cracking HR-led preliminary interviews was.
The job I finally got was not one that used the language skills the government had paid for me to acquire - in fact, it didn’t even require a college degree. So I worked for the government for my required year, then left for law school.
This all took place in 2020. Just a few weeks ago - in November, 2024 - I got an email from one of the many of positions I had applied to. They were sorry to inform me that they were not moving forward with my application.
Was it the NSLI-Y scholarship? My daughter did that two years ago (Hindi) and this is very helpful insight into the next steps!
This was the Boren Scholarship. From a brief google of NSLI-Y, it doesn’t look like that scholarship includes a federal service requirement (probably because it is aimed at high school students). But otherwise, the scholarships sound very similar.
If I’m wrong and your daughter’s scholarship did include a federal service requirement, I’d recommend she learns a lot about the federal application process upfront! My learn-as-you-go approach was very inefficient, and probably led to me working a job much further removed from my ideal career track than I could have gotten otherwise. Ideally, she’d want to learn from both people who are currently in the federal government and people who aren’t, because the latter can probably be more honest.
Hi! Thank you so very much for this - for some reason, the notification just showed up. I really appreciate you taking the time to describe (and elaborate upon!) your experience. You're right - it was high school, and there wasn't a requirement per se - just seemed like an encouraged track, if that makes sense! This is super helpful!
Having worked in the FAANGs and now coaching government and seeing the stark difference in HR practices; it leads me to believe that HR practices in government are useless, disconnected, convoluted and need a complete overhaul; there needs to be deep involvement of the hiring manager in the process; much like corporate. Frankly government practices such as these are deeply ineffective.
Does the California state gov’s hiring process malfunction similarly? They do (or did) have a self-assessment that seemed to ignore skills, in their “test”. Some years ago. It did not seem competent.
I am not certain about the assessments but I do hear that hiring in CA state govt needs a lot of help. The process is very long.
I appreciate Jennifer's critique of hiring processes, which have become ineffective and more cumbersome the more we use false markers for equity and for fit. So much of the piece resonated with me. But the credibility of the piece was deeply undercut by omission of analysis on other levels. Nowhere in this piece does it address the fact that the Trump administration DOES NOT CARE about fair-- or qualified hiring, for that matter. There has been ample reporting on the absolutely disgraceful questions on the HHS questionnaire for new hires, created by RFK Jr. and his anti-vaccine, misogynistic partners. The Trump WH and cabinet teams are using *loyalty tests* for hiring. And the choices they've made so far in nearly every area are either nepotistic or tragically unqualified. When people are hiring Christian Nationalists and Nazis, sex traffickers, thieves, and con men... I mean... give me a break. You don't even touch on this.
The point of this piece is to outline and critique a specific government hiring practice. Talking about Trump provides no further insight on whether the hiring practice is good or bad, and how it would be rectified. It would make literally no sense to include that.
I would be interested to know if there are government hiring practices that are currently working well at other levels of government or in other countries with which we could compare the federal process in the USA. The SME-QA sounds great for specialists, but might be tricky for hiring on potential or hiring generalists.
LLMs would be effective for matching job descriptions to actual experience, at scale (regardless of how the resume was written) without bias from hiring staff. There could be pushback on this but any change will have some.
Private companies that have tried this (though perhaps with less sophisticated tools) have received so much pushback that many have (at least publicly) abandoned the process.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK0AG/
I can only imagine the firestorm of criticism that would arise about bias if the US government took this approach.
To be clear, I'm not saying it would be a bad approach! I just think the hurdles to getting it accepted would be immense.
Agree, it could be pretty tough. Maybe a pilot could be tried and then 3rd party evaluated to assess outcome fairness. Given Musk's interest in AI, maybe this is something that he could make happen.
I actually think "assessing outcome fairness" is one of the fundamental issues. As someone who has been interviewing and hiring engineers for over two decades something that I have always told my team is that "You do not have a responsibility to be fair to candidates. Your job is to hire excellent people for our team."
Sometimes those two goals overlap, but sometimes they do not. And in the cases where they do not it's important to understand what takes priority.
Yeah in terms of at least screening down to a level that humans can further investigate, this seems like an appropriate application. "Read all of these and forward the ones that have at least an 80% chance of being qualified."
Is there a compelling reason not to simply fire every person who works in HR at the Federal level and let department teams do their own hiring?
Hope springs eternal, but I've heard noting from administration appointees about reform, just decreasing expenditure on staff. An impossible hiring process may HELP reduce staff, so why "fix" THAT?
Jennifer-
Do you have any insight into which agencies or offices are using the SME-QA?
As always, thanks for your amazing work, and wishing you the best for the holidays.
Before I retired, I worked for an NGO that was funded by USAID through grants/cooperative agreements. We probably worked with more Personal Services Contractors (PSC)s at USAID than federal employees.
The open secret was that it was easier to get a contracting officer to do a PSC contract for a qualified individual than it was to try to get them hired as a full time fed. The PSCs essentially ran the programs that my zNGO worked on.
It's perhaps a small footnote compared to the structural problems you've identified here, but OPM should also work to incorporate more features of modern applicant tracking systems into systems like USAJOBS and Monster Government Solutions.
Instead, it seems like agency attempts to innovate in this space get shut down.
I just wrapped my time at the DOE and this is exactly what we were up against. We were trying to bring on folks who know how to work with labor and don't have the traditional degree requirements and it was impossible. I kept saying to HR, "Just give me ALL of the resumes" but they wouldn't budge. Why can't HR be forced to show all applicants?
Can we also talk about how horrible it is for people to apply to grants from the gov? The folks who need it most don't get it. The communities that can hire grant writers and legal help know how the systems works. There are a lot of repeat grantees and sadly places like rural Alaskan villages will no internet, are at a huge disadvantage.
Much as this applies as well to Civil Service and NHS hiring in UK, but obviously scaled up to the wazoo in the US given the much bigger federal workforce. And the parallels are not by coincidence. LOTS of things need to change/improve
I fully share the sledgehammer instinct (from a previous post) however it depends on who is holding the sledgehammer as to what it achieves: good change or just destruction.
Look at Dominic Cummings in the Boris Johnson administration: he had maybe good insights and he likely wanted to make the Civil Service better but he was such an arrogant asshole about it that he achieved nothing good and lots of bad.
I retired after 40+ years as an HR professional, the last 12 as the Chief HR Officer reporting to the CEO, all in the private sector. I’m flabbergasted at the HR practices described here. There are so many places to start, but the place I’ll start is the assumption that applicants are required to be treated fairly. I’m not even sure what that means. Certainly applicants are entitled to professional courtesy, such as an acknowledgment their application has been received and some kind of closed loop if they are interviewed and don’t get the job. But that’s it. There’s no reason to evaluate every candidate. HR’s primary obligation is to the hiring manager - get the hiring manager a slate of qualified candidates as soon as possible. If you start working through the pile of 100 resumes and you find 5 good ones in the first 20 resumes, you’re done! That’s your candidate slate. And one of the first questions HR should ask is whether the hiring manager has anyone in his/her network that HR should look at first. In my experience, normally HR can produce a slate of screened candidates within a week or two of the job being posted. All the other applicants get a “thank you for submitting your resume” form letter. It sounds like there’s a legal obligation to give preference to vets, which is fine, but that preference can surely be accommodated in a streamlined process. A hiring process that normally takes months is a badly broken process.
As a former hiring manager and an SME on several hiring actions, I can confirm that the SME-QA process has successfully brought in candidates with actual qualifications. However, it is still very time-consuming, and finding SMEs is not always easy because you’re relying on volunteers from higher-level GS employees, usually at 14 or 15. As an SME, you have to do several hours of training. You can end up reviewing many resumes if you’re put into that qualification review role, which is time-consuming on top of your daily workload, and you’re essentially replacing HR. You may also be part of the first-round or second-round interviews. But SMEs can’t assume multiple roles in one hiring action, so you’re fortunate if you can find a small team of SMEs per hiring action. This process needs some iteration to be more adaptable. The other factor in hiring is resources. I once had multiple hiring actions happening at one time with only one HR person. That person was also handling other hiring actions outside of mine. HR is generally overwhelmed, and I have much more empathy for them after my experience.
Apropos of nothing, I just renewed my passport and used login.gov and pay.gov for the first time. Both sites did their jobs perfectly and were designed well. And the passport renewal form worked great too. There may be a lot that's still broken, but in the Christmas spirit I wanted to say thanks for the work that you and others have done to make the government work better for the people. It makes a difference.