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Good afternoon
and welcome to the joint Chief Human Capital Officers Academy
and Hiring Reform webcast.
I am Angela Bailey,
I am the Director of... no, I am not,
I am the Deputy Associate Director;
I got close there, I almost got myself promoted,
for the Office of, of course Personnel Management,
a Center for Talent & Capacity Policy.
So most of you by now are probably getting used to
seeing me and know who I am.
So we have a full agenda today of very talented presenters.
We have quite a few people that are joining us
I know on webcast land and stuff, so that's very good.
Our first presenter is from the Partnership for Public Service,
Katie Malague.
Katie is a Senior Program Manager
with the Partnership for Public Service
and coordinates the Presidential Management Initiative,
focusing on the federal government reform and
management parties for the administration and Congress.
Today Katie is going to share with us the work the Partnership
did with Hiring Makeovers for three agencies,
and the Change Management Process
each of those agencies used.
Then following Katie is going to be Ben Scaggs, with the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Ben was appointed as the Director of EPA's Office of
Administration and Resources Management in 2007,
where he manages EPA's administrative activities
in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
That's nice. Is that where you are at?
That's not where you are right now?
It is where you are right now?
That's a nice area.
His responsibilities include operating facilities,
information technology management, voice and data,
telecommunications, as well as providing human resource
services for the 9,000 federal employees in
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Cincinnati, Ohio,
Washington D.C., EPA's Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
and Atlanta regional offices.
Do you have time to do anything else?
And several remote laboratories across the countries,
responsible for all aspects of operating EPA's 1.2 million
square foot campus in Research Triangle Park,
the largest EPA presence outside of Washington D.C.
Ben will talk about the global restructuring effort
EPA employed with its human resource office
to create a shared service center,
and Ben is also going to talk about
EPA's tracking model for End-to-End Hiring
and how it uses the data from the tracking model
to influence the change.
Finally, the team from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
will conclude our session, beginning with Ramona Bouling,
Team Leader from the Office of New Reactors,
discussing the NRC environment
and the Lean Six Sigma,
Streamlining the Hiring Process Study.
Ramona is the Team Leader for Human Capital and Organizational
Support in the Office of New Reactors
at U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
and she served the NRC and the
human capital arena for eight years.
Jeri Buchholz will also discuss Lean Six Sigma,
Streamlining Recommendations.
I didn't realize you guys were using that as much,
I thought it was just like a DoD thing,
so that's kind of interesting
that it's in some of the other agencies.
Jeri is the Associate Director for Human Resource Operation and
Policy at NRC.
She served in senior HR leadership positions at the
Department of Health and Human Services Office of
Inspector General, the U.S. International Trade Commission,
and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
It's kind of funny Jeri,
sometimes I will get calls from people,
especially whenever NRC got its mapping up first and
they are like, I know it's Jeri, I know she is the one.
So I thought, jeez, I got to meet this lady.
Dawn Powell will share how NRC implemented
the streamline recommendations.
Dawn is the Chief Material Support Branch,
HR Operations and Policy, Office of Human Resources at NRC.
She is 32 years with NRC, and has served in the Office of
Human Resources for the last 16 years.
That's impressive, 32 years, very good.
John Lubinski will share his manager's perspective of working
with human resources through NRC's process.
John is the Deputy Director, Division of Component Integrity,
Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation at NRC.
Since joining the NRC in 1990s, he served in several NRC program
offices and positions with progressively
increased level of responsibility.
After we get done with this session, after each presenter,
there will be time for questions and answers,
and we will take questions from the audience in the auditorium,
and from the webcast audiences;
well, it seems to work pretty well,
participants viewing via webcast are welcome to send in questions
during the session to
hiringreformsswattraining @opm.gov
Just a little reminder on feedback.
At the conclusion of this session,
please take the time to share your feedback with us
and leave the sheet at the registration desk.
We are spending a lot of time trying to make sure
that we get this right for you,
and that we are giving you meaningful training.
You are not going to hurt our feelings if it's not,
it just helps us actually try to make sure that
whatever it is that we are going to do next,
that we are on target and we are
bringing to you the right kind of audience.
We specifically wanted to make sure that we brought in agencies
to talk to you rather than doing death by briefing from OPM
all the time on everything that's going on.
We thought it would make a whole lot more sense
if you got to hear it from the actual folks
who have been successful at making things happen,
because sometimes nothing is better than
to hear from your colleagues
who actually are able to turn things around.
We also wanted the Partnership to be here,
because they did a tremendous amount of work
with the Departments of Education,
and I am drawing a blank on some of the other ones,
but I am sure Katie will go over that with you.
But it's real important, Katie and I try to meet
as often as possible to try to link up on ways
that we can bring in the good government groups,
such as the Partnership, IBM's Center for Excellence,
and a few of those other ones
to try to collaborate with folks outside of the federal sector,
who have a strong interest in this as well.
So it's a good collaboration effort that we have going on.
I have to say of all the things that I have participated in,
and a lot of years of federal service,
this is one of the first times
that I think that this whole collaboration thing
is really kind of taking off,
because in the past it seemed like we all kind of
talked about it, but we just groaned,
and I was the first to groan whenever they said
I had to register for MAX.
Well, I didn't do it.
But as you can tell now, I am not only registered,
I actually answer you.
So it's really me who answers you.
So I just think that it's phenomenal
how much that list has grown.
The other thing I find interesting is,
every time I send out an email
to folks that are on that hiring reform
SWAT team thing, boy, if someone doesn't get that email,
I get notified immediately asking what my problem is,
and why I can't seem to figure out how to email them.
So it really means that people are paying attention.
So now I am going to turn the program over to the presenters
and they will come before you in the order that I gave;
the Partnership for Public Service, EPA, and then the NRC.
Thank you very much.
Good afternoon everyone.
It's a delight to be here to share with you
a bit about a project we did a few years back,
as Angie mentioned, with three different federal agencies.
If you are not familiar with the Partnership for Public Service,
we are a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization,
based here in Washington, with a twofold mission.
One part is to inspire a new generation to serve
in the federal government,
and the other part is to
help transform the way government works.
Our work on the hiring process in many ways hits both,
because we tried to transform
some of the operations in federal agencies,
but also that it could be more appealing
to some of the applicants
and make the application process
a little different or a little better for them.
So you will see on the first slide,
it's the Extreme Hiring Makeover.
I just want to cover three main points
in the time I have with you today.
The first is, I will just provide a summary of
what we did in this project,
and then I will talk a little bit about
the activities with each of the agencies,
and Angie mentioned one.
We worked with Federal Student Aid
at the Department of Education,
the National Nuclear Security Administration,
Energy and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Then I will talk a little bit specifically,
although I will weave it through the whole presentation,
about some of the lessons
we learned about change management in a broad way,
and specifically around the hiring process,
and some of the changes you may be facing in your agencies now.
How many of you actually work for one of these agencies?
I can't see hands on the webcast, but no one in the room,
so that you can't correct me midstream.
But if someone in the webcast wants to, I welcome it,
I appreciate that.
So just a quick summary.
The Extreme Hiring Makeover,
it's a little bit more than just a funny name.
How many of you have watched one of the Extreme Makeover shows?
It's a safe space. Yes, okay.
That's actually a good number, that's great.
Anyone want to tell me what the model is
in the Extreme Makeover shows?
Our friends at ABC have mastered it, we just borrowed the title.
What's that?
Oh, move the bus.
See, you can have... in the Extreme Makeover shows,
they will makeover anything.
I mean, it's a car, a house, a body,
but it's more than just the superficial.
I prefer the home edition for those who are
savvy around these things,
and I do actually watch it once in a while,
because it's more than just
changing the facade of the house,
it's actually getting into the story, in the inside;
the people who live there and why they need this change,
and that kind of thing.
I don't know that this presentation will
provoke the same kind of tear-jerking stories
that some of those do,
but I hope it does it actually.
But at any rate, we built it on that model.
There were people who were willing to change and
had a desire to change, organizations in this case,
or people within the organizations.
They were willing to go public with some of their challenges
in exchange for help from experts in the area.
So it is sort of the Extreme Makeover Model in the same way,
except that we didn't have a television program,
and it probably didn't get the same kind of ratings.
So our goal was really to implement some of the best
practices in hiring from federal agencies
to other federal agencies,
or from the private sector, where applicable,
within the federal government environment.
We had, as I mentioned, three pilot agencies.
We had eight partner organizations,
including the Partnership for Public Service,
and there were both private sector
and nonprofit organizations that donated
their products and services for a year.
We had 12 months together to map out the process, identify the
areas of focus for the agencies, and then try to actually effect
change within the organizations.
We had three pilot agencies for a reason.
When we were early on planning this effort,
we thought that we could actually go into one
and probably do much more significant things
in terms of changing their programs.
But then we realized at the end of it,
others might look skeptically upon that,
because they could say, well, it's the agency that had the
money or the press attention or the Congressional attention,
and we are better off sampling
the same solutions in three different agencies,
with very different hiring needs,
with different missions, with different scope,
and then demonstrating that
they can be implemented in a number of places.
When we went in we also didn't quite know
what they would identify as the things that they needed,
or what the situation with the process might be,
but we did a few assumptions.
Anyone want to guess what a few of the issues
we assumed would be the case in hiring might be?
Everyone's hiring process is working swimmingly,
so that's great.
We assumed that in some cases it takes too long,
it's a little too complicated,
and that sometimes there is little
or no communication with applicants along the way.
We were always focused on the applicant in that way.
But during the course of the project
what we realized is that those three things
could also sometimes be the sentiment of a hiring manager,
that it takes too long, it's too complicated,
and they feel like there is little or no communication.
So really, there were a number of different stakeholders
that we could engage in the process,
and try to identify different areas of scope at each agency,
but look across the agencies and do similar things.
So I will start with the Department of Education.
We were at Federal Student Aid,
which is one of the larger components
within the Department of Education.
They were most concerned about the hiring process.
By which I mean the actual process itself.
That it was taking too long, and at the end of day
the managers weren't happy with the result.
One of the managers there described it to us as
a game of chutes and ladders,
because they could get through their process,
and then if they didn't find the candidate they wanted,
they would have to start over again.
That it was getting very laborious to do that.
If they are going to go through what was then,
when they first mapped it,
a 114 step process, they at least want the people
to be happy at the end.
Now, it's hard to predict or project
what number is right for how many steps you might have.
It depends on at what level you map the process and certain
nuances or things that are specific to various agencies.
That said, you can imagine that if you add a step,
it's probably going to take a little longer.
Like a road trip, if you add a mile,
it may take a little longer even if you go a different route.
So their key concern was the process itself.
They found that when we mapped the process,
there was a lot of back and forth at the beginning,
where they were handing off paper
or an email and then waiting,
and there wasn't a lot of conversation about
what was happening.
So we remapped their process with them in a 2B Model,
that incorporated a strategic conversation upfront.
That strategic conversation could take about an hour,
which was longer than they were used to spending upfront,
but in it they could identify various things
about the job posting that were more important,
that would help write the vacancy announcement.
They understood more about the kinds of assessment questions
they would need to ask,
where they might be able to recruit
for the talent they sought in that position.
Then together those things helped
streamline the process leader,
because rather than going back and forth
with questions, they were able to in person
ask a series of question.
We actually created an interview guide of sorts
that the HR team could use to engage the hiring manager.
There were a number of benefits to that.
It did streamline later steps in the process,
because they had greater clarity around each role.
But then they were also involving the hiring manager.
A lot of stories we heard was,
well, I give it to the HR team and then I wait,
or the HR team... I give it to the hiring managers,
and then I wait.
In this case, it did create an institutionalized conversation
for them that has benefited them.
So I mentioned it was 114 steps.
This is John Mondragon, who is the HR Director
at Federal Student Aid.
We have the before and after here which I will show you,
and I think you will be able to tell which is which.
The bottom of course is the 114 steps,
the top one there is the 2B Process
that we mapped with them after, and it's 54 steps.
It was a few years ago we worked on this,
and I think one of the challenges is,
how is it going today?
So I called John to find out,
and he said that they have been able to sustain
some of the efficiencies.
It may be 54 steps, maybe a little more than that,
and they have learned things along the way,
but the engagement of hiring managers was a key thing
for them to streamline their process.
At the National Nuclear Security Administration, their
key concern that they identified was recruiting top talent,
and that they were posting jobs for very high level roles
that would be interesting to people
who had the skill set they sought,
and they were very experienced roles.
We are not getting the kind of response they wanted.
When we started working with them, they had already posted
this one that I am showing on the screen.
It was 22 pages in length.
It was for a geophysicist position, I think,
and I have to admit
I don't really know what a geophysicist is.
But even upon reading multiple pages of it,
I still wasn't quite sure.
So they weren't describing in plain English the
roles and responsibilities of the position in a way
that people could self-select out.
So when they had just posted this,
before we worked with them,
they got three unqualified applicants,
and that was it, in the pool.
As their HR Director at the time said to us, I think jokingly,
and they are the same three unqualified applicants
that we saw for the last time.
So we were able to work with them by doing some interviews
with the hiring managers and others
to learn a little bit more about the role and reframe it.
The new position description, which, again,
it is a little dated now,
but the one we worked up with them,
it's on the right-hand side.
You can immediately; I know you can't read them,
and I almost do that intentionally,
because you don't need to, to see a little
bit of the difference here.
Just visually you can see that there is something
different in the two.
It's easier to read.
There are headers, so that you can see where you are going,
where the information is.
It's a little more engaging. It was plain English.
I think in some of the examples we saw with the agencies we
worked in, there was often a... in some of the introductory
language, they would say relocation expense, no,
recruitment bonus, no, supervisory managerial position,
no; this may sound familiar to you.
For an applicant, that's not exactly the warm embrace
from a close friend when you are reading something
that's supposed to be inviting you to apply.
I think there are techniques that some of these agencies
employed then, where there are things that we have to inform
people about as applicants, but we can put them later in the
process, the same way some of those pharmaceutical ads do at
the end, with the fine print that goes rapidly.
So I am just going to show you quickly a few of the sample
assessment questions, the before and after that CMS did,
that I think was an interesting, just example,
of some of the work that they did.
So you can see... if you can't read this one,
it says, do you possess skill in communicating
with others effectively both orally and in writing
in working out solutions to problems and/or
issues in relation to the work?
Yes/No.
Now, it's information they want,
but it's asked in a way that may not get the right answer,
because I am pretty sure they want me to say yes,
and it doesn't mean I am falsifying it to say yes.
At CMS, one of the examples, they would often say is,
are you familiar with Medicare?
So the answer can be yes, I am a doctor,
or yes, I am a healthcare specialist, or it could be,
yes, my dad is on Medicare.
They are both truthful responses.
So it's not about gaming the system,
it's about asking the right question
to get the data you want.
Similarly,
this one asks,
which best describes your experience?
I recognize that this is small,
so I will just read a little bit of it.
But I have at least one year of specialized experience that has
equipped me with the particular knowledge, skills, and abilities
to successfully perform the duties of the position.
His experience is related to the work of a position and
equivalent to at least the GS-11 level in the federal service,
as described in the vacancy announcement.
The second choice was,
my experience does not match the choice above,
which may be the truthful answer for folks,
but I think I have an inclination about where
I am supposed to answer if I want to move on in the process.
Again, it's information they need and they want,
but it's asked in a way that is a little too transparent
perhaps for some.
So they updated their assessment questions.
They went through all of the things
that they were asking and needed to ask
and needed to know for the hiring process,
and they reshaped them.
So here is one example, where they say,
I have experience in analyzing the following,
and it's a multiple choice.
I don't know the right answer to this,
because I am not qualified for the position,
whereas for the other two
I sort of had a sense of the right answer,
even though I was unqualified for the position.
It also gets much more rich data along the way.
Similarly, they say, I understand the operation
and delivery of, and it lists a series of things
that are specific to that role.
Again, it gives much more rich data to the hiring manager,
because they can say, okay, this is good.
This person knows about two of these things or three of these
things instead of just one,
and then they can compare more wisely.
So overall, what CMS did was build a funnel;
you have probably seen this around the assessment process,
where they opened up the funnel at the beginning
and they had early involvement of managers,
they clarified roles for candidates
where the job postings were written in such a way,
the candidates knew, yes, I am actually qualified for this and
I should apply, or they knew they shouldn't.
When they went through, they had quick hire in place,
and they would ask some of these early screening questions
when the applicant submitted the application.
Then if they reached a certain threshold, they would be invited
to do another online exam of sorts, and that pre-screening
together would be combined for category rating,
and then they would come in and have an interview
and another cognitive screening.
We had concern at the time that this may be too much, it's three
hurdles for the applicants, but is it too many hurdles?
But in fact, the hiring manager said the interviews always
reinforced the rich data they had gathered through the process
of all of these questions.
The flip side that they... in reverse, each of those
components supported the other, and that they were more quickly
able to find the right candidate.
So from this, some of our tools that we worked with agencies on
are actually posted on OPM's Hiring Toolkit,
which is a terrific resource for agencies,
which I would encourage you to check out if you have not.
For one, we found that mapping the hiring process is just the
first step, that actually sustainability is a
key challenge, and implementing the process improvements you
identify, and overcoming some of the barriers
is the primary goal.
That HR must partner with hiring mangers and vice versa,
that it should be a team effort in this hiring,
rather than some of the siloed activities you might see.
That a job posting is really a marketing tool.
Many of the agencies we have gone into would say
that they have posted the job,
and that's really where they stopped the recruiting.
But in fact that there is more beyond that.
But thinking about the job posting as a recruiting tool
may also help give some of the sales language
or more alluring language.
Every federal agency has a terrific mission,
and some folks don't mention that in their job postings,
but celebrating the good mission is very helpful.
On the Change Management side,
the number one thing is that sometimes
these things take time, but it is possible,
and the sustainability point I made before is a key one.
That it's a long-term vision to try to maintain these.
To go back to the Extreme Makeover Model, we often say,
it's one thing to lose the weight, it's another to have the
continued diet and exercise on an ongoing basis that will help
you maintain the process.
We encourage agencies to revisit the hiring process periodically
to see where there are redundant steps,
because there may be things you add in
for a certain specific need,
that then five years later
is not really necessary anymore.
So considering things that way.
The involvement of top leadership in our work was very
important, and I think across agencies
it's helpful in reducing roadblocks.
If you have a office or a team that doesn't really see the
value in the project, it's helpful to have top leadership
support to kind of move your project forward.
We also found that dedicated project resources on the teams
where we had people who actually could do this kind of work as
part of their core job, rather than in addition to the 110% job
they already have, they were able to advance this more
readily than people that were trying to fit it in.
There needs to be some level of persistence and accountability
in any change to be able to advance the cause.
Perhaps it goes without saying that
internal communication is helpful.
I like to go on a no surprises model on these kinds of things.
That if you are going to have a change, it's really worthwhile
to communicate that from within the organization and gather
input within the organization, because the result
will be much stronger.
The last suggestion that we picked up from this process,
and some of our other work is that measuring the performance
along the way really does promote accountability,
it helps institutionalized the changes,
and it proves the value of the change,
so that on an ongoing basis there will be support.
I think identifying meaningful metrics
and the end-to-end roadmap lists several,
that you can benchmark upfront
and then track over time.
It doesn't mean there will always be improvement,
but I think you can then at least track
the improvement more easily; whether it's time to hire
or other measures along the way.
So that is my quick summary of both, some of the activities we
had and some of the Change Management lessons.
As I understand it, I have a few minutes to take questions
if anyone might have them,
or comments, suggestions, anecdotes?
For those in the room, there are people with mikes
if you wish to have them.
I had a question about,
where you showed the funnel,
you had the automated pre-screening,
and then you talked about the web based skills assessment
that was in addition to.
Can you talk a little bit about that,
because I am not quite clear on that?
Absolutely.
So the question is about
how they went from the automated pre-screening
to what that web based skills assessment
was in the funnel at CMS.
The initial one, the pre-screening, is what many of
you may have with [inaudible] or QuickHire or some of those
tools, where in the very initial process they answered a few
questions that allowed them to deduce a score, and based on
whatever range someone was able to earn through that process,
they were invited by email.
So it was an online process.
They went to another web based tool that was then offered by
Brainbench for our project.
We had a couple of assessment organizations working with us.
Then that one was shaped around the needs of the hard skills of
the job, and things that you could deduce online.
So it was another thing, not quite like QuickHire should say,
but at a lower level.
So they were getting to more specific skills around the job.
It was about a 30 minute assessment,
so it did take a little bit of time.
What they found was that in some respects it would weed out the
people who either through the questions realized they were
probably not qualified for the job,
or they just didn't have the commitment level
to try to do some of these things upfront.
But I was surprised by the percentage,
and I regrettably don't remember the specific numbers,
but it was a very high percentage of the people
who did get through that process.
Then those two scores combined helped them identify
who could get into a category rating group.
Then from that group they invited folks in
for an interview, and then they had a proctored exam there.
I think that was again another 30 minutes.
But it was a kind of skill exam
where they didn't want it done online.
But then having those two examples was one...
I know there is concern sometimes
when people are doing thing on the web that
it might not be the actual applicant filling it out,
so this mitigated for that.
But there didn't seem to be
much evidence of that in this process.
Yes?
I was wondering whether or not Partnership for
Public Service has on its website
any research that may have been conducted
on the behavioral type of assessments,
automated assessments.
I know they have been doing this for years in the private sector.
Any studies, any research, any perhaps assessment items
based on specific competencies
and especially core competencies
and managerial competencies.
Do you have any resources like that?
I know we have at least one report that's called
Asking the Wrong Questions,
which is from 2004-2005 timeline,
that focuses on assessment broadly
and the different methods to do it.
Some of the methodology
that we are using in the federal government is least effective
in terms of predicting success on the job.
That some of these online tools, when you do frame the questions
properly, gets more closely to the skill set that will be
demonstrated or applied on the job.
So I would encourage you to take a peek at that.
Actually, on our website there is a publications link you can
go to, where you can plug in assessment and anything that has
some relations with assessment will pop up for you.
So there might be a richer collection
than what I am conveying.
Does anybody have a question down here?
Yes, thank you. Along the lines of resources,
do you have anything on the
Interview Guide for hiring managers?
The Interview Protocol.
-For the strategic conversation? -Yes.
Yes, in fact, that's on OPM's Hiring Toolkit.
I think it's called... it may actually be called
the strategic conversation on there,
and I forget which phase it's in,
but probably Planning for Your Hire or Recruiting Top Talent,
one of those sections,
which I understand may change to match
the end-to-end roadmaps.
You look for that, it's a list of basic questions
to frame the conversation between
the HR team and hiring manager.
I would like to ask another,
just sort of open ended question.
When many of these hiring reforms were started,
and we all recognized the need for them,
they were started at a time
when the economy was in much
different shape than it is today.
There were perhaps fewer people seeking government jobs.
I am just wondering how has the downturn in the economy
affected this project?
That's the question.
Sure, I am glad you asked that
because I should highlight that we
started this in 2004 and spent 12 months with them formally
and then about another year, the Partnership,
without the partner organizations worked with them.
So this wrapped up sometime ago,
and we still check in with the agencies.
But to answer the question more broadly about
hiring in the federal government
in this economy and
how it's affecting different hiring reforms,
I would say a few things.
In one respect, it's more challenging to the process,
because there are more applicants.
I think there is some evidence that it's not only related to
the economy, that there is an increased interest
in government, for whatever reason.
I think it will be interesting to see if that carries on
beyond the economic hardship,
but it is a convergence of a few factors
that's probably leading to that.
So I think it can in some respect stress the system,
because you probably have more applicants for certain jobs
than you might have before,
but at the same time it opens up the applicant pool
more broadly and hopefully can thereby bring in a
better applicant pool for various roles.
I had a question.
Do you have any insights on how you involve hiring managers;
I know you talked about this conversation upfront,
but do you have any other insights
you could give us on involvement?
On involving hiring managers? Yes.
During the process I should say,
I think in all three of these agencies
we seem to have what I would describe as
somewhat reluctant hiring managers
who are participating in the project.
At each agency I have one solid memory
where I met someone whose arms were crossed
in the very first meeting and
I thought, we are done here.
But in fact, all of them, if they didn't become believers,
they at least came around, so there is some persistence,
I think, and openness on the HR team to involve them and realize
they are better off trying to involve them.
I think one of the challenges upfront is that involving
hiring managers, if they have not recently been involved,
or if that's not common practice,
it will seem like you are adding to their burden.
They feel like that's not their rule, but ultimately, I think,
the value will be seen in the success.
So if you engage them and then they are happier with
the result at the opposite end,
I think they will be more willing do it,
but again, that's another thing over time.
So I would say the strategic conversation,
checking in with them on the job posting.
When we did that in a strategic conversation with one of the
agencies, I think the initial draft of the job posting was
about 13 pages, and the key skills were
not on the front page or two.
So the HR team rightly wrote a description that,
was it highlighting the things that the hiring manager wanted,
and they were able to capture that
in a very early conversation.
So there are things like that,
that I think can demonstrate the value to hiring managers.
Then of course looping them back in the interview phase, and
assisting them there; whether it's through a structured
interview or other guides.
I am getting a hook here, so thank you everyone.
Good to join you.
My mama could never get me to stand behind a podium.
I bring you greetings from the Southern part of Heaven,
known as the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle Area,
also home to the 2009 Men's Basketball National Champion,
University of North Carolina Tar Heels.
I am here to tell you a story,
and I am not sure how this story ends.
Can you all hear me in the back?
Looking for nods from the people in the back.
It's like my Church, everybody is at the back.
Come to the front.
I am not sure how this story is going to end.
I don't know if it's an Extreme Makeover, as Katie described.
We have had a couple of opportunities with customers
where they have said, bus driver move the bus,
the bus is pulled away and they have broken into tears.
We also have had people say, bus driver,
run over those HR people, will you.
But this is a story about EPA consolidating
from 15 transactional HR centers down to three.
EPA, and I think I have colleagues with me,
one of who described EPA structure as a constitutional
or built constitutionally as a decentralized mess,
and that's probably pretty accurate.
But we went from those 15,
down to three; one in Research Triangle Park,
one in Cincinnati, Ohio, and one in Las Vegas.
The reason that EPA undertook this is there was
a lot of anecdotal information,
particularly at our headquarters,
that things were not working as they should.
Everybody had their own personal horror story
about their run in with HR,
but we really didn't really have any systematic way
to say how we were performing.
So if we told people, we are going to consolidate down to
three because we are going to deliver better service,
and it will cost less,
the key question became, well, how will we know
if we have improved if we don't know where we are now?
So that's what I want to talk to you about, how we have tried to
address that question in our consolidation efforts.
Let me take a step back.
When she was reading my brief bio, which is not brief enough,
you may have picked up that
I have a lot more duties besides HR;
there is a campus to run, couple of thousand scientists,
research animals, the whole nine yards.
HR was not my thing, that's why they don't trust me to come over
here to OPM without two HR people in the front row,
because they are afraid of what I might say.
But one of the things when I came into my job
I had in my performance standards;
remember, we all have these performance standards,
and some of us actually pay attention to them,
but one of the things I had in mine was,
you will comply with the 45 day OPM standard.
Well, I had no idea what that was.
But I soon found out that every six months or so
someone in my staff would come to me with a report and say,
just to let you know,
we did comply the last six months.
Well, that's nice.
What happens if we had not complied?
I had no ability to influence that outcome until
after it had occurred,
it was entirely retrospective.
Well, so I went to... one of the nice things about having
other things besides just HR
under you is I had an IT shop under me.
A little guy in the IT shop, who honest to God,
has a beanie with a propeller on his desk,
built me a little database,
where I could, hire by hire, action by action,
track when things were about to go to 45 days.
When they would hit 35 days, they would turn yellow,
and then I would go,
oh my gosh, I have got ten days to influence this outcome,
I need to call the selecting official
and jolly them along.
Or if they are not going to make a selection,
do we need to start over, let me cancel the thing before
the clock ticks out on me, because by God, it was in my
performance standards and we were going to make it.
Well, that was fine and dandy and a boutique little way of
dealing with one tiny piece of the 150 however many step
process that is the labyrinth of federal employment.
But we needed more.
Slowly this system has morphed.
Before, one of my other little things it would do is it would
...I could push a button and it would tell me, okay,
for some period of time,
how often did I comply with the 45 day.
We like green.
We don't like red.
We are okay with yellow if its towards green.
Anyway, this morphed into something
a little bit more robust.
You may be won't be able to see this back here.
I know that the paper printout of this presentation is not
optimized for a hard copy,
it's really optimized for a screen show.
But one of the things you will notice down here at the bottom
is, these are steps in the process.
We actually sat down with OPM's guidance and we said,
macro level, forget 150,
let's boil this sucker down to 12 or a fewer.
So for instance; and you can't I am sure read this,
how long does it take
an office to actually approve a vacancy to be filled?
We will give them three days.
From the time a requesting official asks for it,
until somebody says, yup, you can fill that job.
Then, how long does it take us to classify?
I don't know about you, but at EPA
we do not do position management.
Somebody leaves the agency, we reinvestigate the entire idea
of what we might do with that FDE.
So we give ourselves ten days to do the classification.
If it's a new job, that's hard to meet.
Gets back to Katie, what you were saying about engagement
with selecting officials,
and understanding what they are doing.
Then security reviews, preparing information for subject matter
experts, and then turning it over to subject matter experts.
You may be able to see from back there
that some of these columns are blue.
Those are the columns that the customers are responsible for.
One of the nice things about what this does is it tells me,
for any given job; and each one of these lines is a job,
a vacancy announcement.
I can tell for each step whether or not I met the service metric,
whether I threatened to go over it, i.e, did it turn yellow,
or if it went red, that means I missed the service metric.
The beauty about this is, some of them don't belong to me.
So when a customer calls and says, how come it took
you so long to fill my job, it could be that his subject
matter expert who was supposed to turn around
his easy hire questions in four days, took four weeks.
So I don't open fire, but if fired upon, I will return fire,
and this arms me to do that.
The other thing it will do is it allows me to
do assessments in a more aggregate level.
Again, the steps in the hiring process,
all the way out to making the job offer.
This will tell me, for example, the ten days to classify
position for this quarter, first quarter 2009.
I met that ten day standard 68% of the time.
So you may also notice; it's kind of covered here,
that this box up here is checked, which says all.
There are three service centers; the one in North Carolina,
the one in Ohio, and the one in Nevada.
That number is for all of them.
If I select just RTP, these numbers will change, and maybe,
just maybe, the RTP number is good and the Vegas
and the Cincinnati numbers are not so good.
Well, what is RTP doing that
Vegas and Cincinnati could learn from?
I can also sort this by customer.
Why is it that I have more trouble from my scientists
and engineers than I do from my regulation writers?
I can sit down with my customers and go through this data and
share it with them.
The other thing that you can do;
and it's not just for recruitments
but for non-recruitment actions as well,
is what we call 34-34 compliance.
Those steps, if you added up all those steps and the metrics
that we applied to them, it added to 68 days.
It just so happens that 34 of those days
belong to the customers;
things like subject matter experts,
working on easy hire questions,
the time that it takes them to do interviews,
that sort of thing.
34 days belong to them, 34 days belong to me for a total of 68.
Well, I can go into this system and
I can click on a service center, and its checkbox,
I can set a date range, give me all the records from
January 1st until today, for example.
I only am interested in seeing what my attorneys are doing.
So just check OGC, Office of General Counsel.
This is EPA's version of our alphabet soup,
I know you have one too.
Don't act like you don't.
We are federal employees, we know acronyms.
So I can click that one, and if I push a button,
I get this fancy little deal,
which will tell me, okay, customers,
for the pieces you own, you are meeting your metrics
73% of the time,
I am meeting mine 86% of the time, but overall,
from end-to-end on the 68 day;
and our 68 day starts when we get it,
to the day a job offer is made, not the day a ***...
sits down on the seat, 97%.
Of course, when I did this for you all,
I picked a good one.
There are some that don't look so good.
Those are the ones that want to run over us in the bus.
But it is amazing how you can engage with a selecting official
who may have been reluctant to engage with personnel before
when you have data about their side of the story.
When they start to understand that if they open fire on you,
that you can return fire,
all of a sudden things become more collegial.
What can we do to help each other?
If we stop throwing rocks at each other, and we start
worrying about the kind of strategic conversations
that we need to have in the first place
to make things happen more quickly.
I just have a couple of screenshots
of the actual data entry sheets.
You get the date fields, the people key,
and the type of action,
these are all done in a vanilla Lotus Notes database.
This was not some multi-million dollar deal,
we went to some contractor
and paid them to do, this was one federal employee
at his desktop using an agency standard piece of software.
So not a big investment.
Then you get the kind of date fields,
and these again are color coded,
so I can look in... and I know these, for example,
belong to the customer.
Here's the problem
with what we are dealing with here.
This is all fat-fingered, right?
What we would really like to see, and the agency is looking
at the next version of PeoplePlus going to a service
provider that will provide this for us,
is we would like to see this integrated
into that piece of software such that people
don't have to key this data.
Because what happens if one of my specialists
forgets to key in that date, then you can't run the math,
and then you get overinflated or under-inflated numbers.
The other thing I wanted to share with you,
and it gets back to,
I think, the difference between why we only have 12
steps and you guys had 150.
One of the fields that you have here is Additional Comments.
I talked before about, we have ten days to classify a job,
but we know in the real world of classification that, that
requires back and forth usually, with the subject matxer expert.
A classifier reads a PD, they don't fully understand,
they call somebody.
If the person is there, they can answer the question,
and you keep rocking and rolling.
If the person is not there, they may sit a week.
But that ten days is still on me, it's still under my column
to turn that around.
But this field right here allows my classifiers to go in and say,
well, I sent the revised position description to the
selecting official and have not yet heard back from them.
So if trouble comes, I can drill down into that record, pull up
that information, and we can get to the bottom of it.
It takes the drama out of it.
It eliminates the horror story.
It used to be, we managed by exception.
Somebody would come in and tell a story about how it took
a year to fill a job.
Never mind the 602 jobs that you filled for them on time,
the exception became the practice.
With a robust data set you now dispel that.
You dial down the drama and you focus on what's important.
This last piece just shows you who has been on the record.
All of that culminates in this piece of high candy,
that our customers get once a quarter.
All this data is pulled out of this system and presented.
As a matter of fact, Suzanne, my HR Director
and I had a customer meeting this morning
and gave information to the customer
relative to our performance over the last quarter.
But the nice thing about this,
all this data is available on their desktop.
So if they can access this data and drill down into a record and
see, why has it taken so long for this job to be advertised,
and they can look at it themselves and go, oh,
it's because my subject matter expert hasn't done something,
then they don't call me.
Now, sometimes it is us, and they do call me,
and then we look at it and we deal with it.
But one of the things that this does;
I don't know what the story at your agency is,
but the story at our agency is,
just by giving them this,
there is a level of sophistication
associated with them that makes them sit up and take notice.
Oh my goodness, they are actually tracking this.
Which before it was like throwing paper over a transom,
you never new what happened to it.
It was the stovepipe kind of deal.
Now, just being able to produce this kind of information
dials down the tenor of the conversation
and makes it about the work, not about the drama.
Just a few takeaways and then I will take some questions,
for us, for EPA, and this is toward... look,
when I wake up in the middle of the night
worrying about 80 days end-to-end,
these are the things that I think about,
and what the data that we
have collected and our experience tells us,
if EPA is ever going to be successful, 80 days end-to-end,
we have got to do better position management,
and standardized position descriptions are a way to go.
If any of you operate with a system that allows storage,
electronic storage of position descriptions in creation of
classified position descriptions,
I would like to talk to you,
because that's something
that we would really like to get to.
We lose a lot of time with our subject matter experts,
and I think it's because we are recovering
from years of subject matter experts not trusting us.
It was a black hole.
You have got to work around those HR people,
not work with them.
Now, one of the messages we give our hiring officials is,
just tell us what you want to do.
Based on what you think you want, try to work around us.
If you tell me who you want to get,
let's see if we can get you there.
We may not be able to get you there the way
you think you want to go, but we can get you there.
The other thing is, even if you meet every metric,
every step of the way, you can still fail, okay?
I tell my customers, I can meet the metrics every single time.
I will just cancel the cert.
It gets close to that 68 days, bam,
I am at it, and you will be furious with me, right?
So I look my customers in the eye and I say, look it,
these numbers are important,
they are an indicator of our performance,
but they are not as important as you being happy.
At the end of the day, if I meet all these metrics and it
delivers to you a candidate that can't do the job, who cares?
So there is a tyranny of the numbers that you have to avoid,
and you need top cover from management to help
you avoid those pitfalls.
But it does make clear that it's a dual responsibility.
When they are sitting there with a piece of paper that has
a gauge on it associated with them, and it's in the red,
they understand that they own part of the process,
at EPA, that's a novel thing.
I don't know what it's like at your place.
But the bottom-line for us, the takeaway message,
Suzanne and I have just completed
quarterly meetings with our customers,
representing the 9,000 or so folks we service.
For selecting officials, their bottom-line is,
is the juice worth the squeeze?
In other words,
if I as a selecting official have to do all this stuff
and you are jollying me along, at each step you are calling me,
your subject matter expert should have had
their questions turned around two days ago, where are they?
Your selecting official should have conducted
all their interviews a week ago, where are they?
If you are going to hammer people at each step of the way
and jolly them along,
you darn well better deliver a good candidate.
At the end of the day what our selecting official say is,
I really don't care about the number,
I care about the quality of what you give me.
So that gets back to the tyranny of the numbers.
The other thing is,
you push them too hard and you deliver them a hiring mismatch,
particularly if it's on the merit promotion side,
they are stuck.
On the DE side,
if you have got a manager who has got a backbone;
and I don't know what your managers are like,
but some of mine are...
sometimes they need to strap on a spine,
you can cut a DE high or loose.
But we hustle people down to 68 day or an 80 day path
to meet the numbers, and we deliver Charlie or Jane Loser,
you are stuck with them.
So I think this body needs to engage with our friends at OPM
to help us come up with some kind of sanity check
on a forced march to the sea in terms of meeting a time metric
that ensures that we are getting quality candidates
to do our work.
That's all I had to say. That's my story in a nutshell.
I am happy to entertain your questions.
I don't know if I will have answers.
I think this gentleman was first and the lady right here.
Hi, we appreciate the dashboard, that's really helpful.
I guess we are having a little issue right now as far as that
first phase for the manager,
before the 52 actually makes it to human capital.
How are you tracking it?
How is the manager getting that information into the system?
The way it works for us on a 52, you may...
I don't know how familiar you guys are with the paperwork,
and God knows,
I don't know if the paperwork is the same everywhere.
But we have two date fields, the date a job was requested and the
date the authorizing official said yes, go with it,
and at EPA, that can be a month.
But it's very clear to our hiring officials anyway
that that is on their clock, not ours.
So what we are trying to do with them
is exactly what Katie was talking about,
is have that strategic conversation early on to say,
what is it you are trying to accomplish?
In the meeting that Suzanne and I had this morning
with the Chief Financial Officer,
they told us about
a planning retreat that they are having.
We said, you need to have us there.
If you are going to talk about the organization,
the direction you are going to go,
you might want to take sometime to
let us hear where you are headed, so we can advice you.
Will they take us up on that?
We will see.
Lady down here.
Would you comment on how you develop your subject matter
experts and ensure that they are interested,
and what's the QA for their end product?
How do we ensure that they are interested?
Well, the situation at EPA
is that FTE are few and far between.
So when they get one, they treat it like gold.
We really don't have much of a problem engaging with the
subject matter expert, but what we do have a problem with is;
and we were talking about this before,
we have... I can't remember, you called it QuickHire,
our version is called EasyHire, also known as Easy Liar.
Suzanne, you told me, how many questions?
38,000 questions a subject matter expert can choose from to
help their screening stuff.
So what we have to do is build personal relationships.
We assign staffers to the same organizations,
so that they get to know the hiring managers,
so they can have those conversations about,
what kind of person are you looking for?
Let me look and email you a set of potential questions
you might ask.
What we coach our people with this, once you come up
with some questions you are comfortable with,
that are general enough to cover a lot of basis,
reuse them, don't waste a bunch of time.
Does that help a little?
Other questions?
No one is nodding.
The software program that this fellow wrote at his desk,
is this web based?
No, it's not web based.
Lotus Notes is what's called a distributed application.
So you load it on the client's desk,
it operates over EPA's wide area network.
For example, I have customers in Corvallis, Oregon,
they can access this on their desktop.
Okay. So for HR, the HR side of the house,
does this become your status report,
and you know what's on your desk at all times?
That's a great question, and here's why.
I tried to describe how this was developed
and why it was started.
It was started to help me as a reporting device,
it wasn't started to help HR specialists
to manage their workload, and those are two different things.
But it's now morphed over time to have to do both,
and now there is a view which you didn't see;
I could have done a screen capture,
where I can call actions up by due date.
I could go in and say, show me what...
if the metrics are to be met, what do we have to do today?
So and so has got a PD they have got to get classified.
So and so has got to hear back from a subject matter expert.
So helps manage workload in that way.
So this reports your KPIs, if you are going green,
it's your workload, it's everything?
-Yes ma'am. -That's awesome.
We do have a PD library online.
Let's talk.
I think I am out of time.
One more minute.
So you are going to make me stand here nervously for one
more minute, instead of asking me one bailout question.
Hi! This is a question
actually from the webcast, from the field.
There is actually a request as to whether EPA would be willing
to share specifically what went into creating the program
that you demonstrated?
We would be delighted to do that.
In fact, we have already met with at least two agencies that
I am aware of, taken the product to them.
We are willing to tell folks how it was developed.
We are willing to give it to folks if they would prefer.
We don't have any pride of authorship on that.
We just need to just contact you on your contact
information here and coordinate that?
Yes, I think my contact information
is in the hard copy handout, but in addition,
I will set some business cards on that table right there.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
My name is Jeri Buchholz, I am the Associate Director for
HR Operations and Policy at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
the best place to work in the federal government, which we
can't say too often or hear too often.
We are here today, we have a little bit of a different
approach to talk to you about today.
I have brought two of our managers with us to talk to you
about some of the work that we have done
in streamlining the hiring process;
something that we have been working on for years,
in addition to working on our employee engagement
and work life programs for decades.
So we are here to tell a little bit of a different story,
what does it look like when you get to the other side?
So we will start today with Ramona, who is to my right,
who will talk to you a little bit about the NRC environment
and the decision to engage in two Lean Six Sigma studies.
I will talk a little bit about how we planned for the
implementation of a Lean Six Sigma recommendations.
Dawn, who is a Branch Chief who works for me will talk about the
actual implementation activities we have done this fiscal year
John, who is to my far left,
is one of our senior managers at the agency,
and he will talk a little bit about
the really good relationship that we enjoy between
the Office of Human Resources and the managers of the agency.
So we will start with Ramona.
Good afternoon. I just want to give you
a little background about the NRC we are,
an accepted service agency, with about 4,000 employees.
After the issuance of the Energy Policy Act in 2005,
we recognized that there were certain aspects of that,
that offered flexibilities to or incentives to companies
who wanted to build new power reactors.
So we as a result started to engage
and to prepare for the onslaught of new reactor applications,
and that really meant that we had to staff up in the agency
to be in a position to receive these applications
into licensed future new reactors.
So with that, we looked at our hiring practices
to see where we could gain efficiencies,
if there were any opportunities where we could
identify cases where we could streamline certain processes
and engage the stakeholders that are in our agency,
involved in the hiring process.
So we initiated
a process to look at the hiring process
from the perspective of the 45-day hiring goals.
We looked specifically from the period of the vacancy, opened
until an offer was made and the various steps in that process.
Initially, we looked at the fact that we would be hiring
upwards of 1,500 employees between 2006 and up until 2009.
So with that, we recognize the challenges that we would face
with competing with the industry for the same talent pool
and just the workload demands on the agency, not just within HR,
but also within the program offices
that needed these individuals on staff.
So with that we began the first Lean Six Sigma study,
and that resulted in recommendations
that really targeted non-bargaining positions,
and we were able to implement certain flexibilities
that offered managers
opportunities to save time in the process.
These centered around
eliminating requirements for rating panel.
This also included an opportunity for them
to not use a rating panel in cases
where there were ten or fewer applicants.
These recommendations primarily center around those employees
in the NRC that applied for non-bargaining positions
and employees external to the agency who applied for both
bargaining unit and non-bargaining unit positions.
So with that, we started to engage the hiring managers,
and it's very important that we reiterate the benefits
of early engagement of the hiring manager in the process,
to really strategize on how best
to use these flexibilities to meet their hiring needs.
We issued that report in the beginning of 2007,
recognizing that ultimately we would come back and do a more
full scope evaluation of our hiring process.
So in June of 2008,
we initiated a new team to look at the hiring process
from the time that vacancy was identified
by the hiring manager,
up until the time the person came on board.
We assembled a group of staff from all over the agency.
We had staff from HR, we had staff from the Program offices;
one of which I am a part of, managers that were actually
selecting officials involved in that process.
Non-HR staff, sort of the admin side of the house
that had to process certain personnel actions
and help in the hiring process.
We also engaged our Office of Administration,
security staff that processed the security clearances,
and we also utilized Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
that guided us through the process to make sure
that we were utilizing the principles of Lean Six Sigma
to evaluate and look for efficiencies
and streamline certain processes.
So we found that the collaborative effort of this
assembled group of people really fostered an environment where
everyone really got a full appreciation of the process.
When we initially got together, we as one of our first taskings,
sat down to map out the process.
Similar to the presentation before our process,
went around the conference room, the wall was covered
with each step that we identified.
I think what it really gave the team members was an appreciation
for steps that they weren't readily aware of.
Although they presented 52
and asked that the vacancy be posted,
they don't really know what goes on
between steps C and F,
and they really got a full appreciation around that table,
with the mix of staff that participated in this effort.
We felt that, that was one of the benefits of having
that sort of team assembled with that type of staff.
So one of the sources of information that we used
when we were coming up with recommendations for improvements
to the hiring process was the OPM End-to-End Hiring process,
we looked at that, as well as
the first Lean Six Sigma team's recommendations.
We also, through the process of
collaborating in that environment,
identified best practices each office had implemented.
So that really offered an opportunity for us to make
recommendations that ultimately have resulted in time savings
for our hiring process as a whole,
and strategies for how we can improve things down the line.
We looked at areas where we could find
instant or immediate results,
and then areas that would take more time
to implement the recommendations,
but recognizing that if we identify it,
once you lay it all out there
and understand what your full process is,
then you can really have an opportunity
to affect change and make recommendations, once you know
the full scope of what has to be done to bring a hire on board.
So with that, I am going to turn it over.
Thank you.
We received in HR the Lean Six Sigma study report
in October of last year,
and as Ramona told you,
one of the nice things about Lean Six Sigma study
is that it identifies for you recommendations
that are easy to implement,
and can be done in a short period of time.
Recommendations that are moderately difficult,
and then recommendations that would take
a much more serious investment of people, time, and money.
Since we received no people, time, and money
to actually implement the recommendations,
we decided to go for the easy to implement.
But as it turned out, the recommendations would,
if we implemented all of them,
would streamline the process by about 45 days,
but if we implemented the easy to implement ones,
we would get 17 days
of streamlining out of those efforts.
So we decided to take what I like to call
a spiral implementation approach,
where we would look each year at our Lean Six sigma study,
talk about the things that we could...
that we have the resources to implement for that year,
and just continually improve our process over time,
gaining more and more days each time
we circled around and did implementation.
We developed a work plan,
which was a new thing for our organization,
which turned out to be very, very popular with the employees
and the Office of Human Resources,
that laid out each deliverable, and by line described
what was to be delivered each quarter.
Quarterly then we issued a report that we sent out to
all of the Office Directors, Deputy Office Directors,
what we call a PIMDA, which is the senior admin officer,
of the things that we had implemented.
We posted all of this on a Internet site
that we have for this purpose.
We did several really good things
that I think were not terribly difficult to do.
Many of the things that are recommended, if you look at
the recommendations that OPM offers you
with the End-to-End Hiring Model.
We managed the process internal to HR, wrapped around
into our operating plan and our agency metrics.
We are green every quarter in terms of our deliverables,
because people like Dawn went out and did some really, really
good work implementing the recommendations.
So I will turn it over to Dawn to talk about that.
Thank you Jeri.
We engaged all the HR specialists,
one of Jeri's goals that was very successful was to make sure
all HR specialists had a piece of the work plan,
which then rolled up in the op plan,
so for the first time the HR specialist could really say,
I understand how my piece fits into the bigger picture.
Some of the Lean Six Sigmas that were easy to reach,
that we implemented over this past year,
were simple things like,
we developed an applicant information sheet
to hand out at the interview,
that told the applicant about our security process,
the background checks that would be conducted,
and the type of information that they would need to provide,
and that proved helpful.
We also created a library of position descriptions
that we are already classified,
we are still working on that.
This will roll over into the next year,
probably following year work plan,
but we do have a good library pool,
managers can get to that at the HR website and look at library.
See what kind of position description is already
out there classified.
We also created a listing of the crediting plans
that were in place.
We don't publicize those,
but we created a list so managers can see
what credit plans are out there
and it gives them the HR specialist contact name,
so they could call to get a copy or discuss the crediting plan.
We also have a tracking system that tracks the HR,
as well as the security process.
Our Recruitment Activity Tracking System is called RATS,
and we give all the HR specialist a stuffed rat,
to sit on their desk to remind them to input everyday,
just like you said,
if it's not in there, your data is not very good.
We modified that to include additional fields
to help with the security tracking,
and our Office of Administration,
Division of Security has access to it,
and they put their dates in there,
so there is much more information available that
the HR specialist shares with the manager
as to where an applicant is in the security process,
which was previously kind of a gray area.
We can't tell them specifically,
but at least we can give them an idea.
So those were some of the general things
that we have implemented.
John Lubinski. Jeri asked me to talk a little bit
from a manager perspective.
I guess the first thing I would like to highlight
as a manager's perspective is...
philosophy came down from the top is,
the most important position from management standpoint
is our first line supervisors.
They are doing the hiring, they are making sure
the work gets done.
We had to implement a philosophy that's still evolving is,
in the old school we had a lot of good mangers
that made widgets and they got widgets done
and they did a good job of making widgets.
But could they hire people, could they manage people,
could they teach people?
That's what we put in as,
you are not a part-time leader of people,
you are not a part-time supervisor,
that's part of your job,
and we needed to get that mindset into place.
As part of that we said, how do we do that?
Well, we made that part of their job and we said,
handle this as you did in making your widgets,
and that is, hire good people,
hire the right people into the jobs.
Set clear expectations.
Reinforce the expectations.
Provide support and tools for people to meet the expectations,
and hold people accountable.
Then as second and third line supervisors
we made sure that we gave those first line supervisors
those tools to do that and set that expectation.
So as Ramona said,
we hired 1,500 people in a three year period.
That meant we had a lot of turnover
and we had a lot of turnover in the supervisor ranks as well.
So we had to hire good people into those positions.
We made sure when we hired good people,
they were the right people and they had the mindset
to actually lead people and to have a concern on
human resources, human capital and workforce planning.
That's an evolving process,
as I said, and we are continuing with that.
There are some challenges,
because when you deal with people
who have PhDs in highly technical areas,
they feel very comfortable when their supervisor
has a PhD in a highly technical area.
So there were challenges, but they are starting to see the
benefits from the type of people that we are hiring in
and developing people.
Setting clear expectations.
It's the responsibility of the manager,
not just to meet a 45-day metric for the hiring process,
but to get their work done and to get the people in
who are the right people to get that job done.
We don't want to hear afterwards,
well, here's what I did, here's what HR did,
this is what we did.
We set that clear expectation for them,
that involve the stakeholders early in the process.
If you need to bring your HR specialist in early,
bring them in early,
not when you decide you need to hire,
six months before that, when you are talking about
workforce planning.
Reinforcing the expectations.
I think it's very important really at the second line
manager standpoint to reinforce these expectations
with the managers.
They come in with a problem, they have an issue,
we reinforce through questioning.
Okay, is Bill getting the training
he needs to get his job done?
How will you do in six months from now?
What about Harry, who is thinking about retiring down the
road, have you thought about what you are going to do
as far as the skill sets for replacements?
Have we gotten together a posting yet
so that we can start to hire?
Have you thought about [inaudible]?
How do we work this into the system?
So we reinforce those expectations
through the questions we ask.
We also require annual training in leadership
for all of our first line managers.
We have requirement for the amount of training
they are required to obtain each year.
We look very hard at that from the standpoint of, this isn't
just something in the technical area that you are trying to
learn about, but it really gets the leadership
and the HR skills involved as well.
Providing support and tools to meet the expectations
is very important.
We hold; and I am speaking personally in my group now,
we hold biweekly meetings with our first line supervisors,
just focused on human capital.
We talk about where each of the vacancies are,
where do we see future vacancies in the near term,
what are we doing to fill those.
When we get into those meetings, we involve the HR specialist
in all of those meetings.
When someone comes up and says
they have an idea that they need a posting to come up,
and we start to talk about
what kind of questions you are going to need,
what kind of people are you looking for,
if it doesn't exist in the database Dawn talked about,
the HR specialist says, well,
so and so in another office has been looking for a similar.
Let me pull those so that you have something
to work with as a starting point.
So that's where we are pulling the effort together.
We did lay out metrics and timelines as far as
how many days it would take to meet the 45-day clock
and who is responsible for that.
When we talk about those in these meetings,
it's not just the responsibility of lead person for that,
but whoever is on the other side, if you will;
whether it's the HR or the program side,
what can I do to help you? What do you need?
That works both ways.
What information do you need to get this?
There is a lot of post meeting discussions
on that to make sure that we are aligned.
We also have quarterly meetings
on longer term succession planning.
We sit down and look and say,
what are the critical skills we have in each of our positions?
If that person were to leave tomorrow,
is it a high priority to fill it, medium, or low?
What are we looking at as far as
the potential for them to leave?
Is there a high potential they are going to leave within
the next year, next two years, next five years?
So we can start to prioritize where our postings come in.
There is a lot of work in the HR area,
so we want to give them the priorities.
This is a high priority task, we need to get this done.
This is a lower priority task, can we start to look
maybe at another way of filling that,
where we can start early in the process, six months in advance?
Clear guidance.
Dawn talked about a database being in place.
Also, standard operating procedures, what are we
following as far as standard operating procedures.
Templates. When we look at these,
we really look at these templates as living documents.
They come to us, they are not the final,
that you have to follow this template,
it's a guide to start with.
If you want to change something because it's specific
to your position as a manger, talk to the HR specialist,
get it modified, and then the HR specialists get to learn from,
in working with the next person, in another office, who may have
a similar type of posting that they need to deal with.
Finally, the last part is holding people accountable.
We do this in a number of ways.
One I want to speak about at, I will say the...
from the middle management up in the agency,
the same HR metrics are in everyone's performance plan.
Jeri is in our HR Department, I am in her Office of Reactors,
and we have exactly the same performance metrics.
We don't differentiate.
There is nothing there that says,
I met my certain number of days,
she met her certain number of days,
it's, did we meet the 45 days?
Then there is a host of other sub-metrics as well
that are more important towards getting the work done
that we have to meet as well.
At the end of the year if that metric is missed,
we miss it, HR misses it.
Everyone in the agency is on the same team,
if you will, as far as
meeting that metric and is held to the same accountability,
so there is no finger pointing at the end.
We also have put that into our first line managers.
Their performance plans are a little different,
but we have filtered down the metrics into those plans,
and we have also gone to a process a few years ago;
that's probably been about, let me say,
four years ago Ramona where we went to having
our first line managers' performance plans match
the ECQs for the SES program.
So they have Leading Change, Leading People, Results Driven,
Business Acumen, and Building Coalitions.
We equal weigh them in their performance plan.
So the Human Capital part gets
just as much as the Results Driven
from the standpoint of the number of widgets they ship
out the door each year, and as equally weighted.
So when we talk during the year and we provide feedback,
we talk about all these areas.
It's not just looking at our operating plans from the
standpoint of how many widgets are out the door, it's, how are
we doing against all of the items in our performance plans,
which include the Business Acumen and Leading People.
So again, the big part here is keeping all the people in the
agency who need to be involved with the stakeholders as a team.
We never have... as a line organization, we don't have the
pre-meetings before we bring HR into the discussion.
They are in the discussion, there is nothing secret.
Any paperwork we put down, anything we are putting together
as far as how we are tracking our success, we share with HR
to get their inputs as we are developing it.
As we move forward and talk about hosting
six months from now, three years from now, we make sure
our HR folks are in the meetings to hear that.
I will make a commentary mention about
the senior leadership in the organization.
The senior leadership is what's really behind this.
They have started from the standpoint of strongly endorsing
this working relationship,
but without the first line supervisors being
committed to this and seeing the benefits of it,
it would not work, and we have gotten that support.
So that's all I had to talk about,
so I will turn it back to Jeri.
I think we are ready for questions.
No questions
hard to believe.
It happens when you are at the end.
I guess that's true.
Everybody is thinking, oh, now we can go for the coffee.
Nothing on the Internet?
Well then, we will stick around in case you want to
ask us secret questions afterwards.
There is a question.
Oh, a question.
I have got friends sitting in the back.
When you talked about managers and inviting HR
into your meetings,
biweekly meetings to do the
succession planning and all that sort of stuff.
How large is your agency?
The agency overall is 4,000 employees,
but from the standpoint of the kind of meetings we are talking
about, we are doing it at first line supervisor level.
In my organization we have four first line supervisors,
and then they report to me as a second line supervisor.
So it would be the five of us meeting together
with our HR specialist.
Right, so then Jeri, how large is your office
that they could accommodate this?
I mean, we service 30,000 people.
Right. We have the great advantage
of being large enough to have enough resources
to do some of these things, but small enough that implementation
does not require layers and layers of approval and vetting.
So we have an agency of 4, 000 people.
We have 46 people working in all of HR,
including policy, employee relations, labor relations,
and about 30 people working in HR, that work with
the line managers, divided into three branches.
So we are in a very unique position,
being at 4,000, it's just the ideal size.
We are not going to pretend otherwise.
But I think in principle
as I look at what makes us different from
other federal government agencies,
our programs aren't different,
our processes aren't different.
We don't have special pay.
We don't have special benefits programs.
We don't have special legislation.
But what is very, very different about the NRC
is the manager's approach to managing people,
and I think that's the big message
that John is trying to communicate,
certainly on a scale of 30,000, 60,000 employees,
that's a much bigger task.
If I can comment, when I talked about the meetings
that we have, again, we look at it from the standpoint of,
this is a benefit both to the HR specialist and the manager
that we are having this coordination early and upfront.
Sometimes these meetings last ten minutes,
because again, depending on how many postings you have
and what you are talking about.
The quarterly meeting, where you are talking longer term,
may get longer.
But we are not trying to... we block off an hour in case
something comes up.
If there is one manager that's having problems with getting
something through the process, the others may leave,
and we will just work that HR specialist.
But as I said, many times meetings may only last
10 or 15 minutes.
Right. No, I think it's great.
I have had the luxury of participating in another job,
but servicing that many people, we can't come close.
Thanks.
Are there any other questions?
Well, a big round of applause for actually all of our...
[clapping]
Thank you very much.
I wanted to go over some key points though that I thought
might be important that I have heard today.
One of the first things, and this is kind of a lesson learned
for me when I was a HR Director
within the Department of Defense,
I cannot agree more that data is king.
If you don't have the data to back it up,
it builds credibility for you as an HR specialist,
it builds your business case for some of the decisions,
and it actually even can help you build business decisions
with regard to targeted recruiting
that you need to go after, because
when you are able to track and see exactly where
an action is following short,
it really helps give you a lot of information
that you can mine deeper.
So if there is one take away from here it's that,
if you don't have a data tracking system,
whether it's Lotus Notes or it's like the army,
which is where I had most of my experience,
if it's a big deluxe system that army has,
I think that whether you are using stubby pencil, Lotus Notes
or a very sophisticated system, you have got to invest
in some kind of tracking system.
There is absolutely no way that you can move forward
if you have no clue where you are at.
Actually, that's one of the reasons why OMB was very hard
over on making sure that the agencies mapped against the
End-to-End Hiring process.
It wasn't to put you through some meaningless drill, it was
to really make sure that you at least had a baseline to know
where you could go after some of the improvements.
The other thing that I had listened to that I thought was
important is this whole concept of position management.
In the End-to-End Hiring Model what we did,
and we spent a lot of time working with the agencies;
NRC was one of the agencies, along with DoD,
I think HUD, the EPA, Treasury,
I mean the list went on with who all we worked with.
Well, one of the things that we noticed is that,
time and time again is that,
the agencies didn't have good position management,
or they had little to no workforce planning being done.
One of the most important things
we found that would make agencies more successful
is when they had approved staffing plans upfront.
So in other words, you took the time in the front stages to plan
out exactly what it is that you needed, so that you weren't
spending the 30-60 days of time after you already have...
someone has already retired, and then you are trying to
figure out what you need.
It really should be planned and approved in advance.
You will find that in the End-to-End Hiring document.
The other thing with regard to these position descriptions,
it's a great idea.
I can't remember which agency,
but it might have been the NRC I think that said this,
like whether you have it automated
or you have a library pool, you should have access where those
managers can get to all of the classified positions
that are already out there.
What we found time and time again is that,
we wait until there is a vacancy
and then we are reclassifying jobs all over again,
and come to find out throughout most of the agencies,
you have duplication of things that are going on out there
as far as positions goes.
So the more standardization that you have,
the better off you are.
Also, within the End-to-End Hiring Model, we recommended,
do your classification and your position descriptions during
workforce planning, don't do it during the hiring process,
when you have the RPA, the Request for Personnel Action,
sitting on your desk and then you are trying to do it.
So the other area that we recommend is
position designation.
Like the security clearance part of it, we recommend that's
decided up in the workforce planning stages too,
rather than waiting until
you are actually in the middle of a hiring process
and you are trying to figure out
what kind of clearance you need.
Now, from another area that I think Katie touched on
is the assessments.
We fundamentally believe from an OPM perspective that
assessments are the cornerstone of these quality hires.
While it's very true that we want to make it easy for
applicants to apply, we are not saying that we want it to be
hard for them to get the job.
Meaning, that there should be some kind of progressive hurdles
or assessments that we are doing for these applicants.
Although the front end, what USAJOBS looks like
and how you apply; whether it's with just a resume
first coming in and a cover letter.
Once you get through that first gate,
there should be some rigorous assessment to make sure
that we start getting quality hires,
because it really should be about getting the best folks in.
I don't mean best based on a GPA,
I mean best based on from all segments of society.
So those are things that we are really looking at, and you are
going to see coming forth out of OPM in the near future here.
From selections, just some lessons that I have learned is
that, when you are tracking the data, a lot of times what you
find is that if you work to setup interview panels or at
least block off the manager's calendars in advance, you can
kind of cut down that selection time frame for when they are
going to actually get together to do the interviews, because
what we have found is that, when you are waiting till the end, it
takes about 60 days to schedule an SES or a 15s calendar,
but not if you had it blocked in advance,
so it's just kind of a lesson learned.
The last thing that I want to touch on is metrics.
This is a great idea that holding the managers,
all managers across the board accountable for the same metrics
when it comes to human resource management.
I think that really drives that home.
So these are some great presentations
that you had today.
I think that the nuggets of information
that you got out of it should be valuable to you.
If you have any further questions,
we will be glad to take them;
either you can go in through MAX, not either,
please go in through MAX,
and ask them under the Frequently Asked Questions
and we will get your responses there.
But I will also be glad to take any questions
that you might have of me right now.
Everybody wants to hit the Metro.
Alright. Well, if there is no questions,
really appreciate everyone's time,
and we will see you at the next Training Academy.
Thank you.