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Well, good afternoon everyone,
and welcome here to the Office of Personnel Management.
I am John Berry, the Director here,
and I am extremely thrilled and honored
to have you all with us today
to tell you a little bit about
President Obama's Hiring Reform Initiative.
This morning the President signed a presidential memorandum
to modernize the federal hiring processing,
and today we roll out OPM's Implementation Guidance.
This initiative is the biggest step forward
for fixing federal hiring in over three decades,
and it is the capstone of a yearlong effort.
I would like to thank Secretary of Labor,
Hilda Solis, for being with us today,
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development,
Shaun Donovan,
Deputy Secretary of Veteran Affairs, Scott Gould,
Deputy Secretary of Transportation, John Porcari,
the Under Secretary of Defense,
Dr. Clifford Stanley, for being here.
Thank you all for joining us today.
[Applause]
I want to give a special shout out
for the Deputy Director of Management
at the Office of Management and Budget,
Jeffrey Zients.
Jeff, since he has come aboard, has brought new energy,
new vision, and a powerful sense of integrity
to everything that OMB does.
I have worked closely with him
over the past year on this effort.
It would not have happened had it not had the commitment
and the passion that he has brought to this.
Jeff, my hat is off to you.
Thank you sir!
[Applause]
I want to also have a special shout out for Senators Akaka
and Voinovich and our Congressional partners
who have pressed tirelessly over the years
and provided leadership on the effort to produce Hiring Reform.
We support their efforts to move legislations with the Congress
that would codify much of what we are doing here today.
I want to have a special thanks to all of our
Chief Human Capital Officers seated down here today.
They have been essential in pushing for this
from the beginning.
From the day I walked in the door, they said,
you have got to nail this one.
So thank you all for being the wind there
that has pushed our sails forward.
Dean David Ellwood at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
was also an important early facilitator.
He helped us convene a group of a brainstorming session
with people from the private sector, our union partners,
who really gave us a lot of the ideas and the innovations
that we are implementing today,
that really were born out of that meeting.
We have also enjoyed a very constructive partnership
with our union leadership
and want to thank all of them for being with us today
and the spirit of partnership that they have provided
in helping us move forward with this directive.
Finally, to our own Hiring Reform team here at OPM.
It is a large team.
There are three especially I want to mention,
Jennifer Mason, my Deputy Chief of Staff,
Angie Bailey, and Rob Shriver,
have sort of been the three team leaders on this effort,
but the entire team is here today.
You are too many to name, but my heart goes out to
each and every one of you
for your persistence on this over the past year.
Thank you very much.
These reforms wouldn't have happened without you.
[Applause]
"President Obama has called on executive departments
and agencies to overhaul the way they recruit
and hire our civilian workforce."
The message could not be more clear.
We have a problem, the President has told us
how he wants it fixed,
and the Cabinet is focused on fixing it.
Hiring Process Reform isn't the most exciting topic,
but it's extremely important,
because it affects everything the government does.
Yet, for far tool long our HR systems have been a hindrance.
We have great workers in government
now in spite of the hiring process, not because of it.
As they retire, it's tough to replace them
when it takes five months on average to hire somebody,
or when there are 40 steps in the process
or 19 signatures required.
After years of talking about reform,
today we are taking action.
We are making it quicker and easier to connect
the best candidates with federal jobs.
Let me just quickly tell you how some of this will occur.
To start, we are switching to resumes.
[Applause]
Now, for the first time in history
you will be able to apply for almost every federal job
with a simple resume and a cover letter.
We are eliminating, the President is eliminating,
knowledge, skills, and ability essays as an initial recruitment
requirement of the federal government.
[Applause]
This will save applicants millions
of person hours as well as money too.
We are eliminating red tape, so hiring managers can view
the full range of qualified applications;
no more Rule of Three limiting
how many resumes the hiring manager gets to see.
Shared registers have already launched,
shaving five to ten weeks off the hiring process,
depending on your agency.
We are going to also give hiring managers
more control over hiring
and the workforce planning processes.
We are going to provide training
on how to use these powers legally
and we are going to hold hiring managers
accountable for improvement.
Now, even the best reforms will fail without support.
So OPM has been working with OMB on preparing for months
to provide HR shops with unprecedented,
comprehensive, and ongoing support.
The detailed Guidance Memo that we will be signing today
is only our first step.
Tomorrow we will be giving a nuts and bolts briefing
to the government's HR leaders.
We are launching and HR to HR blog,
and we are sending out mobile assistance teams
anywhere that they are needed.
To be clear, this initiative respects our highest ideals.
The merit principles are sacrosanct,
and as you see this desk,
which you might wonder what it is,
this is the desk used by Theodore Roosevelt
when he was the Commissioner of
the United States Civil Service Commission,
and it is brought out of our museum
for special significant signings that advance efforts
to protect our civil service and our merit principles.
So we will be using it today as the base for our signing.
Veterans preference is part of our nation's sacred duty
to our returning service members,
and that's why we launched, with Secretary Solis
and Secretary Shinseki and Scott,
one of the most comprehensive and high level veterans
hiring initiatives in our history last November.
This reform effort is unlike previous attempts at hiring,
because these improvements are going into effect government
wide today by order of the President of the United States.
This initiative is about simplicity, flexibility,
and efficiency.
It will substantially reduce the time
and aggravation it takes to find and hire the best.
When we achieve that goal,
all of our government will work better,
and the American people will benefit as a result.
Thank you!
It is now my privilege to introduce to you my friend,
Jeffrey Zients.
[Applause]
Thank you John for your leadership,
your kind words for partnership that OMB and OPM have
which is essential to moving forward so many of the reforms
we are looking to do, and for your friendship.
Reforming the federal government's hiring process
is critical to making sure
that we have the best and brightest talent.
Mounting deficits and debt
are placing enormous pressure on government spending.
At the same time, trust in government is on the decline.
Just 22% of Americans say they trust the government,
near a half-century low.
Together these forces create great urgency
for us to improve the performance
of government operations, in both service quality,
how we serve citizens as customers, and efficiency,
making sure that every dollar counts.
Given the magnitude of these challenges that we face
and the approaching retirement of nearly
half the federal workforce, we have a pressing need
opportunity to make improvements to our antiquated
and cumbersome personnel practices.
Across my business career working with companies
to improve efficiency and service quality,
I have seen that the vary best organizations
focus on people as the key to performance improvement.
By contrast, too often, government agencies
don't have that same focus on people.
The federal government's human resources practices
are based on a personnel system created 60 years ago.
As a result, many of these practices are bureaucratic
and cumbersome and lead to underperformance.
As John discussed, the current hiring system
uses overly complex job descriptions,
involves filling out lengthy forms and essays,
and is a black hole, providing almost
no feedback to applicants along the way.
I know from my 20 years in business
that the best talent doesn't wait around for five months;
they find work elsewhere.
We clearly have to fix our hiring process
if we are going to achieve the President's aspiration
to make government service cool again.
The federal government needs the very best talent.
To improve our efficiency and effectiveness
and make sure that every tax dollar is spent wisely,
we have to get the right people.
Only then can we deliver on the promise of a government
that is as effective and as extraordinary
as the nation we serve.
It's now my honor to introduce the Secretary of Labor,
Secretary Solis.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Thank you Jeffrey, and also,
I want to express my great appreciation
for your work on this issue,
but I especially want to thank my good friend,
the OPM Director and our friend,
John Berry, for helping to spearhead
this historic federal workplace,
Hiring Reform, that we are announcing today.
So another round of applause for you and your staff
and everybody that's been working on this.
[Applause]
It's crucial that the federal government
be able to effectively attract and hire
and retain top talent for every single opening, and Lord,
I know something a little bit about that,
knowing that we have six applicants for every job,
if not more, across this country.
So we know that this is a wonderful opportunity
for people who are seeking work
or looking to change their careers.
We are putting our sign out saying, "We want you."
I know at the Department of Labor,
we feel very strongly about that; in fact,
we have an ambitious goal to hire up about 3,000 people.
We have already begun the process.
So we are looking for a few good talented men and women
who represent the veterans community,
the disabled community,
and the underrepresented groups as well.
Diversity is what this is about.
So I am very excited to be here today.
I know that having worked in the federal government
before I came to serve as a Cabinet member,
it was quite a task filling out the paperwork.
In fact, it reminded me of taking the SAT
or filling our an IRS form,
and not really knowing what kind of a response
you were going to get back.
But I know that the reforms that we are looking at here
are going to cut through the red tape.
They are going to make it easier for folks like ourselves
and our managers to make better decisions,
and we are going to eliminate that essay style answer,
which I think is going to help provide more timely response
to those applicants that need to hear about jobs.
Our economy is suffering quite a bit
and we need to put people to work,
and what best place to come than the federal government.
I have the highest regard for our public servants,
for our career staff,
and for all the people that work with us across this country
and around the world.
So I just want to say in closing,
thank you very much for allowing me to be a part of
this historic moment, and I have the pleasure
of now introducing the Cabinet member representing
the Housing and Urban Development, Secretary
Shaun Donovan.
Shaun.
[Applause]
Thank you so much Hilda!
It's great to be here with you today.
This is a very, very important day for all of us
in the federal government, but more importantly,
I think, for this country.
We heard a little bit earlier about the remarkable moment
that we find ourselves in.
Let's remember too that in an economic crisis
of this magnitude,
the government, our responsiveness to people
communities around this country has never been more important.
American citizens are looking to us,
despite that declining trust that Jeff talked about,
are looking to us to respond quicker,
faster, more effectively.
There is no way that we can do that
if we don't have a workforce of the 21 Century,
and that's really what these reforms today are about.
Now, I want to say a particular thank you to John
and the remarkable team here at OPM.
I want to say thank you to Jeff
for your great partnership as well.
I am here, because I have been
and my agency has been a little bit of a guinea pig
over the last year working with OPM
and OMB to try to reform our hiring process,
as we have been developing
the reforms that the President signed
and that we are announcing today.
I want to show you something, if I could.
This is a flowchart;
in fact, it's only a part of a flowchart
that represents what HUD's hiring process looked like
when we began working with OPM and OMB about a year ago.
In fact, our hiring process was so complicated,
we couldn't fit it on one slide.
So this is one of three.
For any of you that are interested,
I can be happy to give you a personal tour
of our former hiring process backstage afterwards.
One of three that laid out
how we hired at HUD when we began this effort.
In total, our hiring process had 40 steps
and our average hiring time was 139 days,
from putting out a job announcement
to actually hiring someone.
But even worse than the timing was the fact
that the process itself didn't actually yield good results.
In the past, for instance,
if HUD wanted to hire new IT staff
to analyze the quality of borrowers that were using
Federal Housing Administration loans,
our program managers were barely involved in
the development of the recruitment tools;
from the job descriptions to the kinds of questions
used to screen applicants.
Only when the shortlist of applicants, three typically,
had already been identified,
at that point did these applicants' potential bosses
actually get involved in the hiring process.
You can imagine how in the midst of the housing crisis
that we have seen, taking four-and-a-half months
to hire new staff could be a bit of a problem.
Even if you found the right person for the job,
there was no guarantee
that they would still be in the market
for a job by the time that you could bring them on.
So what did we do?
We worked with OMB, we worked with OPM,
and the great team here, and with our internal,
we call it a transformation initiative,
we have reduced the number of steps a hiring manager
has to take to 14 steps from the 40 that I talked about,
and that is everything from beginning the hiring process,
to finalizing the selections and onboarding an employee.
We have provided workshops to managers
to help them understand their role in the hiring process
and we have improved the accountability
of everyone's role up and down the hiring chain.
We are now down, as of today,
to 77 days in our entire hiring process.
We have cut the process by more than eight weeks
through this partnership.
[Applause]
Even more importantly, we have seen an improvement
in the quality of the applicants
that we are able to bring on board
and what they tell us about the quality of our hiring process.
With people who are better qualified for the jobs
that we post,
HUD can do a better job for American families
and communities across the country.
I want to particularly recognize Janie Payne,
our Chief Human Capital Officer that's here.
Allison from her team is here as well,
who has done a remarkable job leading these efforts.
I want to thank you both
and congratulate you for the great work.
[Applause]
I am so excited about the announcement today,
because with the President's action
and OPM's implementation,
we will be able to cut our hiring time even further,
taking advantage of the ability to transition
to a resume based system,
which is just an enormous step forward
for the vast majority of our hiring.
Cutting through red tapes, so hiring managers
can view the full range of qualified applicants,
and using shared registers that pool our resources.
Coupled with our 5-year strategic plan for HUD
that we are releasing this week,
these steps will improve our ability to attract
and retain a high quality workforce
and support the President's goal
of making government service cool once again.
So we are excited about what this means for HUD
and for our ability to create a 21 Century skilled,
motivated workforce, a flexible, high performing,
learning organization in HUD,
and above all, an agency that invests, not in programs
and policies, rules and regulations, but in the people
and places that rely on us, each and everyday.
That's what this effort is about
and it's why I am so proud to be here to join you John
and all of you to celebrate this great step forward.
Thank you!
[Applause]
Let's get everybody in here.
This is pretty good turnaround Jeff.
The President signed the presidential memorandum
at 10 o'clock this morning and here we are two hours later
signing the directives to the agencies.
So here we go.
We are airborne.
It is done. Teddy would be proud.
[Applause]
It is now my honor to introduce to you the man
who has responsibilities for managing
probably the largest number of federal employees
and military in the world; is Dr. Clifford Stanley,
Former General and a great leader,
who is bringing a fresh air to the Defense Department.
Thank you for being with us today Cliff.
We really appreciate it.
[Applause]
Thank you,
and thanks so much John. I appreciate your hospitality.
The whole time everybody has been talking,
I have been smiling.
The process has been excruciating.
I have been away from the government for a few years,
came back and said, it's still the same.
I said, wow!
So this is like... it's just a breath of fresh air.
I have been excited since hearing about it
and I am so honored to be a part of this process.
I wanted to say very briefly.
We hire over 100,000 civilians each year.
I want to let that sink in.
Add in the process,
and it's excruciating,
byzantine, it's a problem.
So what we have done very well for many, many years
is lead the way in terms of handling diversity,
but now diversity is defined not just as race
and gender but also in the talent that we have
in the Department of Defense,
and being able to dig down, find the right people,
find quality people, address those issues that
we talk about in terms of having people of,
not only all skills and everything,
but also people from all backgrounds,
disabilities, you name it, that's what it's all about.
I have got three people here I want you to meet,
great people, who represent the Department of Defense.
I have got Officer Marvin Carraway
from the Pentagon Force Protection Agency.
He is in the audience;
I am going to ask him to stand real quick.
I want you to see him, so you know who I am talking about.
Officer Carraway.
[Applause]
Thank you.
You may remember him.
He was this brave individual who stopped the shooter
from entering the Pentagon in early March.
He was actually wounded in that affair, in that event,
and we thank him and people like him
that are part of our Department of Defense.
Thank you Officer Carraway.
[Applause]
So I think Officer Carraway,
you see that we are humbled to be in your presence,
and that's what this is all about.
We also have Ms. Tambour Eller,
from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Recognize her.
Ms. Eller deployed to Iraq from June to December of 2008.
So she is part of this.
She served as the Deputy Chief of Staff,
Operations in the office there,
but she demonstrates the flexibility, the agility,
in our operations, and what we do,
recognizing our civilian expeditionary workforce,
because our civilians actually deploy, they go out there.
So we thank you very much Eller.
[Applause]
Finally, and I say finally,
but I have teased her earlier
about her intellectual capacity,
not to say the others don't,
but Ms. Blanche Dillon from the Air Force is joining us.
Ms. Dillon is a Career Field Manager
in Cyberspace Transformation and Strategy Directorate.
We want to thank you all for what you do,
but as much she is recognized probably more than anyone
for the need to reform our hiring processes,
and we thank you.
This is only just, as you know,
just a taste of what we have in the Department of Defense.
We are excited about getting behind
the President's initiative, Hiring Reform.
We thank you again for your hospitality.
Looking forward to working with you. Thank you!
[Applause]
It's my honor to also introduce an old friend.
Scott, I guess we have been around town a long time.
We started work together at the Treasury,
under Secretary Lloyd Bentsen
and have remained close friends every since.
He is another one of those rock solid, high integrity people,
who is bringing true change to the Veterans Affairs Department.
He is speeding up the quality of our healthcare.
He is out reaching to veterans and he is shaking things up and
making them happen like they have never happened before.
Scott Gould, the Deputy Secretary of the Department
of Veterans Affairs.
[Applause]
Thank you!
Thanks John for that lovely introduction.
And when I saw that John Berry was going to take the helm
here at OPM, I knew that we were going to get changed.
We have got the President
that understands the importance of people
making government work and we have got a Director
a Deputy Director over at OMB
who together form a wonderful partnership
and I believe have made this happen.
So congratulations!
Deputy Secretary Porcari, Under Secretary Stanley,
who just left, Deputy Secretary Zients,
ladies and gentlemen, back in November,
I had the very great pleasure of standing on a dais
with Secretary Solis and Director John Berry
to talk about the President's Veterans Employment Initiative,
and I said then that I thought that
initiative would be both good for veterans
and good for the federal government.
I am here to say the same thing about today's initiative
on comprehensive recruitment and hiring reform.
Now, this reform is going to make it easier for veterans
to seek and obtain federal jobs.
It does for veterans
what it does for every federal job seeker;
it speeds up the whole process.
You don't have to submit a book to be able to apply for a job.
All you need to be able to do
is send a cover letter and a resume.
But the reform also safeguards the rights of veterans.
Those entitled the preference points, keep them.
Veterans with ten preference points
will also be placed at the top of the category
that they are being examined in.
And that top category isn't going to be limited
to the Rule of Three anymore.
What that means is that veterans have more opportunity
to rise to the top, and if they do,
they will be the first to be offered a job.
Now, this system of selection has been tested before,
at the Department of Agriculture,
and the result was, more veterans were hired.
That's good for veterans.
I think it's also good for our country.
You take an average veteran, someone who has been downrange,
someone who has gone through the boot camp experience,
who has learned to work in pressured environments
and diverse teams,
who has delivered for our country,
who stood tall for what we stand for,
and what you create is a win for our federal government.
At VA, we are chomping at the bit to get started
and the truth be known,
with the leadership of Assistant Secretary John SepĂșlveda
and our career team there,
we are leaning forward for this opportunity.
We have an estimated 105,000 people
that we must hire in the next three years.
That's a lot of folks, a lot of folks.
When I started at VA, just over a year ago,
we spent well north of a 100 days
to be able to go through the hiring process,
not unlike many of our colleagues across government.
Today, that number is coming down,
and John Berry and Jeff Zients
and the President have challenged us to lower that
to meet the standard of the best corporations in America.
This new comprehensive recruiting
and hiring reform is going to help us get there.
It's going to help us debottleneck
and cut the red tape.
Now, on behalf of Secretary Shinseki,
I would like to thank our colleagues
at the Office of Personnel Management
for their extraordinary effort making this happen.
John, you characteristically start by recognizing
your OPM employees,
you know that as is the case at VA.
We would not be able to stand here
and take a little lap around the podium
without the hard work and dedication
professionalism of the individuals
who make this happen.
So we are thrilled, we are very appreciative of the role
that our career team has played in making this happen,
and I believe that this will help us
do right by our veterans.
It's now my pleasure to introduce,
calling on the President's Management Council,
Deputy Secretary John Porcari,
Head of the Department of Transportation.
[Applause]
Thank you Scott.
And thank you John and Jeff for this remarkable partnership
that brought this across the finish line.
This is a remarkable achievement.
In transportation, we have gotten off to a running start
with Secretary Lahood in 2009 chartered an interdepartmental
SWAT team that had our senior executives,
our HR professionals,
our executive agent managers across our modes,
that were primed and ready to move forward with this.
They identified the barriers that we have,
which are not surprising,
you have heard all of them, and more importantly,
set up a strategy within transportation.
So going forward, right out of the gate, we are ready to go.
We have identified the roles
and responsibilities of our key stakeholders,
the standardization of our hiring process
that we can do under this executive order,
and the accountability to make sure
that the process improvements are continuous.
We found in the beginning that it took well over five months,
on average, to hire someone because of our sequential,
opaque, multi-step, frustrating process.
We are clearly losing high performing applicants
who find positions elsewhere.
That SWAT team has made a lot of progress
and we have further set up a
Hiring Reform Implementation Team or HIT team.
And John, I don't want to alarm you but the HIT team is waiting,
and we are ready to go.
We found that we have shackled ourselves with constraints
that keep us from hiring
and retaining the best and the brightest.
These transformational efforts
will go a long way towards changing that.
We should never forget that public service is an honor
and a privilege.
And in our quest to bring the most talented
and committed of new generation to public service,
you two have given us the hunting license to compete.
So thank you very much.
[Applause]
Marcus, do we want to go to questions
or do you want to sort of end the program
and then we can bring the questions up here
and we will take them after, how would you like to do those?
Now. Okay, so we will go for Q&A for a few minutes.
Tom, you know, it's funny.
When the President mentioned that to me the first time,
I laughed, I told him, I said, Mr. President,
I am 50 years old.
By definition, do the opposite of what I say
and you will get closed to cool.
He mentioned to me... what he was referring to Tom was
the spirit that John Kennedy brought
when he issued his famous call
and his inaugural address, his 'Ask Not' speech of that.
But brought a whole new generation of public servants,
many of whom are still serving our country today.
One of whom I know directly is the Majority Leader
of the House of Representatives.
He was a student at the time at the University of Maryland
when he heard President Kennedy speak
and give that address
and it drew him into public service and today he is now
the Majority Leader of the House, Steny Hoyer.
So that is the Age of Pericles,
that the President calls us back to
and that we are striving towards.
I think the efficiencies that we are putting in place today
and trying to speed it up, make it easier.
Plain English, we have gone away from
the 75 position description job advertisement
of the federal government,
down to no more than 3 pages, in plain English.
We have done it for every job at OPM and proving it can be done.
Some of our demonstration agencies
that are up here have done it for theirs.
So you marry those reforms with resumes
and this category rating,
which now allows you, once you have made it
through the meat grinder of this process,
right now all of these good candidates
who are well qualified, they are best qualified,
we throw them out and we make them start over again.
We are going to stop that now allow departments
to immediately draw out of that pool,
if somebody has been best qualified,
now you can interview and hire, interview and hire,
and we are going to work with the Congress
for the authority to do that across departments.
Today by the President's actions
you can do it within a department
and when Congress acts,
you would be able to do it across the government.
And so you could imagine now, whereas you had these...
a lot of frustrated people,
because only one person was hired,
now you will be creating a pool
that can be made available throughout the government.
It's a tool that the private sector has used well,
we can use it fairly.
It complies with our merit standards
and protects veterans' preference.
So Tom, that's it. Joe?
Joe, it is not as specifically addressed
in the President's memo,
it is something that we can work with the CHCO Council
quite frankly, what was driving a lot of that effort was,
as pressure was put on to try to reduce the many months
it was taking to hire people, people were sort of
artificially constraining places that they could easily control
and one of those was the advertising period.
My hope is, is by taking the pressure off,
by going to resumes and saving the time
and the ease that that is going to allow,
once our hiring managers adapt,
so that they don't have to spend all of the time
reading through lengthy essays upon essays upon essays,
they will now be able to achieve much faster ratings.
We are going to be able to hopefully achieve
greater fairness and openness
in terms of the competitive advertising process.
So we will be working on that Joe, we will be watching that.
I know the Chief Human Capital Officers
who are here today will be working with me
on making sure that we can continue
forward progress on all of those firms.
Yes ma'am?
Can you give us a sense of the scope
and scale of the challenge,
how many people you are going to need to hire?
How many openings do you see coming up?
And then also, how do you measure the success
of this initiative together
and what metrics are you looking at down the road?
Two quick answers.
The first is, you heard a number of the folks
talk today about just their individual hiring on average,
and sometimes this is more, sometimes it's less.
The federal government hires in the civilian categories
approximately 330,000 people a year,
and so that's a lot of folks when you spread that
across the federal government.
So it gives you a sense of the extent of the reach
of this on an annual basis.
Your second question was the metrics,
we have a very straightforward and simple metrics.
You heard a number of people say
up here today that it took them 200 days
to do hiring from start to finish,
the average across the government is 130-140 days.
So you can imagine, that means there is a lot higher,
and there is some less.
The goal that the President's memorandum establishes is
to cut that average in half.
So the goal that we are striving for is to do 80 days,
sort of start to finish.
That is competitive with the Fortune 500 standard
that is used in the private sector.
When that Dean Elwood Conference that we referred
to at the beginning that was held,
that was the standard they said you should strive to meet.
And so that's what this memorandum will do.
So the very clear bottom line is, we want to have,
from start to finish, an 80 day process
and the other bottom line is quality.
And obviously making sure we get the right candidate
for the right job
and we have a high quality person in the job,
because that's what the President wants
is the best and the brightest.
And that's a tougher one to measure.
And so we are working with the CHCO Council and others
and OMB to develop metrics by which
we can measure those standards of quality.
Whether it's through,
you go back and you interview managers in the following
a couple of months or a year later and say,
are you still happy with the person?
Are they doing the job you hired them to do?
Did they finish their probationary period well?
So there are a number of ways
we will be able to get to that quality,
but we are still working on setting those up.
But that gives you a sense of some of the metrics.
Yes sir.
Eric Dillon, from the Post.
In addition to what
Joe mentioned about the announcement program,
another common complaint you hear from people
who are trying to get into government from the outside
is that the vacancy announcements
are auto structured so that they are open only to people
who already have permanent employment status.
I forget what the percentages are,
but studies have shown that
it's actually very high percentage of jobs.
Are you doing anything about that?
Yes. That is not addressed in the President's memorandum,
but we have been working on our USAJOBS website,
as a way to sort of more easily categorize,
so that when you come in from the outside,
now you find a much simpler approach.
And when you are coming in from the outside, it used to be,
you would get the list of all jobs,
both that only federal employees could apply for
and those that you could from the outside.
Now we will be able to sort of streamline that.
And so you will see the jobs,
if you are coming in from the outside,
that are available for open competition from the outside.
The positions that are available only to federal employees
that have been defined
so by the agencies will be on a separate tab
that you could go to if you were a federal employee.
So we are trying to split that out
so that we can take the confusion away
for the applicant and make it a lot cleaner.
The other thing I am very pleased
and I want to have a special thanks to Monster,
who is the company
that is managing our USAJOBS website right now.
They were ready for today's announcement
and we will be ready to work with agencies
to begin to accept resumes immediately on our website.
So I think we are teed up to rock and roll,
thanks to their very quick response.
One more here.
The government executives,
how can you work with agencies to make sure that requirements,
the resumes, the cover letters,
don't become as burdensome as the same is now?
Absolutely!
The President's memorandum, and that's one the President does
specifically address is the President makes very clear
and the purpose of this is that,
this is to simply and streamline.
And he directs Jeff and I
specifically to report back to him on 90 day intervals
to show how we are tracking
and how we are moving forward and monitoring.
He also directs us to report back
on how we can now clean up student entry
into the federal government.
And so we are going to be,
Jeff and I are launching today a new initiative and effort,
so that we can get to work on that,
so that we can make it easier for students
to get into the government,
which is a confusing hassle right now as well.
So it is one that directs continuous oversight
and action and report back to the President.
And so he is going to remain very active
and engaged and involved in this.
He has made clear that he is putting the power of his office
behind this and he expects to see results.
So Jeff and I would like to keep the job,
we have got to make sure those results keep coming.
So we will be watching that pretty tightly.
We have copies in your packages
of the actual memorandum that go into the detail.
So you will be able to see that.
I will be happy to stay around afterwards
to answer any more specific questions that you might have,
but we will let these kind people
get back to their days and these busy gentlemen too.
So thank you all for being with us today.
God bless you and God bless America!
[Applause]