Source: www.usajobs.gov
Within hours of its debut, the federal government’s ballyhooed new jobs board was on the fritz: USAJobs crashed repeatedly, error messages popped up over and over, résumés disappeared, passwords were obliterated.
It even got basic geography wrong, with searches for Delaware, for example, turning up jobs in Germany.
“It’s now a mess,” Donna Walli wrote on the site’s Facebook page on Oct. 13, two days after it went live after a costly 18-month redo. “Hopefully I’ll finally get a job soon and I won’t have to deal with USAJobs anymore.”
USAJobs 3.0, the next step in the government’s effort to make finding federal jobs easier and faster, was looking more like USAJobs 1.0.
It was 48 hours before frustrated applicants stopped getting this cheerleading message: “USAJOBS 3.0 is here and you’re not the only one excited about it!” Any “unexpected errors ... have now been resolved.”
Sixteen days later, problems have ebbed somewhat as the Office of Personnel Management, which took over the system from Monster, has raced to add servers and bandwidth and troubleshoot other problems.
But the biggest board for federal work remains riddled with bugs that are frustrating desperate candidates in one of the country’s few employment bright spots. Thousands of job-seekers and hiring managers have turned to Facebook and Twitter to complain, with some begging for the old system back.
“I’m really, really hoping someone has a rollback plan in place,” Daniel Rothman, an IT manager who does hiring for the Federal Air Marshal Service, wrote on Facebook on Sunday, “because frankly USAJobs. 3.0 needs to go back for some extensive rework.”
Personnel officials have blamed USAJobs’ poor performance on what they call an unanticipated spike in traffic to the site.
Much of America now looks for employment online, with widely used technology. But the federal government’s failure to get it right has embarrassed a tech-proud White House, where even the president has an iPad and is on Tumblr.
“If a private contractor was delivering this, the government would have terminated them for cause immediately,” said Adam Davidson, general manager for human capital management at Oracle, which provides payroll and other systems to federal agencies.
The botched rollout is now becoming political fodder for conservatives critical of government and reviving a debate over whether private companies or the public sector do a better job.
The USAJobs launch follows a crash last summer at USAStaffing — also run by federal the personnel agency that routes applications to hiring managers. During a four-day outage in August, résumés, essays and other information for 70,000 candidates was lost.
Since USAJobs went live, it has accepted 381,000 applications without a glitch, officials say. But they acknowledged that it is hard to know whether that number reflects any change over the old system because not all openings have been relisted and the number of open positions fluctuates.
“Whenever you stand up a new system, you have complexities,” said Matthew Perry, the personnel agency’s chief information officer. “If you think you’re going to get something running perfectly out of the box, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t happen.”
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