OPM Chief Deploys Administrative 'SWAT Teams' to Streamline Hiring

Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry's tireless efforts to improve federal workforce practices led a host to introduce him at a forum last week as the Energizer bunny.

But in a recent memo to agency chiefs, Berry sounds more like a modern-day Eliot Ness, a determined enforcer, setting deadlines to put those plans into practice.

Berry has created "SWAT teams" and "wolf packs" to push federal agencies to improve the government's hiring process and to better conditions for those already on the payroll.

In his June 18 memo to department and agency heads, he said that by today, "each agency will establish a SWAT team" to map current hiring procedures, identify and analyze barriers to efficient hiring, and develop "streamlined and plain language job opportunity announcements." In addition, Berry named high-level OPM managers as his "hiring wolf pack team lead" and "wellness wolf pack team lead" to be the points of contact for those initiatives.

Members of the SWAT teams will include agency managers and human resource professionals. To keep those teams cracking, Berry also will assign OPM representatives to them. And to ensure that agencies do not sidetrack the teams, Berry wants the team leaders to hold "a policy or core mission-related role in the agency."

He set a Sept. 30 deadline for the SWAT teams to provide their agency's leadership, OPM and the Office of Management and Budget an update of their work. By Dec. 15 the agencies are to develop "an action plan to tackle the barriers" to hiring and have their plain-language job announcements in full use for their top 10 positions.

"I'm trying to make hiring as easy as possible for our partners in the federal government," Berry said in an interview.

The mention of the OMB is significant because it shows the increased level of involvement by the White House in federal personnel matters. "It is unprecedented for human capital issues to have such a significant role in the overall President's budget and performance plans," Berry wrote.

If the past provides lessons, he may need the power of the presidency to make slow-moving bureaucracies get with the program. Many of them all but ignored the End-to-End Hiring Roadmap that the Bush administration unveiled in September.

Some agencies regarded the road map the way moonshiners observed Prohibition. "To date, there has been sporadic effort, at best, applied to making this initial first step in our overall hiring reform a reality," OMB Director Peter Orszag scolded in a June 11 memo to department heads.

One item that should make federal job applicants happy is the "proactive notification" tool that was implemented June 20 at USAJobs.gov. This feature is designed to notify applicants of their status, using e-mail alerts, at four points in the hiring process -- application received, applicant's qualifications assessed, applicant referred to a selecting official (or not) and applicant selected (or not).

Berry said the OPM is in the early stages of "creating centralized pools of top applicants for key mission-critical jobs across the Federal Government who can be interviewed by agencies and quickly hired." These pools, which Berry said also could include regularly hired slots, would allow applicants to apply to one central pool rather than to numerous agencies.

For example, several agencies may need to hire number-crunchers. Currently, accountants have to apply to each agency separately. But under the plan, the accountants could send their applications to a centralized OPM pool, where the job-seekers would be screened and interviewed. Then agency hiring officials would put the initially approved candidates through the remaining stages of the hiring process.

The OPM would do three-quarters of the work, making it faster and easier for hiring officers to put applicants to work, Berry said.

While improving the hiring process is critical, improving the satisfaction of current workers also is a high priority for Berry. He instructed agencies to identify the 10 areas in which they scored the lowest on the 2008 Federal Human Capital Survey and any areas in which employee satisfaction dropped since the 2006 survey.

Agency leaders were told to meet with staff members and labor leaders "to help improve employee satisfaction in a meaningful and sustainable way." To improve employee wellness, Berry also told agencies to inventory their current offerings, such as cafeteria, fitness and health facilities. Action plans to improve worker satisfaction and wellness facilities are due by Sept. 14.

"Studies show that, on average, happy and healthy employees are more productive and engaged in their work," he told agency heads.

Read Berry's memo (pdf).

Contact Joe Davidson at federaldiary@washpost.com.