OMB's Zients touts better hiring, retention of feds

The National Treasury Employees Union wraps up its annual three-day legislative conference today. On Wednesday, union representatives spent their lunch break getting a briefing from one of the President's top advisors when it comes to managing the federal government and its workers.

For anyone who lives and works in the federal government here in the Washington area, many of the topics discussed by Jeffrey Zients in his speech to the NTEU luncheon on performance management will seem rather old hat.

But most of the delegates to the union's annual legislative conference come from NTEU locals all across the country, and its likely that this is the first time many of them will have heard from the man who is the White House Chief Performance Officer, and Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget.

The portions of his talk that made the most impact with the union reps dealt with the changes now in place, or on the way, in how the government manages people.

For Zients, this is his first government/public sector job ever, having spent more than 20 years in the private sector as a business executive. Still, he acknowledges that "working closely with frontline workers and managers is a core component of our strategy."

Zients received cheers from the NTEU legislative conferees when he cued up a series of Powerpoint slides depicting one of the biggest targets for reform in the Obama Administration: shortening and speeding up the federal hiring process.

Those three slides diagrammed the current hiring process at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A process requiring 40 steps, 19 signatures, and approximately 139 days from start to finish.

"Not surprisingly," he said, "this results in terrible satisfaction scores from both managers and applicants." And he noted that top applicants for many jobs are not going to wait 139 days to be hired.

Zients noted that HUD is working with the Office of Personnel Management and several other agencies to cut the total time it takes to hire a new staffer to at least half of the current average.

He also told the NTEU legislative conference that the goal is also to make the hiring process more "candidate friendly."

Steps to doing this included replacing the now-familiar "KSA essay", in favor of accepting a cover letter and a resume as often happens in private industry.

Zients says that the federal government must also continue to press for better performance reviews and additional training to keep the best feds at their jobs for a long time to come.

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