Monster Government Solutions

Last week, the government’s chief performance officer, Jeffrey Zients said that the process for hiring a new employee is too long and needs to be cut in half. On average, it can take roughly five months to hire one new employee.

Here at Monster Government Solutions, we completely agree.  The process is cumbersome.  Job descriptions are confusing and don’t engage the seeker.  Most people from the private sector are at a loss when trying to understand a government career opportunity.  And in the time it takes to weed through resumes and make a hiring decision, the seeker is frustrated and has likely moved on to another opportunity.

We work with agencies across the federal government and encourage them to make a change in the way that they approach the hiring process.  This change needs to happen before a job vacancy is ever posted.

Here are 5 simple steps to get you thinking about how you can impact your agency’s hiring process:

• Make it about the brand: Effectively branding your agency to attract the right talent is vital. This can be achieved through communicating easily understood and recognizable recruiting themes, information and benefits about your agency.
• Stay consistent: Agencies that are consistent in their messaging are better able to penetrate the talent pool and get to the RIGHT candidates.  Easy to digest messaging also needs to translate into easy to understand job descriptions.
• Adopt commercial best practices: job seekers today are used to a commercial process and they expect that government will follow this process.  When this doesn’t occur, the seeker tends to abandon the process.
• Connect to seekers in their own environment: Most seekers today are engaged in social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  Ensuring that your agency message appears where job seekers reside on the internet speeds up the process.
• Automate the process: Once the seeker gets to know the agency and understands the available opportunities, make it easy on them.  By implementing an automated system you can make the process for the seeker easy, intuitive and streamlined so that they move through the system quickly.

Have you implemented any of these steps or found others that have impacted your agency?  Share you story with us. Post a comment below.

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