An Exercise in Futility

I frequently get asked by friends and acquaintances: "I have a friend who wants a job at FederalEntity. Can I send you their resume?" My answer is always "You can send it to me, but there's absolutely nothing I can do to help them get a job here." Allow me to explain.

When our office has a vacancy, we contact our HR department (notoriously awful), who prepares a vacancy announcement - a generic document that briefly lists what we do and who we are looking to hire. The announcement is sent to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM, a separate FederalEntity) who eventually posts it on USAJobs.gov. Everybody and their mother can then apply to the vacancy with a few clicks of their mouse.

After 2 weeks, the announcement closes on USAJobs.gov. Someone in OPM (on the West Coast, no less...) then takes the hundreds of submitted applications and ranks them on a 100 point scale. You get an automatic 10 bonus points if you are a veteran. For those of you keeping score at home - all of our applicants are ranked based on a vague position description by someone 3 timezones away who has no clue what my office is, what we really do, or what type of person we are hoping to hire!

We've gone through this process 5 times in my 2.5 years here, and each time the list of suggested candidates that we get from OPM is shockingly awful. They supply us with the "top 3" point earners who we have to interview, and if all of these candidates are unsatisfactory, sometimes we can request to see the "next 3" on the list. However, it's extremely difficult (read: impossible) to justify hiring someone from the "next 3" list over someone from the "top 3".

Blah blah blahhhh, what does this all mean? Well, last time around we had an applicant with undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics and applied mathematics from great schools, plus great work experience. For some stupifying reason, she was ranked #4. All of our "top 3" candidates were horrible. Eventually 2 withdrew (found other jobs?), but the guy who was ranked #1 really wanted the job. He had been a plumber for 30 years, had never really used a computer, never worked with Excel (that's all I do all day long), and his writing sample had 13 typos on the first page (including the misspelling of his company's name!). He was ranked #1 partly because I think he "exaggerated" some things on his application, plus he was a veteran. Our request to skip over him to hire the #4 applicant was rejected by OPM. The reason? It was an entry-level job opening, and those skills that we claimed he clearly did not have (computers/excel/writing?) were learnable! We could hire them both if we wanted to, but we couldn't skip #1 and hire just #4.

This was over a year ago, and that vacancy still has not been filled. In 5 tries over 2.5 years, we've only successfully hired 1 new person. In that same timespan, 3 people have retired, quit, or moved to other offices. Ever get the feeling like you're on a sinking ship?

Coming up on Wednesday: How I became a Fed and how my friend didn't.