The Office of Personnel Management thinks it has zeroed in on one of the big reasons it takes so long to hire new employees: procrastinating managers.

Many managers take an average of 37 days but sometimes as long as three months before they get around to interviewing job candidates, OPM said. And as thousands of résumés gather dust on desks, many of those job seekers lose interest in the federal government and take jobs at faster-hiring organizations.

"When agencies over the last few months went through and identified some of the barriers to the timely hiring process, the résumés waiting on desks was the No. 1 reason," said Angela Bailey, OPM's deputy associate director for talent and capacity policy, who plays a lead role in the government's hiring reform effort. "I literally mean they're sitting there."

Bailey said OPM has started spreading the message to hiring managers to step up the pace when it comes to interviewing candidates and making hiring decisions. For instance, instead of waiting to assemble hiring review panels to interview candidates when enough qualified candidates have applied, hiring managers can schedule those panel meetings ahead of time, anticipating that they will get at least some qualified candidates to review.

Other fixes OPM is eyeing:

• Promoting the widespread use of new, more effective assessments to replace by next summer the time-consuming knowledge, skills and abilities tests (KSAs).

• Calling upon vendors to update their hiring support systems used by agencies so they support a candidate evaluation process known as "category rating." Most systems in use now support only the so-called rule-of-three process.

• Creating a new evaluation tool similar to category rating that Bailey called "score rating."

OPM Director John Berry has called hiring reform one of his top priorities. In June, the Office of Management and Budget directed agencies by Dec. 15 to map out all steps of their hiring process, rewrite job announcements to be in plain English and no more than five pages, notify job applicants of their status throughout the process, and involve managers more.

Preliminary reviews of agencies' hiring processes and barriers led OPM to conclude that time management problems are largely to blame for the long hiring times.

Managers' delays

OPM concluded that many managers, trying to juggle numerous duties, put off résumé reviews, interviews and evaluations. They wait until a stack of résumés arrives in their in-boxes, and only then do they schedule times to assess and interview candidates, Bailey said. And if they have to coordinate schedules with other managers on a hiring panel, that compounds the scheduling problem. As a result, days become weeks, and weeks become months. Today, it takes the government about five months on average to hire an employee. OPM has said agencies should take no more than 80 days to hire a new employee, and managers should take no more than 15 days to interview.

OPM is taking an informal approach to tackling this issue, Bailey said. OPM officials, chief human capital officers, agency hiring managers and human resources officials throughout the government — who make up so-called SWAT teams that are trying to figure out how to fix the hiring process — are regularly talking to swap ideas, whether through weekly meetings, phone calls, Web casts or e-mails.

OPM earlier this month told SWAT team members that hiring managers need to coordinate and set up interview panels well before they get a list of job candidates. OPM also suggested agencies set up standing panels to conduct structured interviews.

"Formal directives don't work any better than informal prodding," Bailey said. "Managers either think this is important or they don't. If it is important enough to them, they will make the necessary changes to make sure they interview and select in a timely manner."

One HR director at a small agency, who asked not to be named, thinks OPM's diagnosis is right on the money, but said simple suggestions won't solve the problem. Managers are overstretched and need more employees to handle day-to-day matters so they can focus on managerial duties such as hiring.

Managers "have got to do that mission work, and they don't have the people to get the job done. It's a vicious circle," the HR director said.

Robert Tobias, an American University professor and former National Treasury Employees Union president, said OPM's conclusions raise serious questions about what role managers should play in the government.

"I think asking [managers] to block out time is a Band-Aid on an open sore," Tobias said. "What is their responsibility? Is it doing, or is it leading? If they're doing, they'll never have enough time to do interviews."

Michael Hager, former chief human capital officer at the Veterans Affairs Department, said VA found a similar problem when it reviewed its hiring process in spring 2008. VA managers used to take three to four months to hire new employees, but conversations between his staff and hiring managers helped the agency cut about a month out of the process.

"It's not rocket science," Hager said. "It wouldn't be to embarrass or expose them. It was, ‘Here's what's going on, and here's what's necessary to improve the process.'"

Joe Boyle, a legislative action team leader for the Federal Managers Association who is also a manager at the Environmental Protection Agency's Chicago office, doubts that the problems lie with managers.

"I'd disagree with a generalization as broad as that," Boyle said. "If there's a vacancy and the supervisor is perhaps performing the work that unit is expected to deliver, to cure that, it's important to make a selection and make it promptly."

Improve candidate assessments

By next summer, OPM wants agencies to use a series of assessments tailored to job categories to measure how well someone can do a job.

Those assessments will vary by job, but Bailey said some could include logic tests, writing samples or situational tests. OPM on Sept. 30 began piloting three online assessments for HR assistants, secretaries and clerks, she said.

Miriam Cohen, deputy chief human capital officer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said her agency about a year ago began using tests to automatically assess attorneys, secretaries and entry-level nuclear engineers. These tests of about 30 to 40 yes-or-no questions apiece were designed by agency experts and Monster.com contractors to measure how much candidates know about their field and to automatically weed out unqualified candidates.

Those tests differ from KSAs, which often require candidates to write lengthy essays describing their work experiences. Bailey and other KSA critics say some candidates hire other people to write their essays for them, making KSAs a poor way to evaluate talent.

Bailey said she and other OPM officials have applied for jobs at private-sector companies to see how they handle hiring. They learned that those companies rely heavily on assessments.

"Panera Bread asks you 225 questions, beyond your résumé," Bailey said. "There were all kinds of questions at Southwest Airlines, including [testing] your sense of humor. We'd be fooling ourselves if we didn't think the private sector goes beyond résumés."

Better candidate rating systems

Also, OPM wants to give agencies more options in selecting a pool of qualified applicants. Many agencies still don't use category rating, where candidates are placed in broad quality groupings rather than being assigned numerical ratings. Proponents say category rating results in a larger pool of better-qualified candidates than the so-called "rule of three," where only the top three-scoring candidates are put forward.

Bailey said some agencies' computer systems aren't set up to use category rating, and as a result, they must use the rule of three.

"We're working with vendors … about this very issue," she said.

The new rating system OPM is considering, called score rating, would require legislation to enact, Bailey said. Under this system, agencies would assign applicants a numerical ranking based on their qualifications and anyone who rates above a preset cutoff score would be reviewed further.

The system would allow hiring managers to evaluate the relative strength of candidates, something category rating does not allow because qualified candidates are not assigned numerical ratings. The proposed score rating method also would not limit hiring managers to only three candidates, as the rule of three method does.