The specifics of the White House's hiring reform plan unveiled last week came as no big surprise — many of them have been proposed repeatedly over the last few years. But the difference this time — and the reason experts think this plan has a chance of succeeding — is the muscle behind it.

"We've been talking about this stuff at the operating level for decades," said federal staffing expert John Palguta. "But [now] you have the president of the United States putting his name on a memo talking about things like the rule of three. And you have [the Office of Management and Budget], the people with their hands on the purse strings, working arm in arm with [the Office of Personnel Management]. If they're trying to make a significant step forward, I think this does it."

President Obama ordered agencies to overhaul their hiring processes by Nov. 1. Agencies must:

• Eliminate the use of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) essays to assess candidates in the initial stages of the hiring process, and instead rely on resumes.

• Require managers and supervisors to play a greater role in the hiring process.

• Use shorter job announcements written in plain English.

• Eliminate the current "rule-of-three" process, where only the top-three-scoring candidates are put forward for hiring managers to choose from, and instead adopt the category rating system, where managers can select from many more candidates placed in broad quality groupings.

• Notify applicants of their status at four points in the hiring process.

"For far too long our human resources systems have been a hindrance," OPM Director John Berry said May 11. "We have great workers in spite of the hiring process, not because of it."

The government's hiring process is widely recognized as a problem. Agencies take about 140 days on average to fill a job vacancy, and many fear that the best candidates get tired of waiting for the government and take jobs elsewhere. Berry hopes reforms will get the government's average down to 80 days.

OPM has already set up hiring reform websites with fact sheets, advice and collaborative space, and will offer agencies the help of so-called mobile assistance teams made up of experts in recruiting, staffing and other HR issues.

"I'm pleased to see OPM pursuing this initiative, and I hope that they will create a transparent accountability mechanism to track and enforce progress," said former OPM Director Linda Springer, who in 2008 began working on a "road map" for fixing the hiring process.

Springer's road map — which Berry last year called "an excellent start" — also called for an 80-day hiring deadline, ending KSAs and better notifying applicants of their status.

The entire government will have to get started right away to meet the White House's deadlines. OPM wants to see agencies' hiring reform and recruitment plans by Aug. 1. Then, within three months, Obama wants OPM to set up a governmentwide performance review and improvement process that includes a timeline, benchmarks and progress indicators and a goal-focused, data-driven system to hold agencies accountable for fixing their hiring.

The HUD model

Janie Payne, chief human capital officer at the Housing and Urban Development Department, said HUD cut its average hiring time from 139 days to 77 days after it implemented the plan as OPM's "guinea pig" last August. Other agencies may follow paths similar to HUD's over the next few months.

Payne said HUD took nearly two months to map out its complicated hiring processes, which consisted of roughly 40 steps and "looked like a wiring diagram for an electronic circuit" when drawn out.

Then HUD identified problems and logjams — such as the use of widely varying hiring processes throughout the department — and cut out useless and redundant steps. That helped pare the 40-step process to 14 steps. HUD also made those 14 steps standard across the department.

Manager engagement is key

The biggest logjam at HUD was a lack of involvement from managers, Payne said. Managers felt too busy to be involved in the interviewing and hiring of new employees, and many assigned liaisons to work with HR offices to hire new employees. But those liaisons didn't know exactly what skills the manager needed from a new employee, so the quality of candidates who came through was sometimes lacking.

So HUD partnered with OPM to set up mandatory training for all managers who were going to play a role in hiring.

"That helped them to not only understand the process, but to understand their role in it and why it's one of the most important things to have on their agenda," Payne said.

Payne said HUD considered — but stopped short of — appraising managers' performance based in part on their ability to hire high-quality candidates.

"We're fortunate that they didn't come kicking and screaming," Payne said. "Their frustration at not getting top-quality candidates led them to help us."

But other agencies could crack down on managers if they don't get on board. Obama's memo orders agencies to hold managers accountable for recruiting and hiring highly qualified employees.

HUD also mapped out how many days each of the 14 hiring steps should take, and started tracking those on a daily basis.

"Tracking was very critical," Payne said. "We didn't know where the bottlenecks were" before.

Allison Hopkins, HUD's acting HR director, said the department is now trying to create better competency-based assessment questions to evaluate job candidates. HUD is working with its own subject-matter experts and with OPM to design better multiple-choice questions that will help weed out unqualified applicants and elevate the most likely candidates.

Assessment tools such as those questionnaires will replace KSA essays as an initial evaluation method. But some agencies will still use some form of written assessment essay later in the process.

Payne said that the backing of HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Deputy Secretary Ron Sims was crucial to getting the hiring reform effort off the ground.

And experts say that the involvement of top agency and administration leaders throughout government will ensure that the reforms take root this time.

"This is a priority at the leadership level I haven't seen before," said Ellen Tunstall, OPM's former deputy associate director for talent and capacity policy and a consultant at Federal Management Partners. "That's going to help."

Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, said bureaucratic inertia and a lack of time and resources have also been large impediments to lasting change. Without enough pressure — and support — from the top, those issues could impede progress this time too, he said.

"Sometimes managers aren't interested in being involved and [they] like having it done for them," Palguta said. "Sometimes it means changing an information technology system [so it can handle category rating], … and they don't have the money, even though in the long range they'd be better off. Inertia says, keep doing what you're doing, even if it's clunky."

----

TOM SPOTH contributed to this report.