Best Hiring Strategies for Government Managers Training Workshop

Hiring federal employees was never an easy process, and both hiring officials and staffing specialists often become frustrated by its challenges.  Adherence to the federal government’s merit system principles is sometimes seen as an obstacle to hiring the right talent to accomplish an agency’s mission. All too often it seems like the line manager and the human resource management staffer are talking past one another. In today’s budget environment, with hard or soft hiring freezes, and early out and buyouts becoming ever more common, it is especially important that hiring managers be able to identify and hire the candidate they need, quickly and effectively.  With fewer people around to perform the agency’s mission, the mission can be jeopardized, or at least the work unit’s performance may be threatened, by longstanding unfilled vacancies.  There is also the real risk that once a position stays vacant for an extended period of time the organization may lose the FTE, as the agency’s Budget Office is ever more likely to “sweep up” vacant slots to better manage FTE and their associated personnel compensation and benefits budgets across the agency.