United States office of Personnel Management

Unit 6 Final Research Project

GB: 546 Recruitment and Selection

Kaplan University

Shoshonie Heitmann

June 20, 2012

Recruitment, Staffing and Talent Management

The United States Office of Personnel Management is in the business of recruiting, staffing and managing the talent once the candidate is in place. This organization main objective is to ensure that each agency throughout the federal government service has talented and goal oriented employees from which to draw progression and development through.

This organization is very large and the amount of manpower it takes to ensure that position are filled with viable talented candidates, to ensure that any additional staff is needed to perform functions to help ensure that different agencies are able to perform their functions for either the military, government or the American people. This also includes global bases throughout the world.

The office of personnel management also believes in creating a work place that one wants to make a career not just a stepping stone, therefore the promotion of training and self development is a high priority from the bottom position to that of CEO's or executives that run complete departments. This organization realizes that to keep employees it must help them to bring out their talent by helping provide guidance, training and mentoring programs.

The intention of this paper is to show the different levels and programs that is offered by this organization, as well as show how over the years this organization has developed and incorporated talent development and training into their recruitment program to help eliminate turn over and benefit many such as the Veterans, military spouses, and newly graduated students.

Job Analysis

The Office of Personnel Management has very specific guidelines for which it does it hiring and a resume has to go through a points system to even get past the first stages of the look at stage. The KSAO's are highly used but so are the line and skill definers when setting up the different positions that are needed throughout the organizations that OPM hires personnel for. There is a strict procedures that are followed when looking at different positions that need to be filled, the first part of the process is to perform a job analysis. The methodology for OPM is to develop comprehensive list of competencies and tasks defining the job at hand. Significant matter experts (SME's) rate tasks and competencies according to the importance, and skill factors. According to the ratings, analyze which competencies are fundamental to the position, and if should be used in the selection process. Then by creating a accomplishment sample worksheet which determine the rating for the various accomplishments and what rate it will receive (DEO_Handbook, 2007).

Sometimes the different skill factors are shown through work experience or education value. Sometime back OPM had to re-examine their value on the education level for which each position need to be able to complete the job requirements. The discovery was made that many of the GS9 positions posed to high of education credits needed to fill the positions. The process was then changed to lower the education levels for GS9 positions (Library Journal, 1984).

As times change so has the Office of Personnel Management to keep up with the different laws and regulation that have been put in place to ensure that hiring practices are in accordance with the equal employment opportunity act and the affirmative action plan. In 2010 the president indicated that more needed to be done to bring more disabled on board as well as level the minority playing field. OPM took this to heart and is working hard to develop a working database that shows persons with disabilities that are qualified for certain jobs (Pace, 2011).

The recruiting practices have changed over the years but to help meet the diversity issues recruiting at local black colleges has become a normal practice for the Office of Personnel Management (Black Enterprise, 1992).

Tests Used

Along with job classification the United States Office of Personnel Management uses a vast amount of different tests to help ensure that the candidate is a correct fit for the position but also for the organization. There are reasons that employers do talent assessments, or also known as pre-employment testing, mainly it is to see if the candidate is a good fit for the job within the company. These tests generally can give a organization a indication of how in tune a candidate is with matching with the company (Doyle, 2012).

The different tests that are used by Office of Personnel Management are designed help to assign points to each candidate based on the scores and abilities.

* Biographical Data (Bio-data) Tests

* Cognitive Ability Tests

* Emotional Intelligence Tests

* Integrity/Honesty Tests

* Job Knowledge Tests

* Personality Tests

* Situational Judgment Tests

This different test all work in align with the assessment methods used when determining if a candidate has the qualification and skills to fill the position that is needing to be filled. "The extent to which the assessment method has been shown to accurately measure a job-related competency and/or predict successful performance on the job" (OPM, n.d.). Each of these programs is done in house and has been designed to help create validity in the assessment of each viable candidate.

The Office of Personnel Management took a process and adapted it to meet the needs of all the agencies for which hiring is done. This process has guidelines to help ensure applicants perceive the process as fair, so all agencies of OPM are encouraged to:

* Offer applicants a realistic job preview before the assessment process

* Discuss with applicants the rationale for using the selection device, as well as what it assesses and why these competencies are important to the job

* Provide applicants the opportunity to ask questions about the job and the selection process

* Treat individuals with respect, sensitivity, and impartiality during the process

* Provide feedback