GovernmentExecutive.com

Federal agencies do a poor job of assessing job candidates, leading to bad hiring decisions and greater costs to taxpayers, according to a new report.

A widely used assessment method, which assigns points to job candidates based on their level of education and years of work experience, "is one of the least effective predictors of job performance," stated the report, issued by the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington nonprofit group working to revitalize the civil service.

The method ignores the quality of applicants' education and experience. Furthermore, it evaluates candidates based on information they provide themselves, allowing job seekers to game the system, the report concluded.

"Without a concentrated effort to reform the way federal employees are selected, the government risks hiring the wrong people, wasting resources and losing productivity, while it inadvertently overlooks some of its best job candidates," said Partnership President Max Stier.

The costs of poor assessment include higher turnover, lost productivity and greater absenteeism, according to the report , adding up to millions of dollars every year. The report was based on extensive interviews with agency officials and hiring experts.

One of the primary causes of the assessment problem is the continued use of the Administrative Careers with America questionnaire, which many government agencies began to use to fill entry-level jobs after the federal government settled a discrimination lawsuit in 1981. The settlement required the government to replace the assessment test existing at the time because it was judged to be discriminatory.

As a result, the Office of Personnel Management developed the ACWA tool, a 156-part questionnaire that asks job candidates to respond to multiple-choice questions about their experience and accomplishments. In addition, OPM created the Outstanding Scholar program to allow agencies to bypass competitive hiring rules and hire entry-level workers who had achieved a grade-point average of at least 3.5 on a four-point scale during their undergraduate studies.

The ACWA questionnaire and the Outstanding Scholar hiring authority were intended to be temporary fixes that would be used only until agencies developed individual assessment tools, but many agencies continue to use ACWA and Outstanding Scholar as their primary hiring methods.

In some cases, the results make little sense, the report points out. For example, applicants who want to become park rangers are asked on the ACWA whether they've ever worked as professional writers. Candidates for management analyst positions at the Navy are asked if they've ever had to coordinate lunch breaks with other workers, and if they've ever written a play or novel that was published.

At the same time, the Outstanding Scholar authority has eroded competitive hiring to the point where some agencies are filling almost all entry-level positions with it, while rarely increasing the diversity of new hires.

A number of alternative assessment techniques are better predictors of future job performance, according to the report, such as tests that expose applicants to situations they might encounter in the workplace, structured interviews where all candidates face the same questions and their answers are compared, and cognitive ability tests, akin to the Scholastic Aptitude Test that prospective college students take.

Improving the hiring system will require that Congress take action to fund the development of better assessment tools, the report concluded.