Managers rate quality of job candidates low

The government's method of referring lists of qualified job candidates to agency supervisors isn't helpful about one-third of the time, federal managers told the Merit Systems Protection Board in a soon-to-be-published survey.

Under the government's merit promotion process, personnel specialists review job applicants' qualifications for job openings. The personnelists send along the candidates they consider to be "best qualified" out of a pool of qualified candidates. The manager then selects a candidate from the list.

But about a third of the time, supervisors can't find anyone they would hire on the referral lists, whether the lists include only current agency employees or also include applicants from other agencies or from outside the government.

MSPB collected the data from a 1999 survey of federal supervisors. The information is just a piece of a broader project studying the federal merit promotion process. That full report is expected to be done later this year, said John Palguta, director of policy and evaluation at MSPB.

According to Palguta, part of the problem with mismatched job candidates lies with personnel specialists. Palguta has a background in human resources. During his time in that field he observed that personnel specialists tended to err on the side of caution when deciding whether to refer a candidate or not.

"When staffing specialists are trying to judge basic qualifications, they are more likely to put applicants in the qualified pile. Then they don't have to defend an unqualified decision. If they rule someone out, they can get into an embarrassing position of having to reverse their decision," he said.

While that reaction may keep the personnel specialist out of trouble, it makes the supervisor's job tougher. As the subject matter experts, "supervisors are finding people on the list that they do not believe can do the job, so they return the list unused or take the best that's there," said Palguta.

At the same time, there simply may not be enough qualified candidates for a given position. "Best qualified is a relative term," Palguta said. Referral lists may indeed include the best of the pool, but often the pool is marginal to begin with.

Sixty percent of survey respondents told MSPB that less than half of the applicants who had been referred to them as "best qualified" candidates in the past two years turned out to be outstanding candidates.

Supervisors, more often than not, choose to hire from within their own agency. But when they don't, more supervisors turn to the private sector for a job candidate. Forty-six percent of supervisors said they had hired someone from outside the federal government to fill a vacancy, compared to only 35 percent who said they had selected someone from another federal agency.

"These responses raise questions about the quality of the government's processes for identifying highly qualified candidates for job vacancies," MSPB said.

In one case (described in a recent Career Corner column), a candidate described how a personnel specialist failed to refer him because the specialist did not understand that calculus is a mathematics subject. MSPB's data shows federal managers that they're not alone in instances such as this, Palguta said.