Letters

Bridges to Business

Your article about Internet businesses entering the world of government procurement ("E-Invasion," June) was informative and on point. The world of dot.coms has certainly grown tremendously, and government can no longer be viewed as the one stone that has been left unturned in this continuing Internet expansion. Although it is necessary to consider the government's direct role, other relationships can be entered into between the government and businesses aside from this vendor-customer association.

At the Federal Emergency Management Agency, through our Project Impact: Building Disaster Resistant Communities initiative, we have had success building a bridge between the public and private sectors. Whether we are promoting the purchase of flood insurance with Visa, the creation of a disaster prevention loan program with Fannie Mae, or joint advertising campaigns with Compaq (as seen in Government Executive), we have found new and unique ways to merge the best that the private sector and FEMA have to offer. We are now developing relationships with dot.coms to build on these successes.

The government market undoubtedly offers a great opportunity for the already highly successful dot.coms. But it is also important to consider the other, nonprofit-oriented partnerships that can be created. These partnerships hold countless opportunities and rewards for both businesses and government.

James Lee Witt
Director
Federal Emergency Management Agency

Bringing HR to the IT Table

I've been a federal human resources professional for more than 30 years. I find the list of titles in your seventh annual edition of The Federal Technology Source quite instructive. It identifies a wide range of functions and disciplines that agencies deem important to their technology future: information technology, information services, contracting, procurement and budget, to name but a few.

What is absent is also instructive. Only three organizations-the Social Security Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority and General Services Administration-included an HR official.

We hear that the government is in the midst of a crisis with respect to hiring-particularly in the IT field-yet virtually no agency sees fit to include its top HR official. What this says about the perceived (and perhaps actual) role of HR professionals in the technology world is not reassuring. Not only are HR officials not seen as leaders in most agencies, we apparently aren't even participants.

Harry C. Redd III
Merit Systems Protection Board

Hiring Rules Don't Measure Up

According to the article "Job Candidates Don't Measure Up" (Executive Memo, June), a Merit System Protection Board survey found that about a third of the time, supervisors can't find anyone they would hire on the referral list they get from human resources. According to the article, John Palguta of MSPB says personnel specialists "tend to err on the side of caution, when deciding whether to refer a candidate. As a result more people make the cut than should," and adds that "often the pool is marginal to begin with."

Maybe Mr. Palguta has little exposure to what really goes on in selections. The processes used are so varied and the variables so numerous that one could write a short reference book on the subject. Here are a few examples of why supervisors may reject the referral list:

• In real life, many (if not most) supervisors have one or more individuals in mind for each opening they must fill. They work with the personnel specialists to devise a strategy that will make those specific individuals officially available for final selection. Often these strategies fail, because the pre-chosen candidates don't qualify within the area of consideration or because they lack time in grade, job series or skill code credentials needed to compete with the so-called qualified candidates. In these situations the personnel office then provides a list of "non-pre-chosen" candidates, which of course, the supervisor rejects.
• The official process does not document experience and other credentials in a way that allows for critical analysis.
• Much more often than we can quantify, it may be the case that the personnel department is using the wrong criteria to try to identify the best candidates for a job opening. They follow guidelines that arbitrarily reject many of the best candidates, based on restrictive criteria, such as skill codes and job series or time in grade.
• In many cases a position is officially boxed in by classification guidelines and policies, limiting the candidate pool to several people who are marginally qualified under the official rules, while rejecting many potentially superior candidates who are in "the wrong job series."

My case is but one of many examples in which reasonable-sounding Office of Personnel Management policies and guidelines are applied in ways that produce irrational and counterproductive results. For decades I have served in many work details, doing various jobs outside of my regular job series. In some cases I performed successfully in these extraneous roles, even receiving a few kudos and awards for my efforts. But according to the personnel office, I was not even officially qualified to be a candidate for promotion to the same jobs in which I had already performed successfully.

Supervisors did not always have the time, resources or political clout to change the position classifications so that I could become an official choice for their job openings. Supervisors feel forced to settle for the options given them.

This kind of thing happens thousands of times each year in the civil service, and yet OPM seems to think the little survey it did will actually shed some useful light on this very complex problem. The Merit System Protection Board and OPM quick-and-easy surveys seem to be the modus operandi of the personnel process in government. Much more real data gathering is needed to fully address the problem. We must do very intensive cause-and-effect analyses to identify weaknesses in the process and to find solutions.

I applaud those few teams of personnel specialists and supervisors who are able to make the process work. They succeed in spite of the official selection process. It is about time to assess the need for a 21st-century approach.

Steve Kaniuga
Computer Specialist
U.S. Air Force

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