TSA Testbed: Lessons learned during the largest peacetime hiring effort in history

The Transportation Security Administration gave its new screeners a clear and important mission: Don't let what happened on Sept. 11 happen again. It was a mission that everyone involved could relate to. It also gave deeper meaning to relatively tedious, low-paying jobs. The mission motivated screeners, TSA officials, contractors and subcontractors to do their best to meet the tough deadlines of securing the nation's airlines by the end of 2002. People worked seven-day weeks, 16 hours a day, to get the TSA workforce in place.

TSA outsourced key human resources functions-hiring, training and day-to-day HR processing-that federal agencies traditionally have kept in house. People with contract management and project management skills are essential to heavily outsourced human resources shops.

TSA executive Gale Rossides says agency officials had to be in constant contact with contractors to make sure the agency's needs matched what the contractors were doing. It was also important to make sure everyone had the same goal in mind, she says. "You have to capture the hearts and minds of the contractors," Rossides says.

NCS Pearson found 120,000 people who qualified to be TSA screeners, 60,000 more than TSA needed. So the company created a ready pool of those 60,000 extra candidates. Candidates in that pool could be called upon to fill jobs vacated by hired screeners who failed on-the-job training, who quit or who were fired. The advantage to TSA was that they had people who could be brought into training immediately because they had already gone through the required weeks of recruitment, screening and assessments. However, ready pools can be unpopular with applicants who take the time to go through extensive application forms and tests and cannot wait around for a job. Applicants sometimes describe being in the ready pool as being "in limbo."

TSA officials couldn't do business as usual. Coming up with job descriptions and the tests to identify qualified workers can take more than six months in the federal government and three or four months in the private sector. TSA had 12 months to hire 60,000 screeners, so it couldn't waste half the allotted time writing job descriptions.

TSA leaders hired people from other government agencies and the private sector, gave them assignments and deadlines, and let them figure out how to get the work done. One result: TSA's team designed a hiring process that took six weeks, compared to three to six months for typical federal jobs.