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Public Sector Selection: Does it have to be so difficult?by Jack Feldhaus, President and CEO of Sigma Data Systems, Inc. We used to call it “Personnel Management,” then later it became “Human Resources” — a term I’ve always thought rather degrading to employees. These terms are now being replaced by new buzzwords, such as “Human Assets” and “Human Capital.” When I encountered that last term while reading an article in a recent business journal, the image of 18th century slave ships immediately came to mind. Whatever you call it, the work of hiring people and managing their productivity remains an essential function of most organizations, both private and public. In public organizations, the recruitment and selection of new employees, as well as the transfer and promotion of existing workers, has for decades embodied the concepts of job-related qualifications and fair competition. Our elected officials adopted those two principles as public policy in order to replace systems based on political spoils, nepotism and cronyism. The central idea was to promote effective government by maximizing employee productivity. The implementation of what we’ve traditionally called “Merit Systems” evolved over time into complicated bureaucracies. Their policies and processes were intended to control abuses by hiring authorities, thereby ensuring responsible use of public moneys and efficiency of line operations. Over time, new laws pertaining to Labor Relations, Occupational Health and Safety, and Equal Employment Opportunity have further increased documentation, monitoring, and reporting requirements. The administration of these, along with other divergent and sometimes even conflicting requirements, has often been heaped on top of the existing responsibilities of the personnel selection function staff, adding to their already over-demanding workload. The workings of the typical public employment function became characterized by a need for considerable paperwork and other labor-intensive and time-consuming practices. These include leaving detailed audit trails documenting the recruitment, assessment and ranking of job applicants, and the subsequent “certification of eligibles” for final selection. In many cases, these cumbersome and time-consuming procedures came to interfere with the work of government and to actually impede the speed and efficiency of government line operations. This result was the exact opposite of the original intended purpose of these systems. The resulting backlash from operating agency managers has led some public organizations to dismantle their carefully developed systems of checks and balances. In recent years we have heard a lot of talk about the need for HR to be of “service” to line departments. In many agencies, the implementation of this so called service-oriented approach has simply been to “get out of the way,” thereby allowing hiring authorities more latitude and discretion in hiring and promoting employees. Instead of trying to identify and restrict final selection to only a few of the most qualified applicants, some personnel departments now allow appointing authorities to hire from large “bands” of applicants or even from the entire list of all who applied. Others are experimenting with private sector style methods, such as searching for “key words” in large databases of unverified and unstructured resumes. Such haphazard approaches lack scientifically demonstrated validity and reliability. They tend to yield large numbers of both false positives and false negatives. They favor applicants who are clever at writing resumes, and those who can afford to hire expert resume writers. The key words used for searches are often supplied by appointing authorities who have already examined the resume of a pre-selected applicant. Such approaches may not stand up to the usual scrutiny of public organizations by their citizens, and it remains to be seen if they will withstand the legal challenges that are sure to come. Government organizations bear a much heavier burden of defensibility and fairness than do those in the private sector. While eliminating or ignoring valid and reliable assessment procedures can certainly speed up the hiring process, many practitioners feel it amounts to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” and re-opens the door to the abuses against which merit systems were adopted. Furthermore, it shifts the burden of performing applicant assessment to line departments, which typically lack staff trained in personnel selection techniques. The present situation leaves many personnel managers asking: “Is it possible to use fair and valid employee selection practices, while at the same time providing services that are truly beneficial to operating agencies?” The answer lies not in abandoning merit system principles because they make for a lot of work, but in making it easier to do that work. Personnel managers need not pit merit principles against efficiency. Speed and efficiency can be realized by streamlining or eliminating manual documentation procedures and by replacing outmoded and inadequate computerized information processing systems. By leveraging technology, a personnel manager can free up staff time and redirect it at activities better suited to humans than to computers. These include tasks such as planning, analysis and decision-making. It also includes work requiring creativity and specialized skills, such as the development of valid and reliable examinations and other assessment devices. In order for personnel department employees to become effective as specialized “knowledge workers” rather than just document handlers, they need to view the use of technology as a tool, rather than as a job in and of itself. This reorientation in thinking requires employment managers to focus more on fundamental organizational goals and objectives and less on the frantic efforts currently required to accomplish manual or semi-automated work activities. Personnel managers must clearly define the basic principles that should underlie the work objectives of their subordinates. When personnel staff are encouraged to follow a “standards-based” approach to completing their work, and are allowed the flexibility to exploit computerized tools creatively in any given situation, they can accomplish far more than many personnel managers now realize is possible. When done properly, the process of public sector personnel selection is, of necessity, very different from that used in the private sector. It follows that computer software designed for the private sector can’t be expected to meet the needs of government. Test development and applicant tracking in the public sector requires specialized tools designed specifically for the public sector. Significant increases in the efficiency of the public personnel employment function, and the resulting substantial improvement in speed of services provided, may require an overhaul of some existing and archaic systems, but it won’t require the abandonment of basic merit principles. ₪ |
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