Tag: ICF

Hiring Process, HR Reform

Average Time to Fill: Possibly the Worst HR Measure Ever

by Jeff Neal1 Comment on Average Time to Fill: Possibly the Worst HR Measure Ever

imageMost of us in the HR world have worshipped at the altar of “time to fill” for many years. We use/d it as a proxy for everything we wanted to make better in HR, particularly the hiring process. The idea was that getting the average time to fill down to a good number (whatever that was arbitrarily determined to be) would mean we were doing a good job with hiring. It would make applicants more interested in applying for jobs in our agencies, send the message to HR staff and customers that HR was responsive, and generally raise the level of performance in HR. I have to admit I used it for years.

Looking at it as someone who is not in the HR trenches anymore, I have concluded that it started out as a good idea, but like many things good ideas in government, over time it has become a caricature of itself. Rather than driving real performance, it often provides an excuse for just the opposite.

Let’s look at the typical 80–day hiring model as an example. Is 80 days a good target for filling jobs? No. For most jobs it is far too slow. For some jobs it is far too fast. There may be a few jobs for which it makes sense. The fact that the target is the same for every job is a big part of the problem. The truth is that the time it takes to fill a job varies from one position to another. The use of average fill times is another part of the problem. If I fill three jobs in an average of 80 days, you do not know how long it really took. I could be that one took 160 days and two took 40 days. If you are the hiring manager or applicant involved in the 160 day case, you are probably unimpressed when I tout my 80–day average.

If we really want to improve the hiring process, we need to move away from one-size-fits-all metrics into measures that are tailored to the type of jobs we are filling. Tailored metrics can tell us how we are really doing – metrics like the 80–day measure tell us nothing. If the job is simple, is filled often, has an abundance of candidates, and does not require a security clearance, it should be filled within 30 days or less. If it is a Secret Service Agent who requires a TS-SCI clearance and has to go through an Academy training program (that is scheduled well in advance), it may be that 9 months is a reasonable time. If we are filling one job, it may take much less time than when we fill 100 jobs. If we are hiring newly graduated students, we might make an offer 6 months to a year in advance. Does the HR office fail when it makes an offer a year in advance and adds 365 days to its time-to-fill? Of course not.

Once we get rid of generic time-to-fill metrics, we can determine how well the hiring process meets targets that make sense. It is critical to remember though that time-to fill measures responsiveness, but it does not say anything about the quality of the hiring process. We could be hiring great candidates or bad ones. When we hire great candidates, we could be misrepresenting the job in the vacancy announcement and turning them off because what they applied and were selected for is not what they thought they were getting. Unless we add a quality measure to the mix, we have no clue whether we get good results or not. That means every agency needs a quality of hires metric as well. Such a metric can be determined by a post-hiring survey that goes to the hiring manager and the selectee a few months after the employee reports to the new job. The hiring manager can be asked how the process went and how the new employee is doing. The new employee is asked how the job matches up to the vacancy announcement and their satisfaction with it. Both can be asked about improvements to the process.

A combination of job-specific time-to-fill targets and post-hiring quality metrics is absolutely essential if we want to improve the hiring process. Absent that, we are left with meaningless targets that tell us nothing, enable nothing, and change nothing. Making this type of change does not require legislation, new regulations, or any other bureaucratic steps. It is simply good management and can be implemented now.

News, Opinion, Performance, Strategy, Training

Leader Development is Not a Luxury

by Jeff Neal

Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller had a story on April 2 with the headline “Better trained supervisors key to improving morale.” Jason reported on WFED’s CHCO survey and an interview Francis Rose conducted with NASA CHCO Jeri Buchholz. The CHCO survey and Jeri stressed the need for leader development as a means of improving employee morale. I believe Jeri and my former CHCO colleagues are spot on. Absent significant investment in developing the leadership abilities of supervisors, the Federal government is going to have morale and performance issues for years to come.

I have heard comments from folks who say the emphasis on leader development and the role of leaders in driving Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) results is an indictment of supervisors. Nothing could be further from the truth. If it is an indictment of anything, it is the culture that says investing in supervisor training is a waste of time and money. That culture has resulted in budget cuts for training programs, a lack of emphasis on developing the so-called “soft skills” of leadership, and a belief that mission-related training is always more valuable than leader development.  Such beliefs harm agencies terribly. Here is why.

Supervisors drive culture and morale. Other than demographic questions, the FEVS has 84 questions. Of those, 65 are under the control of supervisors and managers. Here is are the 2013 FEVS Questions with the 65 highlighted. So why not blame the supervisors? Easy – it is generally not their fault. For the most part, people are selected for supervisory jobs based upon their technical skills. If we are filling a basket weaver supervisor, we generally look at the basket weavers and pick the one the selecting official believes is the best basket weaver. In many cases there is little real consideration, and certainly no structured assessment, of that person’s leadership abilities. Once they are selected, we put them into a job that requires a completely different skill set from basket weaving and give them little, if any, real training to develop that new skill set. Many agencies send supervisors to a class that is called supervisory training, but it is really just training supervisors on the basics of writing job descriptions, using the rating system, and other basic HR-related skills. The “soft skills” are notably absent in many of these programs. So – we select people who are very good at what they do, but not at what we are selecting them for, do little to develop them, and then blame them for our problems. It seems that is grossly unfair to the supervisors and the people they supervise.

It isn’t that there is no interest by supervisors in real training. At the Defense Logistics Agency, we implemented a comprehensive program for newly selected supervisors. It was so successful, we started getting complaints from people who had been in supervisory jobs prior to the program’s start asking why they could not have the same training. It was clear these folks wanted to do a good job. They wanted the training. Our response was to create a “retrofit” program to give them similar training.

If there is clearly a demand and a need, why does real leader development not happen? For many agencies, it is because leader development is not treated as a budget priority. With shrinking budgets and everyone competing for a diminishing pot of dollars, tradeoffs have to be made. Training has not traditionally been viewed as one of the priorities, and leader development has drawn the short straw when the limited training dollars are allocated. There is often a mistaken belief that it would appear selfish for agency leadership to devote dollars to training supervisors when their employees are not getting the training they need. I believe that view, while it is based on the best of intentions, actually harms the very employees it is trying to protect. If employee views are so dramatically shaped by the quality of supervisors as shown by the FEVS, investing in leaders is investing in employees. In addition to the benefits for employees, there is also a benefit to customers of the agency. At DLA, we conducted both employee and customer surveys. We found a very strong correlation between our employees’ views and how our customers rated the quality of support they got from DLA. On some questions, such as “I have the information I need to do my job,” the correlation coefficient was +.90 or better. It was clear that how we treated our employees was directly related to how our customers perceived the service they got from DLA.

With supervisory skills being so directly related to the FEVS results, and employee perceptions being so directly related to customer outcomes, it is clear that developing leaders is not a luxury. It is not a selfish use of precious resources for supervisors and managers’ own benefit. It can and will drive agency results and make the government a better employer. That makes it a necessity.