The Office of Personnel Management may be moving on from the REDI Roadmap, at least in name.
Acting director Beth Cobert said on May 3 that OPM has a number of initiatives to help bring more talent into the federal government, and they have “morphed” from the original Recruitment, Engagement, Diversity and Inclusion plan laid out a year ago.
“To me, what we are focused on are, ‘What are these core elements,’” she said. “Do we care about recruitment? Yes. Do we care about engagement? Yes. Do we care about diversity and inclusion? Yes.
“So it is how we morph these programs as they have all evolved to say, ‘What’s going to have the biggest impact with agencies?’”
The REDI roadmap debuted in 2015 under Cobert’s predecessor, Katherine Archuleta, as a way to update OPM’s playbook for bringing in new talent and retaining it, which included the broad use of data and metrics to address engagement.
Cobert said the new iteration, called the Hiring Excellence campaign, follows many of the same goals, but represents an evolvement of what federal partners have sought to make them successful.
“The Hiring Excellence program has really been built on the feedback we got from agencies,” she said. “We need to understand about how to operate better today. We need to create this partnership between hiring managers and human resources. Without those two talking together, folks don’t come on board and we can’t the talent we needed.”
It’s that partnership that will be the core of the federal government’s recruitment efforts, Cobert said. So to foster it, OPM has started a series of sessions to foster collaboration between HR departments and hiring managers.
The sessions include educational workshops to help hiring managers learn HR practices for finding the talent they need and HR professionals learn about the best tools and practices available to advise agencies.
“The feedback and reaction have been very positive,” said Kim Holden, deputy associate director for Employee Services. “It’s been a long time since OPM has been out in the field, doing these types of sessions and doing this type of face-to-face workshopping with our experts.”
Holden said OPM will go to 33 cities to conduct the sessions throughout the year, training a minimum of 50 professionals in each one-day session.
Cobert said the core principles of REDI are still in place, with several elements, like Unlocktalent.gov and the New Inclusion Quotient, already operating.
The new features include a blend of rollouts designed to streamline the list of qualified candidates and encourage collaboration in identifying talent.
One functionality new to USAJOBS is resume mining—which is currently in a pilot program of 500 users—that allows hiring managers to search a database for qualified candidates by their skills and geographic areas.
The ability to analyze this data lets federal hiring managers know when and where their career recruitment efforts are drawing the most interest from applicants.
“They also have tools where they can go in look at has viewed their jobs and who’s applying and where they are applying from so they can find out if a [career] event they had actually paid off,” said Dan Thibodeau, USAJOBS Deputy Program Manager. “They can make sure that the work they are doing [to recruit] is actually meaningful and they are not just putting the jobs up there.”
Thibodeau said the development teams are getting new user-based functionalities up typically after about six weeks of development, with new developments projected to rollout through the year.
Cobert said the speed of technology development, combined with continued budgetary uncertainties, have fostered the Hiring Excellence campaign’s goals of updating OPM with cutting edge recruitment practices.
“The world keeps changing fast, and we are just trying to play catch up in the same way everyone else is,” she said. “It is very hard to think about strategic recruitment when you don’t know what your budget will be or you don’t have one. And those muscles, when you don’t exercise them, become a problem.
