Time to Hire: Using More Reliable Data Could Help GAO Monitor The Length of Its Hiring Process
Fast Facts
GAO competes with other federal agencies and the private sector to hire the best candidates to meet its mission. However, GAO’s hiring timeliness goal is about 20 days longer than the executive branch’s goal of 80 days. A shorter hiring process could reduce the risk of GAO losing qualified candidates to other opportunities.
In FY 2024, internal calculations on the hiring process excluded some employees and relied on inaccurate dates. GAO also used inconsistent target time frames internally. This impacted GAO’s ability to effectively monitor and improve its hiring process.
The OIG made recommendations to GAO to address this and other issues.
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Highlights
What the OIG Found
GAO aims to provide Congress, the heads of executive agencies, and the public with timely, fact-based, non-partisan information that can be used to improve government and save taxpayers billions of dollars. To execute its mission, GAO relies on a highly-qualified workforce that includes employees in mission-critical occupations (MCO) such as contracting, human resources management, and information technology management.
In FY 2024, GAO’s hiring of MCO employees took about 103 days on average, which is longer than its internal target of 98 or 101 days (depending on the application review process used), OPM’s goal of 80 days for executive branch agencies, and executive branch agencies’ reported time frames depicted on OPM’s public dashboard. GAO competes with the private sector and other federal agencies to hire highly-qualified employees. Hiring employees more quickly could decrease the risk of GAO losing qualified candidates to other opportunities and improve its ability to meet the needs of Congress. In addition, the agency’s internally-reported calculations on the timeliness of hiring excluded about 30 percent of the employees hired in MCOs and were based on inaccurate dates for when hiring actions began. Finally, GAO’s internal reporting and hiring guidance had different targets for how long the hiring process should take. By using reliable data and targets for the length of its hiring process, GAO may be better able to meet its hiring timeliness goals.
Why the OIG Did This Evaluation
The agency’s ability to provide timely, quality reports to Congress and to ensure the accountability of the federal government to the American people depends on hiring knowledgeable, skilled employees.
In fiscal year 2024, GAO highlighted managing a quality workforce—including hiring—as one of its top management challenges. The OIG conducted this evaluation to assess the timeliness of GAO’s hiring process.
Recommendations
GAO concurred with the OIG’s recommendations to develop and document a strategy for periodically reviewing the length of hiring actions and mitigating systemic inefficiencies (recommendation 1) and evaluate the target hiring time frame, document the rationale, and update all internal documents to reflect the established time frame (recommendation 4). GAO did not fully concur with recommendations 2 and 3. In response to the agency’s comments, the OIG revised recommendation 2 as follows: Define the types of hiring actions which should be included in time-to-hire calculations and implement controls to ensure all hiring actions within the defined scope are included in its calculations. The OIG revised recommendation 3 as follows: Establish controls to consistently document and record the start of hiring actions.