Good News; Bad News

A post on a Yahoo Group to which your Faithful Correspondent subscribes decried some rather troubling news. Disturbingly, the post claimed that on May 11, 2010, President Obama abolished the “Veterans Preference” in Federal hiring. A bit of research turned up both good news and bad news. On that date, President Obama issued the:

“Presidential Memorandum – Improving the Federal Recruitment and Hiring Process.”

First, the good news:

The following paragraph contained the only reference to the Veterans' Preference in the Memorandum:

“(2) a goal-focused, data-driven system for holding agencies accountable for improving the quality and speed of agency hiring, achieving agency hiring reform targets, and satisfying merit system principles and veterans' preference requirements....”

Nothing in the cited paragraph supports the assertion, even to your utterly GOP, but still Faithful, Correspondent, that President Obama had abolished the Veterans' Preference.

Now for the possibly bad news:

“(a) consistent with merit system principles and other requirements of title 5, United States Code, and subject to guidance to be issued by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), adopt hiring procedures that:

“(1) eliminate any requirement that applicants respond to essay-style questions when submitting their initial application materials for any Federal job . . . .”

Many jobs require the ability to write clearly and concisely. Essay questions can reveal a great deal, but not everything, about the writing ability of a candidate. For example, since the paragraph above addresses the initial application, typically completed online, an applicant might have someone else wrote the essays--although that seems a bit unlikely.

Used properly, essay questions can help weed out many applicants early in the process who will not measure up. Secondly, subsequent rounds of the process might include essay questions under controlled conditions. This would eliminate those who had no chance at the position early; thus, to the extent that essay questions remained, the new rule could save costs.

A question remains as to whether essay questions now included in initial applications would find their way back into a second round of examining candidates. In addition, essay readers need to remember the necessarily subjective nature their task.

Despite the possible flaws of using essay questions, your Faithful Correspondent sees no benefit or value in completely tossing them out. Doing so would almost certainly result in a longer, more costly hiring processes; and a somewhat less qualified Federal workforce than otherwise would be the case. So much for the possibly bad news.

Now for the really bad news:

First, a bit of historical context. As presidents have left office, they have typically reclassified the statuses of some jobs from “discretionary appointment” to Civil Service. Doing so kept the incoming presidents from firing cronies the outgoing president had appointed, and replacing them with-----their own cronies.

With the foregoing historical perspective, consider the following paragraph from the Memorandum:

3. 
   

   provide for selection from among a larger number of qualified applicants by using the "category rating" approach (as authorized by section 3319 of title 5, United States Code), rather than the "rule of 3" approach, under which managers may only select from among the three highest scoring applicants;

Likely Translation: “To the victors go the spoils.”

Crafting “category definitions” to fit the background of one's cronies would not seem likely to "strain the brains" of many executives. Over a century ago, the blatant corruption of the “Spoils System” led reformers to the create the Civil Service System. A linchpin of those reforms was the “rule of 3”. While one can criticize the rule of three for many reasons, it has, for over a century, protected Civil Service and the Nation from many abuses inherent in the old “Spoils System”.

Perhaps President Obama prefers the “efficiency” and convenience inherent in weakening the Civil Service System to its time-tested safeguards. Perhaps President Obama misses his “Chicago roots” more than we all realized.

Here is a link to the Memorandum text:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-memorandum-improving-federal-recruitment-and-hiring-process