| Updated: March 8, 2021, 10:05 p.m.
Her current residence may technically be the back of a Ford F-150, but Utah’s rugged canyon country is where she has made her career and home.
After spending nine years as a commercial raft guide and several seasons as a National Park Service ranger, her resume highlights those skills: a familiarity with remote wilderness travel, technical search and rescue experience, and the ability to row a raft through whitewater rapids, to name a few.
But this year, when the ranger was applying for seasonal jobs with the Interior Department along with thousands of hopeful candidates across the United States, her application was ranked by a new metric: her ability to complete complex logic and reading comprehension problems on a timed, online multiple-choice test.
By Natalie Alms
Jan 28, 2021
The General Services Administration is digging into hiring data to find out why agencies struggle to fill positions.
According to GSA’s Hiring Assessment and Selection Outcome Dashboard, 90% of federal hiring decisions are based on an applicant’s resume and self-assessment, and only 53% of those candidates were offered a job. Even when another type of assessment, like a multiple choice exam, is part of the review, the percentage ending in a job offer being made still sits at 53%.
Self-assessments are exactly what they sound like: asking applicants if they think they re qualified for the job they re applying for. The use of these self-evaluations and long resumes can sometimes result in qualified job-seekers being eliminated from the process and a less diverse final pool of new hires, said Amy Paris, a product manager and digital service expert at United States Digital Service (USDS) who helped collect the data for the new interactive report.
Dashboard Offers Data on Agency Hiring Processes and Lack of Objective Assessments Olivier Le Moal/Shutterstock.com
email January 22, 2021
Federal hiring managers are asking applicants whether they’re qualified for open positions but aren’t getting hard data to back that up.
Federal agencies are relying almost entirely on information provided by applicants during the hiring process rather than objective or expert-driven assessments and now there’s a public dashboard to prove it.
Agencies are under mandate from a June 2020 executive order to use more assessment tools in the hiring process, rather than relying solely on resumes and questionnaires. As federal programs move to meet this task, a group of agencies worked to gather and present data on how current efforts are going.