Six months after President Obama’s May memorandum mandating hiring reform government-wide, the Department of Defense seems to be making serious strides. According to the Federal Times, The DoD is just one of federal agencies that have made considerable progress in reducing the time taken to hire new employees.

Kathy Ott, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for civilian personnel policy, says the DoD now takes 79 days on average to hire new employees, as compared to 151 days on average this past January. At a hiring reform event held at the Housing and Urban Development Department’s headquarters, Ott vouched for the faster, more efficient hiring of civilians.

“DoD understands the need for, and has embraced, hiring reform,”Ott said. “Hiring qualified talent and making sure it is available when we need it is a key to our mission readiness. It is critical we have the civilian talent we need to support our warfighters. There is nothing more important.”

Attracting good candidates and developing useful hiring assessments are next on many agencies hiring reform to-do lists.

Are you surprised that DoD has reduced their time to hire from 151 to 79 days? Do you work at an agency that has similarly reduced its time to hire? Share your hiring reform experience with us in the comments.

A key component of the hiring reform initiative finds its future existence in doubt, as few federal agencies expressed an interest in using it, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

The program in question is the Office’s centralized hiring register. In April of this year, OPM established the register for 13 of the most common jobs in the federal government, into which open positions like contracting specialists, accountants and secretaries could be placed.

The system sounds easy enough to use: When a hiring manager is required to fill a job opening, he can inform OPM via its register about the kind of skills he is looking for, and in turn, OPM would evaluate the applicants and rank them accordingly before handing over a list of suitable candidates to the aforementioned hiring manager.

Despite its user-friendly attributes, Ted Cuneo, chief of staff for Angela Bailey, OPM’s deputy associate director for recruitment and diversity, stated that during the first seven months of the hiring register program only 71 of 106,000 qualified job candidates were hired by the government. Cuneo further said that “OPM has been paying for [the registers] out of pocket. This was a freebie, and it’s not used much…we can’t continue doing this forever.”

OPM Director John Berry seems to disagree with Cuneo, however. In response to whether he thinks the register should be cut, Berry reiterated what he said earlier this year in a statement before a House subcommittee on hiring reform that the system is a huge time-saver, estimating that it saves federal agencies three weeks in the hiring process. He has no current intention to do away with the program.

Are you a federal hiring manager that has used the register? If not, do you plan to use it in the future? Why or why not?