A recent New York Times article revealed that while the national unemployment rate is still dismal, job-posting numbers have gone up.

Job search engine site Simply Hired reported postings rose more than 50 percent last year over 2009; they increased almost 70 percent in December of last year over December 2009.

While these numbers are hopeful, job postings don’t always guarantee there is a job to be filled—a company posting a job can always decide not to hire someone after all or not find someone with the skills they need among the applicants.

Experts disagree on whether the latest hiring news is good or not; almost half of unemployed workers have been out of work for six months or more. Others point out that while workers in more rural areas may be out of luck, those in metropolitan cities have more options available to them. Residents in cities such as Washington, D.C.,West Palm Beach, Baltimore, Boston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Oklahoma City, and the San Francisco Bay Area have a much better chance of landing work with more job-postings present in their area.

What do you think? Is the rise in job-postings a good sign for the unemployed? Or does it mean little when compared to current unemployment numbers?

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?

In an executive order issued by President Obama this Monday, federal agencies have been instructed to take adequate steps in order to increase the number of disabled persons that they employ.

The order states that an additional 100,000 disabled Americans need to be hired over the next five years—an order originally mandated in a July 2000 executive order from former President Clinton.

President Obama justified the plan, stating that “As the nation’s largest employer, the federal government must become a model for the employment of individuals with disabilities. Executive departments and agencies must improve their efforts to employ workers with disabilities through increased recruitment, hiring and retention of these individuals.”

Currently, approximately 54 million Americans have a disability. Through the implementation of this order, President Obama aims to remove the stigma attached to disabled workers and to encourage disabled Americans to actively aspire to be a part of the federal workforce.

Is this initiative a worthwhile one? How should agencies go about recruiting more disabled employees?

Findings from the largest survey ever of the federal workforce, and the first to be conducted by the Obama administration, were released Monday morning. The results demonstrate that while employees are mostly satisfied with their jobs, they remain unconvinced that career advancement in the government is based on merit.

Of the 500,000 workers who received copies of the survey in February and March, a little more than half returned their responses.

Over half of the respondents—56 percent— said they have a high level of respect for agency leadership, with 8 in 10 enjoying the work they do and more than 90 percent believing that their job is important.

In light of all the headlines conveying the public’s poor perception of Obama and the U.S. government in general, these statistics are good news.  It would be interesting to note, however, how the numbers would change (if at all) had every worker, and not just half, filled out their survey form. Would the results remain as positive or would there be more of a balance between the satisfied and unsatisfied employees?

Rather than conducting the review every other year, as they have done since 2002, the Office of Personnel Management will now perform the survey annually. The Partnership for Public Service will use OPM’s data for its annual “Best Places to Work” review, due in September.

The Center for Human Capital Innovation (CHCI) convened its Human Capital Council for its second official meeting last Thursday, June 24, at PDRI’s offices in Arlington, VA. In light of President Obama’s May 11 memorandum on hiring reform, the private and public sector workers gathered to review the mandated changes and exactly how they could be implemented throughout the government.

Leadership Inc.’s Mark Abramson, the Graduate School’s Jack Maykoski, Dutko Worldwide’s Brian Sailer and PDRI’s Elaine Pulakos were among  those who discussed the past and future role of KSAs as assessment tools, OMB and OPM’s role in the reform, and whether or not November 1 was a feasible deadline date for the changes to be made government-wide.

Participants also chimed in on CHCI’s future, requesting more input on the content of the company’s magazine, Leadership Excellence in Government, and that portal memberships remain free. CHCI was also encouraged to expand portal membership to those with .com email addresses, in addition to those with .gov and .mil addresses.

Guests enjoyed a reception in PDRI’s lobby immediately following the session.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the hiring reform process in the comments section. And, as always, suggestions for future meeting discussion topics are welcome.

CHCI President Dr. Allen Zeman, along with PDRI’s Elaine Pulakos, served as a panelist during Thursday’s hiring reform webcast featuring the Office of Personnel Management’s Angela Bailey and Andrea Bright. Bailey, Deputy Associate Director of the Recruitment and Diversity department, and Bright, head of Classification and Assessment Policy, were subjected to questions from some 300+ webcast participants on the subject of President Obama’s May 11 hiring memorandum and what it means for the federal government. Among the topics covered were categorical ratings, in-sourcing, the impact on veterans and the elimination of KSAs from job applications. CHCI is set to host a series of seven additional webcasts on the more specific components of the planned hiring reform through September, with an OPM official present at each session. The next webcast, “Defining ‘Valid and Reliable’ Assessment Tools and Processes”, is scheduled for July 13. For more information on the memorandum’s requirements, visit OPM’s website at www.opm.gov/hiringreform/