Increased workload leads to improvement in hiring process

Published April 29, 2010
By Marti D. Ribeiro
Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center Mission Control Center

TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- The hiring process for new employees to fill civilian positions at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., is improving by the day.

Tinker was tasked in July 2009 to hire 1,100 external civilians to meet upcoming workload requirements. All of the civilians were to come from outside sources; employees not currently in the government-civilian employment system at Tinker.

While excited to offer job opportunities to the local community, the process to hire these new employees was long and tedious - sometimes taking up to three months.

"Previously the time period was very lengthy," said Dan Bell, former 72nd Force Support Squadron director. "From the time the paperwork was received in the Employment Office until the organization received a list of applicants; it would take approximately 71 days or longer."

According to Bill Swigert Jr., director of Personnel, problems with the process were well known and not uncommon.

"The civilian hiring process was slow and ineffective," Mr. Swigert said. "The process was unable to handle large volumes of personnel actions."

But with the transformation spirit in the air at Tinker, problems wouldn't be left alone for long.

Personnel specialists met with transformation experts to conduct a rapid improvement event to tackle this issue head on. They focused not on the entire hiring process, but on the portion of time spent from receipt of the personnel action in the Employment Office until the customer received a list of qualified candidates.

"Our goal for this event was to reduce the process by 30%, approximately 21 days," Mr. Bell said. "Our intent was to get the 'warfighter' into the job faster, and working."

As with most transformation events, the group started by walking the process and identifying the various steps in delivering an end result. The office receives more than 34,000 applications in a year and they need at least 15 minutes to rate each application.

"We discovered we were providing 'management advisory services' at three levels in the process," Mr. Bell said. "Basically, we were creating and conducting work that the customer didn't need and the extra work was creating a bottleneck for rating applications."

This bottleneck was extremely obvious with the maintenance surge. There were more than 5,600 maintenance applications that had not been rated at the time of the RIE.

So in order to get those applications through the system, resources were re-allocated to add certified raters on a full-time basis until the backlog was removed.

"Once the backlog was removed, we were able to reduce our processing time from 71 to 43 days," Mr. Bell said. "Since the process they looked at was only a small portion of the total hiring time, we recognize there's still room for more improvement."

But, transformation is not just about fixing the problem today; it's also about ensuring the problem is fixed for tomorrow.

"To sustain this effort, we have a checkpoint for our application," he said. "If our number of applications gets to a certain point, we can recall those certified raters within 24 hours and they will work with us to get our backlog back down to a manageable level."

The team credits their success in this effort to their ability to affect change almost immediately.

"We had our RIE out-brief on a Friday and were able to start working on the process the following Monday," Mr. Bell said. "It was great to work together as a team; we learned that we always have room for improvements."

Editor's Note: Ms. Ribeiro is a contractor with ICF International