Opportunities Exist To Improve the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hiring Process | Office of Inspector General, Department of Housing and Urban Development

August 02, 2021

Deputy Secretary

2020-OE-0002

2020-OE-0002.pdf

While some of HUD’s efforts to improve its hiring and human capital functions and reduce its average time-to-hire have been successful, HUD’s hiring process overall was not efficient. HUD’s Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer (OCHCO), which is responsible for developing and implementing policies and procedures associated with human capital management, set a goal to reduce the average time-to-hire but did not meet this goal. OCHCO must implement efforts to improve HUD’s hiring and human capital functions and increase hiring efficiency, as defined in its own human capital operating plans.

Hiring process owners, including program office hiring managers and administrative staff, received limited and inconsistent training on the hiring process and were not aware of the roles or responsibilities in the hiring process. The unclear roles and responsibilities, along with the inconsistent training, impacted HUD’s ability to hire efficiently.

Additionally, OCHCO had inconsistent and unreliable hiring data due to the manual nature of the data input and the lack of interaction among the various data-tracking tools. As a result, OCHCO may not fully understand how well HUD’s hiring process is operating or where its shortcomings exist. The unreliable hiring data impede OCHCO’s and the program offices’ ability to properly identify when to take actions for improvement.

We offer 11 recommendations to improve HUD’s hiring process. Six of the recommendations are aimed at process reform, and five recommendations are designed to support data improvement. The status of each recommendation is “unresolved-open.”

Recommendation	Status	Date Issued	Summary
2020-OE-0002-01	Closed	August 02, 2021	Standardize position descriptions and job analyses for mission-critical occupations, high-risk occupations, and positions with high-volume staffing needs.
2020-OE-0002-02	Closed	August 02, 2021	Develop and share best practices with HUD’s program offices on how hiring managers can execute hiring process responsibilities to meet timeliness goals.
2020-OE-0002-03	Closed	August 02, 2021	Determine the cause for the variations in the timeliness of the preemployment and security checks step in FY 2017, 2018, and 2019 and develop appropriate process improvements.
2020-OE-0002-04	Closed	August 02, 2021	Develop and document comprehensive reference documents on the hiring processes, procedures, roles, and responsibilities.
2020-OE-0002-05	Closed	August 02, 2021	Develop and implement regular training for process owners on the hiring process.
2020-OE-0002-06	Closed	August 02, 2021	Create and implement a knowledge management strategy, such as developing standard operating procedures, reference sheets, and program office fact sheets. Corrective Action Taken OCHCO developed and implemented client profiles for each HUD program office to address knowledge loss and the need for offices to explain or reexplain their mission and functions. The profiles will serve as a central repository to learn about the various programs and missions of HUD and will allow OCHCO staff, other key HUD program office staff, and HUD’s service provider staff to view critical information for each HUD program office.
2020-OE-0002-07	Closed	August 02, 2021	Conduct a feasibility study for an automated POL.
2020-OE-0002-08	Closed	August 02, 2021	Develop and implement time-to-hire goals that account for each hiring process step.
2020-OE-0002-09	Closed	August 02, 2021	Develop and document methodologies on how OCHCO calculates hiring metrics to ensure that its hiring metrics and hiring goals align across all of its data sources, including the POL, the human capital dashboard, and the HCOP.
2020-OE-0002-10	Closed	August 02, 2021	Track the quality of candidates as measured by the hiring officials.
2020-OE-0002-11	Closed	August 02, 2021	Track the number of recruit attempts that result in a selection, the number of recruit attempts that result in a successful hire, and the number of positions that are reposted due to unsuccessful first recruit attempts.