BLM Jobs Online Deployment\
Better, Faster, Cheaper Staffing

**\
A Telecast Originating**

**from the**

**BLM National Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona**

**February 11, 2004**

This transcript is from the closed-captioning file produced during the
telecast.

It may contain errors and omissions in transcription.

Announcer: The Bureau of Land Management satellite network presents live
from the Bureau of Land Management national training center in Phoenix,
Arizona, BLMJobs Online, an interactive workshop designed to introduce
BLMJobs Online to the HR community, to managers and employees and to
explain what this new conversion means to each you. Now your instructors
Melissa Dukes and Sherian Long.\
\
M. Dukes: Good morning, BLM. I\'m Melissa Dukes and I\'m the human
resources officer for the Colorado state office.\
\
S. Long: Hello. I\'m Sherian Long and I\'m the California state
personnel officer.\
\
M. Dukes: We\'d like to welcome you to today\'s broadcast, better,
faster, cheaper staffing, also known as BLMJobs Online deployment.
Before we get into today\'s content we\'d like to have a few words from
Marilyn Johnson welcoming all of you to today\'s broadcast as well as
sharing her wisdom about what we\'re trying to accomplish with this new
system.\
\
Greetings, friends and associates. I\'m Marilyn Johnson. The bureau\'s
assistant director for human resources management. I would like to
welcome you to this satellite broadcast on the deployment of BLMJobs
Online, one of our key E-gov initiatives within human resources. E
government is one of the items on the president\'s management agenda.
Not only does implementation of automated staffing support the
accomplishment of this goal, but it also fulfills the needs articulated
in the bureau\'s workforce planning initiative. This is an exciting time
for all of us within the bureau, because our move to Internet-based
staffing opens the door to new and positive ways of filling our
positions.

The new system has a wide range of benefits for employees, supervisors
and HR professionals. I\'d like to take a moment to highlight some of
those benefits. For employees the new system will reduce the time it
takes to complete an application and will make it easier to update your
application. You will also be able to post and update your resume
online. Once you\'ve applied for the desired position, you will receive
an e-mail notification letting you know that your application was
received. For supervisors, BLMJobs Online will allow you to hire the
right person with the right skills at the right time. Because job
announcements will be accessible to a wider range of potential
applicants. This increases the potential to have a more diverse
applicant pool. In addition to this, automated staffing will allow
hiring officials to be able to reach applicants faster, which n turn,
will cut down on the amount of time that a position will be left vacant.
For HR professionals, there will be more consistency in the procedures
for application evaluation and will cut as much as 25 days off of the
recruitment process. This will free up more time for you to serve as
consultant and advisor to management and will make you more accessible
to them as they try to hire the very best for their organization. I
encourage you to fully participate in this broadcast, follow along in
your workbooks, participate in the exercises, and use the push-to-talk
microphone to ask questions. I wish you the very best and I\'m looking
forward to working with all of you in ensuring the success of this new
and exciting system.\
\
M. Dukes: Thank you, Marilyn. We really appreciate you taking the time
to introduce this broadcast today. Basically what we\'re going to go
over is the deployment of BLMJobs Online which is an automated staffing
process, but we elected to do this through push-to-talk so we could have
a lot of interaction with you the students. So for those of you who
haven\'t done push-to-talk before, it\'s very straight forward. All you
need to do is take your microphone, hold it 10 or 12 to 15 inches in
front of your mouth, push the button down, give us your name, your
location, and then most important, you need to release the button. There
are two reasons for that. One, you can\'t hear us talk as long as your
button is pushed down, but more importantly, you can\'t hear anybody
else talk either.

We noticed sometimes we might get more than one person come on with a
question. That way if we do have a couple people come o we can say, Tom,
in Oregon, sounds like you were on first, let\'s go to you and then we
can go to Cheryl in lake wood and pick her up second. Just remember
after you give us your name and location to release that button. That\'s
important. I do know some of you not in a room that has access to push
to talk. A lot of you we have \-- we have a lot of students
participating and it wasn\'t the conference room with the push-to-talk
capability. There\'s fax available for those of you who don\'t have push
to talk and the fax number is coming across the screen now. So you need
to remember to fax your questions. It comes right under Sherian\'s legs.
We will answer your questions that way.

For those of you in a room with only a conference telephone, we\'ll even
accept telephone calls because the most important thing is for you to
feel comfortable asking your questions. That phone number is going to
come up in just a moment. Best case scenario, if that\'s all you have
available to you, please call in and we will handle the telephone calls
as well. Our goal here is for totally interactive training program
today. In addition to Sherian and myself, we have Barbara Morrisey in
Denver. An NHRMC is the lead role organization for BLMJobs Online and if
there are any questions that come up appear Sherian and I aren\'t in a
position to answer, we know Barbara has all the answers at her
fingertips. Barbara, do you have a chance to say hello to everybody so
we\'ll know you\'re out there?\
\
Good morning, Melissa. Hi, Barbara. Glad to see you here again today. We
had a lot of questions come up yesterday. So Barbara was instrumental is
getting those answered. I think that\'s about it. It\'s time to get
started. Sherian, do you want to introduce the topic here?\
\
S. Long: Sure. Our goals and objectives for this session can be pretty
much summed up into two thoughts. First one is we needed to inform all
of you about our conversion to using this BLMJobs Online, and secondly
we, needed to articulate to you your role in filling positions because
we\'re now going to be using this QuickHire software. This whole idea of
automated staffing certainly isn\'t new. Other government agencies,
private industry and nonprofit organizations are all moving towards the
same thing. It makes sense because it is good business. Their objective
is the same thing as hours, and we want to try to improve the quality of
our products as well as reduce the cost. Current HR literature is
already telling us that fully 80% of all recruitment activity is going
to be web based and we\'re not talking just about us in the government.
This is across the spectrum.

Now, also, you probably are aware, automation isn\'t even new to the
field of HR. There\'s a lot of things that we\'re already doing in an
automated manner. If you want to follow along you\'ll see a lot of them
list there had on page 1. We\'re just going to quickly go down them. Of
course you already know we announce our vacancies by using the OPM
website USAJobs that this pen we\'re processing your personnel actions
and getting you paid through the FPPS system. The thrift savings plan, I
know this is the way you manage it, by going out onto that website for
TSP. We are all making our own benefit changes and we are printing off
our own leave and earning statements at the OPM website for employee
express. And finally, those of you who did get yourself registered for
this training, you went to NTC\'s website to sign up. What we\'re
looking at here is the fact that BLMJobs Online is simply our next
generation of a computer-managed HR business solution. You should be
aware that we\'re going to be \-- not we, but you also can find BLMJobs
Online at the website\.... All I have given you is background
information. Melissa, why don\'t you start us off with a goal of our
staffing.\
\
M. Dukes: As Marilyn said, the goal of any staffing process is to get
the right person with the right skills in the right place at the right
time. Doesn\'t that sound just like workforce planning? But the reality
is there is a lot of correlation between workforce planning and the
recruitment process. In fact, workforce planning identifies those skills
we need and helps us identify the best ways to acquire the skills. It
could be recruitment, but it could also be training or retraining
employees. It could be partnerships with other federal agencies or
volunteer organizations or it could be an acquisition process through
contracting with an organization. So there are any number of ways to
acquire those skills but today we really are going to focus on
recruitment. And this goal is the same for everybody. It doesn\'t matter
if you\'re in the federal government, state government, private sector,
nonprofit. If you\'re going to go out and hire somebody, you want them
to come in with the skills that you need at the time that you need those
skills abdomen the location that you need those skills. But for the
federal government, in reality, it\'s a little different and we all know
that pause we\'ve all been involved in recruiting before.

There are lots of laws, rules, regulations and case law we have to
follow in order to properly recruit employees, and the four major ones
my guess that all of us are familiar with are merit principles,
prohibited personnel practices, uniform guidelines on employee selection
and the Department of Interior\'s merit promotion plan. While these
aren\'t the only four we follow, they\'re probably the four we\'re all
most familiar with. But that said, we can still use technology and we
can use private sector technology to recruit and evaluate our
applications \-- our applicants. I know all of you have applied for
federal jobs before so I want you to think about it, what worked well?
What did you like about the staffing process either as an applicant or a
selecting official? On page 2 we\'ve given you room to jot down some
notes. What I would like you to do is take 15 seconds, jot down some
things you think worked well in the staffing process. So 15 seconds,
we\'ll be back on camera, so please take that time and jot down those
notes on page 2.\
\
M. Dukes: 15 seconds have passed. I hope you identified some key things.
In my mind as a staffing specialist, well as an applicant for jobs and a
selecting official, a couple things I think are really critical and I
hope you came up with them, is the fact that the HR and the selecting
official have a chance to really dialogue about what are those right
skills, what is it we\'re really looking for? Another one is that our
processes do comply with the federal regulations. They do ensure we
follow merit principles. And they do ensure that we do not commit any
prohibited personnel practice. That said, there are things that I know
frustrate all of us as HR specialists, as selecting officials and as
applicant. So why don\'t you take 15 seconds and think about those
things that really frustrate you that you maybe wish were different in
the staffing process. So we\'ll come back in 15.\
\
M. Dukes: Is there anything that you jotted down that you would
particularly like us to think about as we go through this training
program, that particularly frustrates you? So we would like to hear from
you. What did you jot down? I\'ll even track it down on the Elmo. Vince,
in New Mexico, I heard you check on while I was waiting to come on. Did
you write down anything in particular?\
\
Caller: Sure, Melissa, I\'m here. I think the length of time that it
takes to go through the whole process from the \-- when we first start
thinking about the announcement to getting someone onboard and I know
you will talk a little bit how much it will save us on. That the length
of time is frustrating us to us and applicants.\
\
M. Dukes: Vince, I think that is really critical thing for most of us,
you\'re right, it takes us a long time. It feels like, to fill jobs.
Anybody else out there come up with anything different that they jotted
down in their workbook? I know Grand Junction checked in. So anybody in
Grand Junction have anything in particular they came up with beyond
length of time they would like to share? Or are willing to share?\
\
S. Long: Melissa, I will tell you something I have certainly heard
complaints about, and that is the inconsistency in the evaluation, or at
least the perception, because they apply at one state and say they\'re
qualified, and they apply somewhere else in another state and they say
you\'re not qualified. I know this caused us problems in the past.

M. Dukes: Agree, Sherian, from an employee standpoint, that comes in
most. There could be technical reasons for that, but sometimes it\'s a
judgment call. So that is definitely one of those biggies. Anybody else
out there?\
\
S. Long: Are they there?\
\
M. Dukes: We know there are almost 400 people registered for both
sessions today. So there are probably about 200 people out there. And I
know it\'s early in the morning for a lot of us, but anything else
anybody wants to share?\
\
Caller: Melissa, this is Brian Davis in the San Juan public lands
center. The big problem I see is it takes so long. Usually our best
candidates by the time we extend offers they\'ve accepted offers from
other agencies.\
\
M. Dukes: You\'re right, losing our best candidates because the process
took too long. Very insightful, Brian. There\'s no spell check on Elmo.\
\
Caller: This is Kent Walter at white river field office. We were coming
up with added expense to get additional rosters, particularly from OPM.\
\
S. Long: Good.\
\
M. Dukes: Kent actually knows this one real well. We did a recent
recruitment with PM and we advertised two grades with them and it was
\$1700 and I don\'t think any of us anticipated that up front but we
wanted a 5-7 admin person. It was expensive. I thank all of you in
Colorado for jumping in. I appreciate your participating in push-to-talk
and making me look good. But I think as you\'ll find, these four items
that we identified and probably the ones you just identified for
yourself, automated staffing is actually going to resolve a lot of those
frustrations for you. Maybe not all of them because OPM is going to be
expensive. But I think most of the ones you have identified I think
we\'ll be able to address. I think for us that\'s the exciting thing
about automated staffing, particularly the time thing is something I
think you\'ll see as we go through this broadcast today is one of the
best parts about BLMJobs Online. So let\'s go to that.

What is this automated staffing thing we\'re talking about? And it
really is about better, faster, cheaper staffing. That is really the
goal of going to automation and something that we think is really going
to occur. But what is that better, faster, cheaper look like? For the
better part, what we\'re really thinking of is an increase, an increase
in the caliber of the applicants who apply, an increase in the number of
people who apply and truly a potential do to increase the diversity of
the applicant pool and all of those things we see as improvements or
better. Faster, and this is the one that I think Vince and Brian kind of
alluded to in the previous exercise is it decreases the time you have to
spend in developing rating criteria, and Sherian is going to go \--
Sherian and I will both go through a lot of detail on that because you
will see, where is that time going away from? But faster to do rating
criteria. It decreases the need for a 30-day open period and we\'ll
really have a good talk about that. I know that\'s frustrating for a lot
of people and I\'ve been getting these, do we have to make threes three
weeks? Can\'t we do it in one month? The goal is to get multiple well
qualified candidates. It also decreases the time to refer applicants
after the closing date, and when you see what we\'re talking about and
we go through the detail, this is the thing I think that\'s really going
to excite the supervisors. Now, it\'s going to change their calendar a
little bit and change the burden on them, but if you could see
applicants three to five days after the closing date of the
announcement, boy, that is just the most exciting thing, I think, for
most selecting officials.

Cheaper, now, you can\'t deploy an automated system in the bureau
anymore if it\'s not going to save money or not have a value-added
benefit, and what we mean by cheaper in this case is that there is no
need for rating panels, no need to fly in a subject matter expert to
evaluate applications. We had a job in Colorado where we had 100
qualified people and we had to fly in the GS-14 to do the rating and
ranking and we decided one person would be sufficient. That person had
to be in our office for a week. That\'s almost \$1200 expense just the
travel, that\'s them being away from their job for a week, and that\'s
just one person. Not a panel. So those expenses go away because we\'re
no longer going to have the rating and ranking process we do now. I
think that better, faster cheaper mantra we put in the title here is a
valid way to describe what it is we\'re doing. But you need to step back
ladle about it. Cheaper did not say fewer people in HR as Marilyn
alluded to, what we\'re talking about is not that we have fewer people
in our. What we have are specialists and assistants who are now in a
position instead of processing 100-plus applications, sending out typed
letters, having to read each application, evaluate them individually,
they now have time to actually work with you on other strategic and
tactical things that you probably always wished we could have helped you
with but we\'ve never had the time to really devote to.

We talked about those yesterday with the HR folks, working on metrics,
helping on reducing OWCP costs, helping with employee skill building, on
resume writing and interview skills. So there\'s a lot of things the HR
folks would like to do if only they had the time and the advantage of
the system is that we will actually have the time to do that. There are
five key automated tools that make up this automated staffing concept,
and real quickly, those are USAJobs, Recruitment One Stop, QuickHire,
BLMJobs Online and FIRES, and I want to walk you through each of those
separately, because they\'re all phrases you\'re going to hear through
the broadcast or phrases you\'re going to hear when you\'re talking to
your HR folks and you kind of need to know what each of them is. The
first one I think we all know, BLMJobs Online is the government Internet
job board. It currently hosts about 15,000 jobs a day. So obviously
government is doing a lot of recruiting and it\'s probably a result of
the homeland security and the aging workforce, but there are lots of
jobs on there.

Essentially as we go through automated staffing what we\'re discovering
is the BLMJobs Online are \-- USAJobs really serves as a portal to the
BLMJobs Online website. The next one we listed is Recruitment One Stop,
abdomen it\'s not actually an automated staffing tool. What it is the
name OPM gave to a contract they did with monster.com to improve USAJobs
to be more applicant or customer friendly. There are a lot of things
that could be bet or USAJobs and monster.com has been working and is
continuing to work with OPM to improve USAJobs\' functionality and they
focus on five critical areas, improved job searches, clean,
understandable job announcements and we all no, sir those five-page job
announcements have a lot every federal, technical jar done and
monster.com is working to make them much more clean and understandable
for people who are not in the federal government, electronic resume
suspicion, the world is becoming electronic and we need to move along
with that, a Sherian I think will talk a little more about how
electronic the world is really becoming. The fourth one is my personal
favorite one, resume data mining. And I think later in the broadcast
we\'re going to go into detail about that, and I have a story to share
on that. I think it\'s too early in the morning. My tongue is struggling
here. But that\'s a personal favorite of mine. And applicant status
checking. Employees get frustrated when they apply for jobs, did my
application get there? Is anybody looking at my application for a job?

They can go on USAJobs using the improvement capability to find out some
of that specific information. The third one is QuickHire and I\'m sure
QuickHire everyone has heard of. Not quite sure what it means. QuickHire
is actually the vendor name to an automated staffing program, and
because it\'s the vendor name and it is copyrighted, we couldn\'t call
the program QuickHire. So what we did is we called it BLMJobs Online.
One is BLMJobs, two it\'s electronic, so we thought that was an
excellent name for this particular use of the QuickHire software. And it
applies to all of our vacancy announcements except one set, that\'s
temporary seasonal fire positions. Temporary seasonal fire positions
aren\'t announced in BLMJobs Online. They are announced into the
department\'s FIRES program.

FIRES stands for Fire Integrated Recruitment Employment System. I like
the acronym because it actually says what it means. The department as
elected to recruit temporary seasonal fire candidates department-wide,
and they\'re in the process of rolling out their department-wide
recruiting program right now for the bureau it\'s available in Wyoming
and Colorado. So if anyone was looking for a job in one of those two
states, they would actually be seeing all the department jobs in those
states, not just the BLMJobs. Now, the criteria has been built, it was
built by representatives in the four major players in the department,
BLM, fish, parks and Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Forest Service, while
they are not using this software, was actively involved in this process
because they are clearly the only other place where you find wildland
firefighters in the federal government, so they wanted to partner with
us as much as they could. The other states currently list their jobs as
BLM-specific and parks and fish and BIA list their jobs as
agency-specific, but eventually, and eventually isn\'t that far in the
future, I would guess one or two more Suns and what we\'re going to see
is a Department of Interior temporary fire recruitment program. Those
are the tools we\'re using in the bureau and before we get onto the guts
of what we\'re really talking about in better, faster, cheaper, does
anybody have any questions or issues they would like to raise before we
move on? You can tell it is the morning. Everybody is as tongue tied as
I am. Ok. Sherian, I think it\'s time to get into the guts.\
\
S. Long: Before I do that, I just want to let you all know one thing.
Because we have so many people out there, they have the bridge down when
I\'m speaking. So don\'t get frustrated if you were trying to interrupt
because we\'re not going to let you. We do have specific times set up
where we\'re going to ask for your questions and that\'s the time
they\'ll bring the bridge up. So don\'t walk away. Let\'s talk about
what kind of differences we have, and I know most of us get impatient
thinking enough is enough with all this background stuff. Let\'s get to
the bottom line and tell us what\'s different. I\'m actually going to do
that. But first you\'ve got to understand there really are eight
different steps that we\'re involved in when it comes to the staffing
process. The first of those is the needs analysis, then we go into the
recruitment, the receipt of application, which is basically your open
period, the applicant evaluation, referrals, interviews, reference
checks and finally that ultimate selection. Now, what is important you
to understand, it\'s not what we\'re doing that\'s changing, it\'s how
we\'re going about doing it. That\'s where the real change is.

If you want, you can follow along with me. It\'s on page 5 of your
workbook. We\'re going to go through these things one by one, so it\'s
clear how this is going to be working. Starting with that needs
analysis, is when we have those discussions have that to deal with, so
what grade level is the job you\'re going to fill? What is that area
consideration? What are the KSAs or other behavioral characteristics
that are important for you in this job. I know all of you recognize
those are those kinds of topics of conversation that the staffer has
with you during pre-recruitment consultation. Well, what comes out of
that, of course, is ultimately a crediting plan or sometimes you think
of it as rating plans, a the vacancy announcement itself. How long does
it take? Oh, sometimes 5 days, maybe 30 days long. There\'s a lot of
reasons, again, that\'s going to influence how long it took us to get
all that stuff accomplished. Then when we talk about recruitment, you
probably started thinking right away about, oh, that\'s that time that
we have the posting. But that\'s not really recruitment. When we refer
to recruitment here, we\'re talking about the other kinds of activities
you would do, such things as putting notices in the newspaper or in
professional journals.

How about those e-mails we\'re sending out to the states letting people
know that we have certain vacancies open. Maybe it\'s making phone calls
to people to encourage them to apply for the job. It\'s all those
things. That\'s what we really mean when we\'re saying something about
recruitment actions. Then, of course, we have our open period, and we
know in that some cases we\'re able to have something open for, oh, just
as short as maybe 10 days, but typically 30 days seems to be the norm
and it certainly isn\'t unusual having to extend that beyond that time
simply because we don\'t have enough people in our pools it self. After
the announcement itself closes, then it could possibly take us \-- well,
it could take us 2 to 4 weeks to do the ratings but wave even started on
those, we still have 5 days we\'re having to wait because, you know,
most people seem to wait anyway to input their application at the last
minute. So we have to give them five days for mailing purposes. So we
get that certificate prepared, maybe another month total has gone by,
and it takes, what, maybe one up to five days for it to come in the mail
from our office to your office, depending on how far you\'re located
from the state office how long did it take altogether? Conservatively, 1
to 3 months, but I know that\'s not necessarily the perception.

Right now I just happen to be on detail back to Marilyn Johnson\'s
stave. Since I\'m from there anyway I\'m having an opportunity to see my
family. So this last weekend I was having a conversation with my
brother-in-law. He knew I was coming to Phoenix but he hadn\'t any idea
what for. In the course of our conversation, he says, you know, nobody
wants to apply for government jobs because everybody knows it takes at
least six months, and in private industry we can apply and already have
a job in that time. I thought, yeah, but you don\'t know about what
we\'re doing now, and we\'re going to get that perception turned around
"taking six months". So let me tell you how we\'re going to do it.

We\'re going to get into the automated process and the changes. Needs
analysis. Well, instead of having in your pre-recruitment conversation
about those KSAs, that\'s a thing of the past. Instead we\'re going to
be talking about task statements. Now, task statements are these \--
could be like a question or statement. There\'s going to be responses to
it. Those responses could be in the form of a multiple choice. It may be
a multiple answer. It could be a yes or a no. It could be a true or
false. Or it could be either or a short or long answer, fill in the
blank type of thing. What you\'re going to be given as staffing
specialist is go into the task statement library and they\'re going to
pull down the task statements relative to the position you\'re actually
filling and then when you\'re looking them over to decide which ones you
want to use, if you decide that, you know, there is something else that

I want to have evaluated on the candidates, there\'s another question I
want to ask, that\'s perfectly ok because your staffing specialist will
be able to work with you and develop any additional task statements you
want. Now, if we can assume that the task statement is already built,
this whole process right in here should be a matter of hours and you\'d
be completely done and the position is going to be ready to go. I would
suspect you do have some questions about these task statements that
I\'ve talked about, but Melissa is going to talk to you about that in
much more detail in just a few minutes. When we get into the
recruitment, strategic use of that outreach recruitment strategies,
particularly if we use it along with that workforce planning, really has
this tremendous potential to increase the diversity of your candidate
pool as well as the quality that we\'ve got there. One of the things,
too, when we\'re talking about strategic, we can really do recruitment
in this outreach at any time because we are web based.

Now, this is one \-- I think the neatest type of capabilities that we
have now that we haven\'t had in the past. I\'m sure there\'s been times
you all come across some candidate that you think, hey, you know, I
believe this one would be really good on my staff but problem is you
don\'t have a vacancy right then. So maybe you accept a resume from them
and then you carry it around and eventually it\'s buried and you sort of
forget about it, but now with this system you will be able to encourage
them to go out onto BLMJobs Online system and do a pre-registration. All
that means is that they will go out onto our website, the one I gave you
earlier, the WWW.BLM.gov/careers and they\'re going to build their
record and that will include their personal information and their
resume. They can also while they\'re there indicate the kinds of
positions that they\'re interested in getting notices on. So, for
example, if they are really interested in the position in your location,
they can indicate all those positions that are, let\'s say, for
Sacramento, and every time we post a job, they\'re going to get an
e-mail that\'s telling them, hey, here\'s this vacancy. They could say
they want an e-mail of every position in BLM. I certainly wouldn\'t
recommend that because we have hundreds that we\'re putting out there.
Or they could limit it to a particular series only and they\'ll get
those notifications. So that way there isn\'t any question about them
missing when they actually have a vacancy available. Now, Melissa also
mentioned to you this capability of data mining. It\'s not in our system
of BLMJobs Online, but it is in the OPM\'s system, and I want to make
sure that this part is kind of clear to you because it\'s true, in
BLMJobs Online we do have resumes \-- resumes resident, but there are
also resident for those who want to build them in the OPM\'s site for
Recruitment One Stop, and that\'s where employees who are interested in
any agency would have them. In fact, our BLMers need to have one there
as well in case they want to apply to a different agency. So you can go
out there and you can drill and you can search to see what type of
candidates are available.

Maybe you\'re thinking, is there anyone out there for this particular
series, or who are interested in coming to my area? You can go in and
see those applications. You could follow up with an e-mail to them
letting them know we\'re going to have a vacancy. Another really good
feature about this new system is what\'s called the diversity
notification list. We\'re already in the process of building out there
the website for a lot of the colleges and universities, the professional
organizations and community organization. So when you\'re doing your
pre-recruitment, you will be shown this list, and all you do is say I
want it sent to this one, this one, this one and when we post the job it
will automatically send that announcement out there.

How much faster and easier can that get for you? When we talk about that
open period, now we\'ve actually posted the job, USAJobs is still the
portal, as we\'ve indicated, for all of them, appeared the applicants
are going to go to USAJobs just like they do now and they\'ll see the
notices. They find one for BLM they want. If this is the position that
we\'ve advertised using BLMJobs Online, it\'s going to link them back
over to our system, and if they haven\'t pre-registered, now\'s their
time, they will do the same thing as I mentioned for anyone else before,
they are going to put in their personal information, in this case
they\'ll also include their qualifications since it\'s a specific job
they\'re applying for, and they\'ll put their resume out.

Now, the resume is kind of like a blank slate. They\'ll have 16,000
characters available for them to put it in, and our recommendation is
they do this in kind of word processing system and simply do a cut and
paste. 16,000 characters is about five pages all told. So that means
they\'re going to have to be very concise in the way they describe their
work. Now let\'s assume that a person had pre-registered when they\'re
linked over to the BLMJobs Online. All they\'re going to have to do
there is finish their QUALS and put in the responses to the task
statements. So if they were pre-registered, no KSAs to write because
that\'s, as I said, a thing of the past. Whole process done in 10 to 15
minutes at the most. We believe the requirement to respond to those KSAs
just alone is going to make this so much faster that we\'re going to be
seeing a larger increase in the number of people who apply. In fact,
based upon experiences of other agencies already using automated
staffing, that\'s exactly what has occurred. In fact, the pools have
gotten so much larger that we anticipate we\'re not even going to need
to do 30 days because we\'ll wind one Tom in the pool. Instead we\'re
probably going to seep two weeks is going to be more than sufficient to
meet our needs. Now, something you should be aware of. The system rates
people just as soon as they put the application in. They put it in, hit
the submit button, boom, they are rated. However, they have the
opportunity during the entire time this vacancy announcement is open to
go back into the system and make any changes to their ratings, and it
could \-- they could also make changes to the resume. It\'s up to them.
Now, I know something else that happens, I certainly will get those
calls, and I know my staffing people do, selecting supervisors will call
and say, how many people have applied? Do we have anyone yet? And HR
still has that capability of going in, looking at that database and they
can tell you exactly how many have applied for a particular job.

Now, once the announcement closes, this is actually a little bit of a
difference now than what you\'ve been used, to usually you think, it
closes on the closing date at midnight and it didn\'t make any
difference where you were, but under BLMJobs Online, it\'s slightly
different in that the closing for everything is at midnight eastern
standard time. So if I\'m filling a position in California, that means
applicants are only going to have until 9:00 p.m. Pacific time. One
other thing\... if it\'s an open continuous type of announcement and
weave a periodic \-- we have a periodic \-- periodic cut off time, that
closing time is 6:00 p.m. eastern. So if it was somebody applying in
Colorado, that means the closing time would be 4:00 p.m. mountain. Now,
we will be including this type of information in the vacancy
announcements and we just certainly hope that the applicants pay
attention to what\'s there.

Once the application time has closed, and I told you they\'re rated
immediately, well \-- well, we have one more step. HR is going to do a
quality control in there. They are going to go in and take a look at the
resumes and take a look at the rating that each person has done to
themself and make sure that there is something in the resume that
validates how they have rated. For example, if they indicate in \-- in
response that they have expert knowledge, then we\'re going to be
looking in their resume to show that they\'ve had that vast array of
experience or education that validates that kind of a response. We are
going to be setting up a standard business practice probably it will be
three business days, and by then we will have it completed and a
certificate will be ready to go to you. Now, when I talk about the
certificate, don\'t think in terms of the old way in that we bundled up
resumes and certificates and put them in the mail to you because that\'s
not happening either. We are still electronic. What you\'re going to get
from us is an e-mail and we\'re going to be giving you a password, and
that password will allow you to go in, and you will see the certificate,
and if it\'s one open to the public, it will be in the rank order,
you\'ll see scores, if it was one for merit promotion purposes, then you
are going to see it in alphabetical order. You will also see the
resumes. Now, it\'s up to you. You can choose to print those down if you
want to or you can simply read them online.

Just remember, you don\'t have any KSAs to have to go through. The next
few steps we take, now we\'re talking about the interview and the
reference check. Not a thing that we can do to speed that up. But now
that we\'ve told you how much faster you\'re going to get it, we are in
you strongly to really take a look at your calendar and get that cleared
away so that you are prepared to start on those interviews right away.
That\'s what\'s really going to help us reduce the whole time it\'s
going to take to get us gun. As Melissa mentioned, we won\'t need panels
anymore because these things are all rated. So as you see, we\'ve got
the potential for saving easily two months in this process and gracious
knows it could well be more than that. This whole thing is a direct
result of redesigning the process that we go through in order to get
your jobs filled. I said it to you earlier, it\'s not what we do,
because we\'re still doing all the steps, but it\'s how we go about
doing it. That\'s really what\'s making the difference. I realize I have
given you a whole lot of information that\'s kind of like a thumbnail
sketch. So before Melissa talks to us a little bit more in depth about
those task statements we\'re going to open the bridge and see if anybody
has any questions that you\'d like me to clarify for you as far as the
process itself is concerned.\
\
Caller: This is Bonnie from Safford field office.\
\
S. Long: Yes, Bonnie.\
\
Caller: I was wondering \-- I want to make sure I got this clear that
the job will be announced both on USAJobs and BLM online and that
USAJobs links to BLM. So if I\'m a person out there looking for a job, I
could go to one or both places?\
\
S. Long: Let me clarify that for you. The answer is all jobs have to be
posted on the OPM website, or as we think of it, as USAJobs. That\'s the
only access portal. So if you want to apply for one every our jobs,
that\'s where it will go. It will automatically link them over to the
BLM jobs online site. If you go straight to the BLMJobs onsite, what
you\'re really doing there is for pre-registration. That\'s when you
would go in initially through there. Otherwise you go into USAJobs. Is
that clear?\
\
Caller: Yeah, that makes sense now.\
S. Long: Ok. Are there any other questions?\
\
Caller: This is Debbie at the fire center.\
\
S. Long: Yeah, Debbie? Go ahead.\
\
Caller: My question is, you talked, Sherian, about applicants applying
and getting a notice back rated as qualified or not qualified. Could
they then go in and change their resumes so they could come back as
qualified if they were rated initially as not qualified?\
\
S. Long: Let me clarify something for you there. First off, the initial
receipt they\'re going to get back is simply going to tell them, we\'ve
received your application, period. They\'re not going to get what
they\'re qualified as. What \-- we will send to them later on after the
ratings have been finalized is the notice to them as to whether they
were referred or not qualified, that type of thing. So there\'s actually
two different e-mails they will be getting.\
\
Caller: Thank you.\
\
S. Long: Any other questions?\
\
Caller: Yeah, Sherian, this is Stella as NTC. I was just wondering on
that application notification process is that automated or \-- are we
still going to be having to do that \-- send out a Letterman annually?\
\
S. Long: Are you referring to the application, the fact that we\'ve
received the application?\
\
Caller: No, it\'s after the job has closed and they\'ve been rated
and\...\
\
S. Long: No, that is also electronic. As the staffers have their
training in the QuickHire software itself, Barbara is explaining how to
go about doing that and we will not be sending hard copies of anything
anymore.\
\
Caller: Ok. In the training I guess I misunderstood. I thought that
wasn\'t available currently.\
\
S. Long: Yes \--\
\
Caller: Thanks.\
\
M. Dukes: One thing I think to clarify that, when you register for
BLMJobs Online, you do have to give the system an e-mail address, and
that is exactly why, or partly why. Part of sit for notification if you
sign up for notification. The other part is to have all that
correspondence handled electronically. So that\'s part and parcel of the
system design.\
\
S. Long: That\'s correct. The truth is an employee may choose to use
their home e-mail address or work number. Doesn\'t make any difference
to us as long as we have an address there. Anything else?\
\
Caller: Yeah, Sherian, this is Kent in white river. Can you explain the
application \-- the applicant evaluation process a little bit? Is that
still done by personnel or is that an automated process, too?\
\
S. Long: I think \-- it is automated, and I think it\'s going to come a
\-- become a little clearer for you when Melissa explains exactly how
those task statements work, because in essence those task statements
have become our crediting plan and the system will to all that for us.
We simply go back and do the validation of it after the announcement is
closed.\
\
M. Dukes: Does much make sense, Kent?\
\
Caller: Yeah. We\'ll wait for your presentation. Thank you.\
\
M. Dukes: I think we also heard from Anita from grand junction. Was that
Anita jumping in?\
\
Caller: Yes, Melissa and Sherian, a couple of questions\... One is, in
the past when fire supervisors have tried to pick up people\'s CERTs off
of QuickHire, they went to print an application and they had to print
all those applications. They couldn\'t just print one or two or three.
Will that continue or \-- I mean, I know they can view them online, but
if they go to print one, are they going to end up having to print all of
them?\
\
S. Long: That will be a question need Barbara to respond. That\'s pretty
technical.\
\
I believe they can print a resume at a time if they go online and don\'t
print on the employee\'s name or applicant\'s name, just print on the
resume for that applicant. We can check that out.\
\
S. Long: Ok.\
\
Caller: Thank you. Then the other question is, I have a few supervisors
here that are wanting information on the seasonal hiring. I know this is
for permanents, but there is quite a few questions out there about the
seasonal hiring.\
\
S. Long: The questions concerning the FIRES positions, I\'m assuming
\--\
\
M. Dukes: Anita, I\'m going to suggest that you connect offline with
Barbara Morrisey or Cheryl Brooks and hopefully they can respond to most
of your questions. I know Cheryl was in training last \-- last week. So
I think a lot of those questions that you have are probably going to \--
she will be in a position now to answer them because she did have our
training last week. The entire HR community is going through training
now, abdomen I think \-- I think Sherian is going to talk more about
that whole rollout process we\'re going through but once the training is
complete, by the end of March, a lot of those questions you can direct
to your HR folks but they are \-- training started two weeks ago at the
national training center, so there are still questions that maybe your
individual HR office wasn\'t able to answer, but once they get through
the training they will. So start with Cheryl, and if she can\'t get back
to you, either she or Barbara will get back to you on your issues.
Because I think that\'s all worked out now.\
\
Caller: Melissa, this is Vince in New Mexico. There\'s a discussion
going on here about accepting hard copy applications from folks, and if
that happens, what kind of application will they get?\
\
S. Long: Vince, that is something I\'m going to be talking about when we
get into the portion that has to deal with the changes in our policy. So
I\'m going to defer the answer to that into just a little bit later in
the broadcast.\
\
Caller: Thank you.\
\
M. Dukes: But the answer is yes, we will.\
\
S. Long: Is there anything else?\
\
M. Dukes: Ok.\
\
S. Long: If not, I suggest we have Melissa talk to us now about those
task statements so this will become a little clearer.\
\
M. Dukes: Thank you, Sherian. That was good dialogue and we appreciate
everyone participating in push-to-talk. Just a quick reminder because we
did pick up a little echo, is those microphones do need to be 12 to 15
inches away or you are going to revert rate a little bit back as we
won\'t understand your question. It was a great dialogue. Sherian and I
have done a lot of these morning ones, we know the first couple times we
do it slows down but we\'re glad you are guys are picking up the mics
and participating. We appreciate that. Task statements are in lieu of
the rating plan. So we use the QuickHire software with \-- we\'ve
focused our targeted skills questions to get the same information we
would get through KSA statements, but in a much easier \-- easier
fashion because as Kent asked, are they rated electronically, yes
applicants are rated electronically using these task statements. We\'re
going to walk through this statement because it\'s complicated.

What I would like you to do is to go to page 6, and what we\'re going to
dost, staffing is all about, these are the tasks we have to perform, and
then doing a job analysis, and what personal characteristics do we have
to have to successfully perform this duty? So in the middle of page 6 is
a duty statement on allot management plans. I\'m not going to pretend I
know enough about lot of management plans to just roll this off the top
of my head. We did get this from Montana and a little bit from Colorado
because we did want to have some subject matter expert input on this. So
this is a standard PD statement on allotment management plans. Let\'s
take 10 seconds to read that so we\'ll all know what specific duty
we\'re talking about. . Ok. Thanks for taking that time.

Now, on allotment management plans what we did is we came up just in a
straightforward process with three knowledges that are required to
successfully perform this duty, and they are knowledge of the
principles, practices and theories of rangeland ecosystem management.
Knowledge of allotment management plans. And professional knowledge of
rangeland management monitoring techniques and methods to analyze,
interpret and evaluate monitoring data to determine if our resource
objectives are met. Now, obviously in the job analysis you do this on
the entire PD and you might come up with in reality 15 or 20 knowledges,
skills and abilities that you want to start looking at and then you
would narrow them down. And what is it that we can actually assess one
essential for successful performance? Two, what can we assess in
writing. There are \-- right now we\'re looking at things that have to
be assessed in writing or can be effectively assessed in writing. Once
we\'ve done that, what we do is then take our knowledges, and please
turn to page 7, we build rating criteria.

KSAs, typically 5 to 6. I hate the ones with 8. We take the KSA, we
clarify it, we define it, and then we define the points much we\'re
going to apply. We do have a 5-point scale in the bureau. We are
required to define at least three of those points, typically 1, 3 and 5.
We can assign points 4 and 2 by interpolation. If you follow along on
page 7 of your workbook, you\'re going to see what we did in terms of
ability to evaluate rangelands. The 5-point level, the applicant has to
complete all facets of a comprehensive monitoring program. At the
3-point level what we\'re looking at is personally completed some aspect
of a comprehensive program and participated in all other aspects of a
comprehensive program. Now, that actually gives you some differences,
that gives you rating criteria. The hard part is actually applying that
stuff. Because people don\'t always write their applications and say,
well, I have applied many facets of the comprehensive plan. They
actually describe those facets or say it in such a way they give you the
information but they don\'t give you the information using the exact
words in the writing criteria, which is also exciting when you\'re
rating candidates. Let\'s say you have 30 qualified candidates and you
have to consistently apply this rating criteria to them. Very
frustrating, because by the time you\'re at 10, you\'re probably still
consistent. By the time you\'re at 20, is somebody say this, did I score
them, a 4? Did I score them a 3? You start questioning yourself. You
still have 10 more applications to go. So that is some of that that
inconsistent issues raise with us. I was referred in Montana, I wasn\'t
in Colorado. You didn\'t treat me fairly when at some level it\'s a very
subjective process. So what we\'re trying to do with task statements is
essentially have the employee self-rate, so no longer will they be
writing KSAs and we\'re going to have a staffing specialist or panel or
subject matter expert try to figure out what the KSAs and applications
say and how do we assign points to them? We\'re going to you a ask them
a set of targeted or focused questions.

We gave you a sample at the bottom of page 7 that assesses \-- that
assesses the person\'s knowledge and skills related range improvement
and implementation. This is a multiple choice where we give them four
answers. So here we have the beginnings of what you would see in a task
statement. We\'re not going to have one task statement per KSA because
as you can tell this particular task statement didn\'t assess everything
that\'s assessed by the crediting plan and clearly didn\'t assess
everything that you would want to know to determine if an applicant can
successfully perform the allotment management plan duty that\'s
described in the PD. In fact, they\'re probably two or three or four
more questions you need to ask. So what I would like you to do in your
groups is to think about what other kinds of questions you would be
appropriate to ask in this case would that get additional relevant data
from an applicant on their ability to do allotment management plans?

Now, remember, your task statements can consist of a number of things
and typically the answers are going to be multiple choice like the one
we saw, multiple answer which would include maybe there are 12 things
that are done as part of allotment management plan or comprehensive
range management, you\'d break them down and check how many apply. It
could be a yes/no. It could be a true/false. It could be a long answer,
a short answer. It could be a matching. There are lots of kind of
answers you can come up with but let\'s take two minutes in just your
groups at your location and try to think of what other duties you might
ask or task statements you might ask to assess someone\'s capability to
successfully perform this duty. We\'ll come back in two minutes. . Ok.
What kind of things? I\'ll go over to the Elmo. What kind of things did
you come up with that might be good other task statements? Anybody?
Particularly those of you who have range people out there. Anybody come
up with some good task statements?\
\
Caller: This is Jim in Colorado.\
\
M. Dukes: Hi Jim Cagney.\
\
Caller: How about some estimates of volumes so we can valuate between
somebody who has been doing it for 10 years and somebody that\'s done
1.\
\
M. Dukes: Volume and diversity is part of that. I think volume and
diversity, yeah, I think those are something you really want to focus

on. Other ideas? Anybody? Come on, I know, Vince, there are range people
in New Mexico. Isn\'t anybody in your group giving you ideas?\
\
Caller: Actually, we have no range people in this room.\
\
M. Dukes: They\'re probably all in the field.\
\
Caller: But, Melissa a thought that came to me would be to try to get at
the issue of controversial range allotments as opposed to ones that
might be more simple.\
\
M. Dukes: Definitely. Doesn\'t seem we do much anymore that\'s not
controversial. Those are hard questions to ask. I think you could
probably design some kinds of questions, maybe short answer ones, that
has someone articulate their experience in dealing with controversial
issues. Good suggestion.\
\
Caller: I think on one like that, the tendency is going to try to be to
create a long answer question, which is just another KSA, and so to try
to keep people away from those shall might be difficult at first but I
think people will realize that they get just as good responsible with
shorter answers.\
\
M. Dukes: Good point, Vince.\
\
S. Long: I was just thinking, probably the way those are going to work,
when we talk about these long or short answers, HR is not going to be
doing the evaluation on that. You all will do that part of it. So we \--
you probably don\'t want to really go there. More than likely you\'ll
want options that would start at the lowest level, they\'ve done rather
simple types of actions, and give them the options up to being the most
controversial. Because that would be a really good follow-on question
during an interview, having them go in and explain to you what was
controversial about the type of actions that they were dealing with.\
\
You could come one something about working on a solution where
environmental groups and local ranchers had disagreement about our
approach. So you kind of break down what happens during a controversial
dialogue and have them check some things that way. Very good answer,
Vince, and very good idea. This is going to be until we get our task
library built one of the harder things, is trying to figure out, how do
we ask some of these more difficult questions but truly relevant for
GS-11.\
\
S. Long: Like, how many range wars have you been in?\
\
M. Dukes: That\'s only in Nevada, I think, or northwest Colorado. One
thing we\'re going to do through these questions is, as you go through
these \-- it will probably be 15 to 20 task statements by the time
you\'re done with your job analysis. Out of those 15 to 20 questions,
you might find that the initial question we gave you is not as relevant
as surviving a range war. Or handling controversial issues. So you have
the option, and this is something we\'re going to strongly encourage you
to do, is to weight those things that are truly more critical to success
on the job. Task statements still are about predicting success. So you
might find of your 20 task statements that 6 of them are just really
critical and that the applicants don\'t really have level skills in
those six, they\'re just not going to be that successful in your job at
the grade level you\'re hiring for. But I have to tell you, we\'re not
asking you to like go into this blindfolded. We put together a number of
teams to develop a task statement library, using HR specialists and
subject matter experts in the states, both at the field and the state
office. So we\'re trying to include everybody who is involved in filling
jobs to help build this task statement library. We have recently asked
two of the folks who participated in this exercise if they would be
willing to share with you their personal experience. So what we would
like to do now is show you something from California. We asked Jim
McCavitt, who is a supervisory land surveyor, add Federica Lee who is a
supervisory HR specialist who represented California in this task
statement library process to share with us their personal experience in
developing task statements that people could use for jobs throughout the
bureau. So let\'s see that interview now.\
\
I\'m Jim McCavitt. When Federica first approached me with the BLMJobs
Online concept I was skeptical. My skepticism as she further explained
online questions would be used in place of traditional written KSAs. I
had this vision of a computer program coldly culling applicants based on
responses. Add Federica explained more about the process my confidence
grew. We developed it is a, statements and then developed questions that
were pertinent to the task statements. I realized that by asking the
right types of questions I could actually get more information from an
applicant than I could using traditional KSAs. Also the question could
be layered to drill down for more information. Since I am very
interested in an applicant resurvey experience, I could start with a
general question such as do you have resurvey experience? If the answer
is yes, I could then attempt to quantify that he can experience with a
follow-up question with \-- such as approximately how many miles of
section line have you resurveyed. Something I see as key is consultation
with the human resources professional in that mice Kay Federica had
great knowledge of the process and was able to design the questions to
cull just the right information from the candidates. I believe selecting
officials by me will be better served through this process.\
\
Hi, I\'m Federica Lee and probably like most of you when I first learned
BLM made a decision to mandate the use of QuickHire to fill permanent
positions, I had some reservations about the whole concept of automated
recruitment. I guess my reservations stemmed from a couple of things.
One, negative feedback I received from managers about the lack of
quality candidates. Two, fear of the unknown. And three, having to
change the way we normally do business. However, a few months ago I
received some training on developing task statements. This training was
provided by a very knowledgeable contractor with QuickHire. During this
training, I soon realized that the process of developing the task
statements was no different than developing a job analysis, identifying
some KSAs and developing a crediting plan. I really believe that the
task statements really replaces the crediting plan. So upon completion
every training, I sat down with Jim McCavitt, chief of the cadastral
survey section, to develop some task statements for a land surveyor
position. I provided Jim an overview of the BLMJobs Online concept, and
through my presentation of identifying that applicants would be
receiving a numerical score based on how they answered some questions, I
could sense some concern on Jim\'s part. But we continued into the
process of developing the task statements and through my explanation of
how answers are weighted and how the system allows the opportunity to
follow up for a narrative explanation from the applicant, Jim seemed to
be more comfortable with the process and even stated, this may work. So
developing the task statements on the front end will require more work.
So it\'s important that the HR professional and the managers work
closely together to develop good quality task statements to get the good
quality candidates. This change will take time, but if we invest our
time to do it right, this way of doing business will be a success for
both the HR community and our customers.\
\
M. Dukes: Thanks Federica and Jim for taking the time to share your
experiences with us. The whole point of putting these teams together
goes back to that time saving discussion that we had at the very
beginning and Sherian walked you through as she talked about the
changes. If we have a task statement library built with maybe 30, 40, 50
task statement questions relative to that occupation, in this case
rangeland management, when you\'re going through your job analysis,
hopefully you\'ll be able to find 15 to 20 questions that directly apply
to your job and you won\'t have to create any or maybe just one or two.
So you\'ll see that is really what we\'re talking about that time
savings. There is no longer that 5 to 30 days of identifying your KSAs,
building the rating plan, reviewing the rating plan that either you
wrote and had the HR specialist review it. That goes away. You just sit
down and look at the task statement library and compare it to your PD
and say, what are the most relevant things to my PD that I\'m interested
in candidates having when I\'m making a selection?

So there is, once the library is built, extraordinary amount of time
savings that comes across through the BLMJobs Online software. There are
two key points and I wanted to make sure everyone understands as we\'re
going through. One, we\'ve already talked about waiting. One is that
before the list of candidates are referred to you, there will be that
quality control. For instance, in our example, someone designed \--
stated that they designed and implemented range improvement projects in
their task statement. They said, yes, I\'m an expert on this, and they
then show up as part of the best qualified list. As Sherian mentioned,
we are going to go back to their resume, and if there is nothing in
their resume would that indicate that they actually had worked on range
improvement projects, particularly independently, we\'ll score them
down. We want the candidate referred \-- as the best qualified to truly
be the best qualified.

Now, the second point is, we are going to talk to the employees about
this in tomorrow\'s broadcast, that they\'re going to understand that as
they work on their five-page resumes as opposed to their 20-page
applications and 5-page KSA statements they need to make sure their
resume validates their claims as part of their application. I want to
tell you I really appreciate you taking the time and working through
this. This is really complicated HR stuff. It\'s probably the one thing
that as a selecting official you spent a lot of time learning how to do
properly and we know it\'s hard. So we appreciate you being patient with
us and really working through the steps slowly, and as a reward we have
a 10-minute break scheduled for the class. So we\'re going to roll on
the screen upcoming trainings from \-- sponsored by the training center
and giver you a chance to take a 10-minute stretch break. So we\'ll see
you back at 10:53 on our clock. Bye-bye. .\
\
S. Long: Welcome back. I hope everybody has returned from their break.
There\'s a couple other areas we particularly wanted to do a little
emphasis on and one is outreach recruitment. I think every one of us
already recognizes we certainly couldn\'t do our jobs if we didn\'t have
some great staffs there for us. In your workbook on page 8 you\'re going
to find a quote we found in the successful manager\'s handbook. I want
you to kind of follow along with me. It says you can only be as good as
your people. Attracting top-notch talent is essential for organizational
success. The fly of and demand employees vacillates but successful
managers are always scanning that talent landscape to identify
individuals who can contribute to their organization. The problem is
that many \-- or maybe not most of us have really gotten in the habit of
just heavily relying of posting every jobs, not doing actual outreach
recruitment.

Posting, if you ever thought about it, it\'s really not more than just
tossing out a net and hoping the right kind of fish are going to be
swimming by. But also the problem with recruitment is it takes time and
gracious knows that\'s certainly something we all certainly have so
little of. We can send out notifications automatically to these other
organization and entities, letting them know that we have these
vacancies, but recognizing that your time is pretty limited we have got
to start thinking a whole lot more strategically about how we to these
things. You all remember that effort we went through called workforce
planning? In fact, we\'re into the new cycle right now, and I would
suspect most people thought you didn\'t see hardly until value to it at
the local level but what we want to do is show you how that document can
help you with some of your strategic recruitment efforts. We\'re going
to set up a scenario for you.

Let\'s say we have a supervisor named Barbara and she has actually
looked at her workforce planning document and this is kind \-- whether
this is the beginning of the year or before the fiscal year starts but
she sees in her plan she anticipates she\'s going to be filling two
rangeland management specialist jobs, one of these will probably be at
the entry level, the other one at the GS-9 or 11. We\'re thinking about
how can I do some of this recruitment, this outreach, even before I\'m
ready to fill the job? And we\'re going to show you how this comes
about. Show we have a little bit of a role play here that\'s coming up
and I want you to watch because our supervisor has gotten in touch with
our human resources professional and they\'re having their first
meeting.\
\
Barbara, let\'s look at some other recruitment strategies outside of the
traditional online approach.\
\
Leon, how come we\'re doing that. We\'ve USAJobs before pit it works
fine. We have a lot of stuff going on in the office. I don\'t think I
understand exactly why we\'re doing this.\
\
I know we\'ve done it that way before but let\'s think outside the box.
Let\'s get creative. Sometimes more is better. We can explore other
avenues and possibly get candidates from other areas. Are there
professional societies you can think of?\
\
There\'s the society for range management.\
Sounds good.\
\
They have a conference coming up in March. And a state conference in
August. Also there\'s a publication called \"rangelands.\"\
\
I\'ve heard of that. Is there any other place you can think of where
qualified people may go? I get what you mean. Yeah, maybe rodeos, state
and county fairs.\
\
That\'s a great one.\
\
How about the Cheyenne frontier days?\
\
Frontier days, great.\
\
There\'s something going on up in Calgary, like the Calgary stampede or
something like that up in Canada.\
\
You know what else I\'ve heard, Colorado state, they also have a program
in range. There are any other universities in the area that may have
similar programs?\
\
Yeah, in fact, New Mexico state does and the University of Wyoming.\
\
You said University of Wyoming?\
\
Yes. Do you know any professors at either one of these institutions
where maybe you can get your foot in the door.\
\
I used to a while back. Let me look at my list and see if I can find
somebody\'s name in there.\
\
We may even think about country music stations \--\
\
Oh, ok. I know a lot of students listen to those.\
\
Do you know of any other creative advertising approaches you\'ve seen
out there?\
\
Well, if you\'re talking about just getting our name out there, movie
theaters, you know how they have the slide shows, maybe we could do
something with that.

Also I\'ve seen at the baseball games people have used the first pitch
\--\
\
Those banners. I get it. Ok.\
\
Exactly. I\'ve also seen sky writing.\
\
I like that. Good idea.\
\
Posting things on the fence and everything. There are plenty of ideas we
can explore.\
\
All right. Let\'s do it.\
\
S. Long: I suspect you heard some ideas there that you\'re thinking
maybe that\'s a little bit over the top. But what ideas did you pick up
on as they were talking about ways that you could actually do some
outreach? Could somebody punch that button and tell us some? I\'m sure
you all were watching this. Could you tell us?\
\
M. Dukes: Sherian, I can\'t believe no one even jumped on the sky
writing idea. My personal favorite. IBM has been known to do that. BLM,
IBM, only one letter difference.\
\
S. Long: Exactly. Why not? Also, the idea for the movie theater, I\'ve
always kind of wondered about that, why we don\'t get our name out. I
know I\'ve certainly sat there in the theater and seen Fish & Wildlife
and Forest Service both doing advertisements on the screen. How about
the rest of you. Did you see anything else that they did?\
\
Caller: This is Vince. I\'ll give you another idea. Albuquerque used to
\-- last year had a billboard right along the interstate for \--
advertising for firefighting jobs.\
\
S. Long: That\'s a great idea.\
\
M. Dukes: I like that.\
\
S. Long: A lot of traffic going by could see that one. That\'s good.\
\
M. Dukes: I definitely have to write that one down. Billboard.\
\
S. Long: Anything else? Anybody hear anything that they were saying
during their discussion? We\'ve obviously got a very quiet little group
there. Let me give you some other ideas there. In your workbook you\'ll
find appendix B, what we\'ve done is created for you a sample, an I
emphasize word this is a sample, for a statewide outreach recruitment
plan that is for Colorado. I think Melissa might want to say something
about that one.\
\
M. Dukes: Just a couple things. I\'m sorry, Kent and Jim, I didn\'t
include white river, but I was making up this, but there\'s some key
things in there I thought were appropriate or important. I know we have
a lot of folks going to the society of range management meeting in Salt
Lake City this spring. Great opportunity for us to connect with full
performance level candidates as well as students. So it\'s something I
think we need to explore. A couple other things, networking is really
successful. I think that\'s why a lot of you see e-mails not so much
from HR but from your peers. I\'m recruiting a range specialist. I\'m
recruiting an entry level NRS. You all have personal networks. You\'ve
worked in other offices before. You\'ve gone to college with people in
natural resources or surveying, and a lot of you actually still are
connected with those folks. You worked with or went to school with years
ago. So as we\'re recruiting we\'re asking people, but most importantly
the selecting official to work that network, see if you know somebody
who knows somebody who maybe knows somebody who might be interested in
your job. When we\'ve looked at this, one of the most extraordinarily
successful ways to get new people into the system. The last one, it\'s
listed in the strategy under Recruitment One Stop, is that data mining
idea. The reason I really got excited about this, I was telling Sherian
this story, my older brother corporate HR executive for the western half
of the United States, and his company, and I was getting ready to fill a
GS9 term position and I wasn\'t convinced were there going to be
candidates in Denver who would bed interested in the money I was
offering at a GS-9. I\'m calling him up and he\'s in California and
we\'re talking. He says, don\'t you go to monster.com? I can\'t use
monitor.com, and at that time Recruitment One Stop didn\'t have the data
mining capability that monster.com gave us. So I said, well, bill,
great, thanks for all the ideas, but I have to go on a conference call.
I\'m on a conference call, and within 10 minutes he has e-mailed me four
resumes he drilled into monitor.com to pull up recruiters in Colorado,
specifically Denver, who were looking for jobs and whose salary needs
were consistent with the range of the GS-9 and I\'m like, this is so
cool, and I knew monster.com was working on that for Recruitment One
Stop. I said, this, this is the best. We\'ll be able to connect with
obviously noncompetitive candidates where we can invite them to you a
but even competitive candidates who may not have that notification. We
have their e-mail address. We can e-mail say we\'re advertising this
job. We hope you\'re interested and please consider applying with us.

That was a brief example, data mining, thanks great tool to connect with
people I have might not have connected with before. So in that appendix
B, no, we\'re not actually advertising 5, 6 range vacancies in Colorado
in the next 12 months, but it does give you lots of different ideas, I
think, on how to do outreach recruiting.\
\
Thanks, Melissa. One other thing, too, I wanted to remind you of, as
you\'re finding these other candidates out there, at any time this
networking, encourage them to go out there and do pre-registration with
our BLMJobs Online. Maybe you need to have a little business card that
has our website address on it so they can get through that
pre-registration. Melissa, why don\'t you talk to us about another
important aspect and that\'s the interviews.\
\
I think you really need to step back and think about it. No longer will
we have KSA statements, and isn\'t appear great thing particularly for
applicants? We\'ll have the computer take the answers to your questions.
No longer will we have 80-page applications for someone to submit. But
what you\'re going to get is eight five-page resumes. So the reality is
you\'re not going to get what you had before. So I wonder, what does
that do to the interview? Does it change the interview? Does it change
the reference check process? So what I\'d like you to do is step back in
your local groups again for two minutes and think about it. Do you think
\-- or how do you think this change with five-page resumes is going to
change the interview process? So we\'ll come back in two minutes and I
am going to ask you for some of your answers. .\
\
M. Dukes: Amarillo, we haven\'t heard from you in a while. We figure
it\'s a time to pick on somebody outside of New Mexico and Colorado.
Amarillo, did you guys come one any things or have any reaction to that
idea of interviewing people when you didn\'t have really traditional
length applications?\
\
We were thinking maybe you could actually tailor the information you
have available since you\'ve going to have more detail available.

Definitely. We appreciate you responding. That was very nice since we
put you on the spot. Anybody else out there have some ideas you came up
with in your groups you would like to share with the rest of us, like
Montana?\
\
Caller: This is Bonnie from Safford. We think that because the responses
are going to be less subjective, they\'re going to be much more of a
rating rather than verbiage that when you get into your interviews and
reference checks you\'re going to ask more of those subjective kinds of
questions.\
\
M. Dukes: Yeah, I know a lot of our interviews we don\'t focus on a lot
of personal behavioral characteristics or those kinds of things, and
you\'re right, I think we\'re going to have to look at different kinds
of questions as well as maybe more detailed questions. Thanks for that.
Anybody else? Washington office, we know you\'re out there. We won\'t
ask Marilyn, but anybody in Washington, did you come up with something
else or something you were concerned about? Ok.\
\
Caller: This is Jim in Colorado. The KSAs really did serve as an example
of someone\'s writing skills for conciseness and stuff. Those 80 pagers
aren\'t too good. That\'s one thing we\'ll have to think of a different
way to assess that.\
\
M. Dukes: I think that\'s a good reference check issue. You don\'t have
the writing sample except in the five-page resume that is artificially
limited. Definitely a reference check issue. This is kind of an
interesting issue because what you\'re going to discover is that in five
pages you might have, let\'s say in our allotment management plan,
candidate 1 gives you three paragraphs on their allotment management
plans and they went through the effort of getting your PD. So they know
this in reality is a big This job. So they gave you a lot of detail.
Candidate two for whatever reason, even if they got the PD and
strategized their application maybe only gave you two or three sentences
about their allotment management plan experience. The hard part is going
to be, do you have to ask both candidates the same questions now because
you have a lot of information from candidate 1?

The answer is, if,let\'s say allotment management plans is one of the
five key things you\'re focusing on and candidate 1 gave you all this
great information and candidate 2 didn\'t and you want to combine the
interview and the application to decide who is the best candidate, you
can legally ask candidate 2 follow-on or detailed questions you don\'t
have to ask candidate 1, and that is a legitimate thing as long as
you\'re focusing on those 5 key job criteria. There\'s not a problem in
this case not asking each candidate the same question, because you\'re
approaching trying to get the same breadth and depth that information.
The interview can change. You\'re going to have to ask more exploratory
questions. You\'re probably going to have to ask more detailed technical
questions, and as Jim said, you might have to get some of those things
like writing skills you wouldn\'t have had to explore with an 80-page
application, you know the person can\'t write concisely, that you might
have to confirm with either an interview or reference check. I know for
a lot of you have gone through a lot of interview training and the
answer is you ask everybody everything, and that\'s generally true. What
I\'m telling you is that you can in this case, if you have these five
key areas and all you\'re doing is trying to treat the applicants the
same, by getting the same breadth and depth of information you could ask
difference questions of some candidates than others. I know some of you
have gone through litigation and you\'re not going to walk through that
door. That\'s perfectly understandable as well. You could ask candidate
1 the same question you asked candidate 2. It might take a little longer
buzz it does cover you that way. So it\'s your choice, but

I think the thing that Sherian and I talked about is that your interview
techniques and skills are going to have to change because you\'re going
to have to be pulling a lot more information out of the interview. The
other thing we will do is talk to the employees about their responses,
and we\'ll let them know the interview is a much more critical process
because now they\'re marketing themselves less on paper and more in the
interview. So just really want you to think about that. The reference
checks, you\'re still validating on the reference check the information
you\'ve obtained from the application in the interview. So it may change
only slightly. Once again, as Jim brought out, I don\'t have anything
that demonstrates somebody\'s success at writing, so I might need to ask
some reference checks on things like that. But obviously you\'re also
going to be asking reference check questions in terms of reliability,
dependability, ability to work as a team member, and ease of
supervision.\
\
S. Long: I was listening to this particular dialogue and I thought, I
agree, it\'s not going to have nearly as much information in the resume,
they only have five pages, but on the other hand, it may also
demonstrate to you those people who are able to truly focus their
thoughts together and be very succinct and give you a great deal of
information in just a very short space of time. I know just recently
I\'ve been doing a lot of interviewing and in looking at the difference
between those resumes I see some people have written on several
paragraphs, and another person was able in two sentences to basically
put across that same idea. I think there is going to be some information
we\'re still going to get from the resume that might help us that we
have hadn\'t in the past.\
\
M. Dukes: I think the idea \-- it\'s going to be different and we\'re
just going to have to maybe rethink our approach and maybe look at some
skill building, and I think actually towards the end of the broadcast
you\'re going to talk about some skill building opportunities that are
coming up. We did give you in appendix C some general information about
reference checks and interviews, including some sample interview
questions and we did that just to give you a place to start. So if you
don\'t have any more questions on interviews and/or reference checks and
I know I didn\'t ask for questions, but if there\'s anything else you
want to bring up before we move onto the next section on interviews?

I shouldn\'t have shut people off. Sherian?\
\
S. Long: Let\'s get right down now to that actual implementation
schedule. This isn\'t a turn key system, and by that I\'m really saying
that we couldn\'t stop our old method one day and start this the next
day. Although I want you to know technically speaking implementation
deployment has taken place because as of the 1st of February BLMJobs
Online is alive and well. First and foremost we must finish the
population of that task statement library. The approach BLM took is we
\-- as we kind of allude to earlier on is they trained the senior person
from each of the offices and they were then tasked, I guess I\'ll say,
or charged with the responsibility of developing the task statements for
those 38 most populace series we use in the bureau. Now, they can\'t do
it alone. They\'re getting the subject matter experts just like Federica
did with Jim McCavitt, and they are then developing and fleshing out all
the task statements that are necessary. It is possible that since
they\'re not all done yet, you, too, might still be asked to come and
help participate with this. If you want to look on page 11 in your
workbook, you\'re going to see a list of all those series and you\'ll
see who it is that\'s been assigned to do the actual development.

Now, there isn\'t any question that the fact when we change things, this
definitely impacts the policies and the way we do stuff, and we know
since we are creatures of habit and we\'d continue to like to do those
things we\'re most comfortable with, it\'s necessary for us to implement
some policies that\'s really going to help us continue to move forward
into full deployment on the BLMJobs Online. So I want to touch bases
with you on some of those things that we anticipate will be the final
decisions. First question: so which of the vacancies must we fill using
our QuickHire software? The answer to that is all permanent and
temporary positions. Now, if you want to, you can also use this software
to be able to do details, to do interest announcements or even go out
and do recruitment for SCEPs, but as I said, those are strictly
optional. But you will do it for temporary and permanent. Don\'t forget,
of course, our temporary seasonals that are fire type positions, they
are advertised and done through the FIRES system, which by wait does use
QuickHire software.

During this transition time, the way it\'s going to work is if the task
statements that are there in the library, that\'s the way \-- or the
method we\'re going to use to announce a job. If the task statement is
under development but not yet ready, you can still go ahead and announce
your jobs under the traditional methods we have. If the task statement
is not done and it\'s not assigned for development, then with a we\'re
asking you to do is to step up to the task of developing the ones that
are necessary for that particular series, and you\'d be doing this
basically for the bureau. So we would appreciate your not shying away
from that. All of this is dependent upon our HR professionals having had
their training both in task statement writing as well as QuickHire
software training. We anticipate all of that will be completed by March
anyway. Now, because this is a transition time, we recognize certain
things come up sometimes that means we need to be ladle bit flexible.

The human resources officers have been given the authority to be able to
make exceptions to those things that I just mentioned. But nonetheless,
as of 1 October, all the jobs we fill are going to be done using BLMJobs
Online. Now, somebody asked this question earlier and we knew it would
come up, so what about these people who want to file hard copy,
non-electronic? And the answer is, this is an exception to the way we do
our business, and it will have to be done on a case-by-case basis. They
will have to demonstrate to the human resources office that they truly
don\'t have the capability of applying online, and if that\'s the case,
they still are going to have to provide to us the identical kind of
information that the people who are filing electronically do, and that
includes responses to the task statements. For the positions that we are
filling this way, also, the only resumes that we can currently use are
the ones that are going to be resident within the BLMJobs Online. So if
someone hadn\'t pre-registered at the time they apply for a job,
they\'re going to have to stop and take the time at that point. Now,
what about that five-day wait like we\'re doing for mailing of
applications? We\'re not going to have that any longer. When it\'s
closed, it\'s closed. That includes those folks who had to file
non-electronically. They must have their application into us by the
closing date, including the responses, because we in HR then are
actually going to have to put those into the system for them. I think
that what we\'re going to find, as we said \-- from experience that
they\'ve had under FIRES, there is really going to be very few of those
because most everybody now has access to it. But we recognize there may
be one or two exceptions.

Another question that I know came up was, what about those additional
documents that we sometimes require such as a DD214 to verify veterans
preference or maybe it\'s a transcript because it has a positive
education requirement? We do not yet have fax imaging capability,
however, we certainly all have fax machines, and we are expecting that
those things be faxed to us or, of course, they could have done it in
the mail, but we must have it by the time the quality control review is
done. So that would be within three business days after the closing date
itself. One other thing you might have thought is what about the
noncompetitive candidates? You\'re going to get all of those. There\'s
not going to be any cutoff. As far as who you have to suburb view, you
just follow what\'s in the merit promotion plan now. And I think that
should probably cover the main kinds of policies. But now we\'re going
to open that bridge in case there\'s something you need clarified or you
have any other questions that you would like us to respond to.\
\
M. Dukes: We actually have a fax, Sherian, that came in. I know somebody
sent us a question via the fax machine.\
\
S. Long: What system generates the top 5 or top 10 for us to interview
or will it generate all qualified candidates? I think \-- well, probably
you have to remember what\'s occurring here is that the system itself
ranks, even under the merit promotion, because you do have weights with
your task statements. So what the resources \-- or the human resources
office right now would be looking at is where that natural break is. I
don\'t think at this time that we have a policy that says that we\'re
going to have a specific number that\'s going to be referred to you. But
that is probably something that will be part of our standard business
practices that will be decided very shortly.\
\
M. Dukes: The question on interviews, right now the bureau\'s merit
promotion plan does not require that you interview every candidate
referred, but I do nope some states have that internal policy. So if
QuickHire identifies 9 candidates as the best qualified, in Colorado
we\'ll strongly encourage you to interview all of them but you do have
your choice. In another state I think you might be required to interview
all nine of them. I think for the noncompetitive candidates, because we
are seeing large increases due to, in large part, electronic recruiting
in our noncompetitive candidates referred, there might be a standard
operating procedure within your state that allows you to drill down and
just interview those noncompetitive candidates that are really the best
qualified for your job even though you will get all of them referred. So
some of that, I think, is going to vary state by state.\
\
S. Long: Definitely. I think it will, too.\
\
M. Dukes: Good question. That was, I think, Roswell?\
\
S. Long:, it was.\
\
Caller: This is Bonnie again from Safford. I have two questions.\
\
M. Dukes: My guess is those guys are like, this is what we want to ask.\
\
Caller: No, that wasn\'t the problem. My first question is, does this
apply to both OPM and merit promotion job announcements?\
\
S. Long: yes, it does. It will be both that will you will get two
separate certificates just like you currently do. So that means when you
get the one that was open to the public, those are going to be coming to
you in score order and you still have the veterans preference, the rule
of three applies.\
\
Caller: My second question is regarding the rating process, the
self-rating. When you\'re talking about a person doing a quality control
check on that, will the applicant as they\'re rating themselves will
they maybe put next to their rating number where the person can verify
that their information is correct, where in their application they can
verify that?\
\
S. Long: Well, no, because what they\'ll see in the task statement and
when you\'re actually into the system itself, it\'s like a radio button,
and that\'s what they\'re clicking on there. There\'s nut wring where
they can write or type in extra information like that. . I think one
thing that occurred to me is that by the time a person has gone through
and looked at all the task statements, because they\'ve certainly
responded, it makes sense they should have the ability to go back. Maybe
they want to customize that resume a little more to ensure that we asked
this kind of question, they responded to that, they think, I didn\'t put
anything in my resume about this, so they need to go in and adjust.
Those are some thing we\'ll talk to the employees about tomorrow.\
\
M. Dukes: In addition, I know a lot of states do hire OPM to do their
external recruiting, though most of us actually do it on our own through
a delegated examining authority. But for those of you who have used OPM
for a number of years, I have to tell you OPM has been using focused and
targeted task statements. They have not been rating by hand for years.
In fact when we were evaluating the QuickHire software in 2000, I think
it was 2000, we did look at OPM\'s system, it\'s called U.S.A. staffing,
and it is substantially more expensive than the QuickHire software,
which is one of the reasons why we didn\'t go to OPM, but they also \--
they have through a lot of litigation validated the whole electronic
method of scoring applications. So I know for some of you probably
wonder, is this fair, will this sustain a challenge? The answer is yes.
Both the QuickHire company would actually bring us legal experts if we
ever had to litigate that issue, but OPM has sustained a lot of
challenges on that and they use the same kind of approach, just their
own particular software, because I think Arizona actually goes to OPM
for all their external recruits.\
\
S. Long: There are any other questions?\
\
Caller: Dave from Washington.\
\
S. Long: Yes, Dave.\
\
Caller: Will managers be reviewing and approving the task statements?\
\
S. Long: Yes, that is part of the pre-recruitment consultation, is that
you are going to be shown the full list of all of the task statements
there and you select the ones you want to use. You may choose to use as
many as 15 or 20 if that\'s what\'s there or depending upon what they
are, maybe you\'re going to say these 7 or 10 meet my need and this is
what I want to evaluate. HR is not going to make those selections. You
do.\
\
Caller: Jason from Washington. Will the applicant be able to review the
announcement and then be able to tailor his resume accordingly so that
he can write in a succinct manner and answer your questions in a short
amount of space?\
\
S. Long: Yes, the applicant themself is going to have the announcement
just like they do today. When we fill out the vacancy announcement \--
let me tell you, what HR is doing, they go into BLMJobs Online, and
that\'s where they develop the vacancy announcement. When they do a
submit button, it goes to USAJobs. When an applicant goes on USAJobs, it
will show them the entire vacancy announcement. So they know what this
job is all about. So when they say they want to apply for it, it brings
them back over to BLMJobs Online and they can at this point f they\'ve
all right got a resume resident, they can go in and edit it and fix it
any way they want.\
\
Caller: Can a person have more than one resume online?\
\
S. Long: You\'re going to have to enter your social security number and
since you only have one, I believe you can only have one resume.
Barbara, is that not correct?\
\
Yes, it is. You can only have one resume.\
\
M. Dukes: What an employee could do, let\'s say that they really are
focused on two different kinds of jobs, one a technical job and the
other one possibly a supervisory job. So they\'ve written their resumes
differently one of the things we\'re going to talk to employees about
tomorrow in their broadcast to write these resumes in a word processing
software because you can do this at your government computer as long as
you\'re not using official government time, to maybe have in their
computer two different resumes, versions of their resume, then depending
upon the job they\'re applying for remove their non-supervisory one from
the software and paste in their supervisory one and submit it. The next
time they\'re applying for a technical job, they delete the supervisory
resume and input the technical one. So there\'s a lot of flexibility
when you start looking at integrating not only BLMJobs Online but just
with other General Electric drawing capabilities like word processing.\
\
Caller: Melissa, that\'s fine, but what I\'m getting from this, this is
Brian in Durango, is that you\'re putting it in that database, then the
HR spokes can access it and if you have a person \-- say they\'re
advertised at the same time and you go and change that resume, what the
HR office hasn\'t \-- if the office hasn\'t pulled it up before you
change it. I see there could be a problem.\
\
S. Long: Barbara, why don\'t you talk a little about how it works
technically.\
\
When you go in and input your resume and you apply for a job, when that
job vacancy closes, we do what is called a staging area which locks your
resume at that point in time so that when we\'re evaluating you for that
certificate, it\'s what your resume was at the time the vacancy
announcement closes. So if you\'re dealing with two different vacancy
announcements that close at the same time, you probably will run into a
problem with, you better pick your best resume. But if they close at
different times, then you can go in and update and fine tune your resume
for the particular job you are applying for.\
\
S. Long: Thank you. Does that answer your question?\
\
Caller: This is Mike Wade checking in finally. System working.
Farmington, New Mexico.\
\
M. Dukes: Good, Mike. I hope you at least had a chance to watch the
broadcast as we went along. If unfortunately you weren\'t able to,
we\'re obviously going to do this afternoon.\
\
S. Long: Did you have a question there also?\
\
Caller: No, I did not.\
\
S. Long: Ok.\
\
Caller: Dave from Washington.\
\
M. Dukes: Hang on, Dave. I need to talk to the guys in Farmington for
just a minute. You\'re still echoing and I totally apologize for this,
but we need you to log off the system because you\'re kind of starting
to disrupt the other push-to-talks. So Farmington, I hope you\'re still
seeing everything, hearing everything, maybe have access to a phone or
fax but we need to you to log off the push to talk. Sorry about that.
Dave from Washington?\
\
Caller: Should the resume include a listing of references or former
supervisors?\
\
S. Long: You know, if it were me, I wouldn\'t \-- with that limited five
pages, that is something that as \-- during the interview you can ask
them for some references. Unless they\'ve been able to be very succinct
in getting all the information in and still have some room for people to
give you additional names. I would do it during the interview process
asking for that.\
\
M. Dukes: They to need to input their supervisor\'s name, though. So you
will at least have their supervisor\'s name and contact information in
their resume. I wrote my resume to apply for a job, I didn\'t get, but
that\'s ok. It was about five pages long. And I loaded it into the
QuickHire software, and it was 15,000 and something characters. So in
about five pages you can actually get a lot of information in a
five-page document. So, yeah, there will be room for \-- now if you go
through resume building software like we have in Recruitment One Stop
and I think we\'re within a year hoping to have a resume building
software for QuickHire, it will also ask you for your supervisor\'s name
and contact information. So that information will be there because that
is actually a required part of your resume in the federal government. So
that data will be there for you.\
\
S. Long: If we\'re thinking like the old SF-171s where it said at the
bottom list references, I wouldn\'t waste my time with that one.\
\
M. Dukes: I know a lot of you won\'t be able to watch the broadcast
tomorrow because two broadcasts in a 0 an awful lot of time away from
your other tasks, but you might want to pull the workbook down we\'re
using for tomorrow. It has about three pages on resumes, five pages on
interview techniques, so appear lot of these questions that are starting
to sound more like applicant questions than supervisory questions, if
you can\'t watch the broadcast tomorrow, which is focused on the
application part, if you can pull the workbook down, you will be able to
get a lot of information we\'re going to share tomorrow during our
broadcast.\
\
S. Long: Do we have any final questions that anyone needs to ask?\
\
M. Dukes: And I didn\'t mean to shut anybody down.\
\
S. Long: If not, then let me just give you a last final few thoughts.
You know, when I look back at the list of the stuff that you all
mentioned earlier that were the negatives on the system, one, of course,
big \-- big one was the length of time and inconsistency and that sort
of thing. I think we realize we can solve many problems with the BLM
software, but the truth is we\'re not going to solve everything. But for
employees, they\'re finally going to get this very quick electronic
notification. They\'ve got that consistent evaluation all the way across
the bureau. And certainly it\'s faster referral. For you all, you\'re
going to increase the number of applicants in your pools. I think
you\'ll see we will have eliminated the need for most of the rating
panels. And it\'s going to reduce the long announcement periods that
we\'re having to go through and the time it takes from when the
announcement closed and before we have that CERT in your hand opinion I
think Melissa already mentioned your interviews skills are going to be
essential in this process.

Right now we have a team that\'s at the leadership academy this year and
they have taken on this very project. In fact, it\'s Vince, the HR
officer out of New Mexico, who is a member of that team, and they\'re
working on a broadcast to come up with things that are going to help you
hone those skills, and you can look forward to that broadcast sometime
in the fall. Melissa has already mentioned those things we\'re covering
with employees tomorrow, and don\'t forget, ask your training officers
for a copy of it, or you could probably get a copy from an employee
there. One thing I want to make sure that you are aware of, again, the
website for BLMJobs Online is\.... Now, as we wrap things up, die want
to give my thanks and appreciation to Leon Thomas and Barbara BLEISCH.
Then to Federica Lee and Jim McCavitt for sharing their experiences in
developing the task statement training. Now, Melissa?\
\
M. Dukes: We\'d also like to thank Marilyn for her kind words at the
beginning of our broadcast, but most importantly we would like to thank
our producer Leon Thomas, our director Kim Menning after everyone at the
Training Center.\
\
Has been an active part of the process for helping us go through the
process.\
\
S. Long: Finally we thank you for your participation today and being
willing to press the button and talk us to and we wish you well as we go
into this BLMJobs Online. Bye-bye.