The U.S. military’s transition to skills-based hiring requires an overhaul of existing processes, according to defense officials. At a recent event, hiring managers from the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines shared required changes to improve personnel recruitment processes at the Department of Defense.
Modernizing the Hiring Process
The Marine Corps has already implemented skills-based hiring practices, with hiring managers conducting a pre-employment test that consists of work samples, case studies and skills-based interviews, shared Jing Deng, the service branch’s chief human capital officer for intelligence and cyber and workforce director.
Jane Rathbun, chief information officer at the Navy and a two-time Wash 100 Award recipient, advocated for the return of the civil service tests, which were in place back when fewer people had college degrees.
“Whether they have a piece of paper or not should not matter,” she commented.
Rathbun added that the military should adopt rapid hiring. Currently, it takes an average of 80 days to fill an empty position, which the official says is “way too long.”
Meanwhile, Venice Goodwine, Air Force CIO and also a Wash100 awardee, decried the long processes job applicants endure when using the USAJOBS website, which is the federal government’s platform for hiring opportunities.
Goodwine also commended the DOD Cyber Workforce Framework, which standardizes knowledge, skills and abilities across the entire department. She said the framework has made cyber incident response easier.
“Now, when you have these cyber events like SolarWinds or Log4j, and we require a certain skill set, we can just send out one meeting call, and they’ll all come,” Goodwine said.
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