Focus on Hiring
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The Postal Service has faced challenges with hiring over the last couple of years due to the volatile labor market, with some areas of the country being more challenging than others. It faces particular challenges related to hiring pre-career employees and first-line supervisors. We have a body of work covering these issues.
Efficiency of Hiring Process
USPS has enhanced its practices for timely hiring. There are still opportunities for improvement including improving the external job application process to aid in attracting and retaining suitable applicants.
Background Screenings
Our work in this area has led to USPS making changes to improve its compliance with background screening requirements. There are still opportunities; however, for USPS to improve its documentation of background checks.
Hiring Supervisors
Over the past couple of years, the Postal Service has decreased the number of supervisor vacancies by streamlining the hiring process and increasing engagement with potential applicants. USPS still faces issues related to retirements, a lack of qualified applicants, and difficulties with location-specific hiring.
Benchmarking Hiring Strategies
Our work highlights best practices used by other companies in the public and private sector for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding employees. This includes establishing a strong employer brand, adopting a multi-channel recruitment strategy, accelerating the selection processing, enhancing the candidate experience, improving the onboarding experience, and leveraging technology.
The Postal Service as an Employer
We found that overall, ratings for USPS on job-related websites declined or stayed the same between fiscal years 2016 and 2021. Career employees — those with benefits — rated USPS more favorably and were more likely to recommend USPS as an employer than pre-career.
