Benchmarking Hiring Strategies: Discussion with Rick Schadelbauer and David Garcia

Benchmarking Hiring Strategies: Discussion with Rick Schadelbauer and David Garcia

The United States Postal Service plays a vital role in the life of this country, serving nearly 169 million addresses nationwide. In order to accomplish that massive effort, the Postal Service must recruit and hire thousands of employees in every part of the country.

I'm Rick Schadelbauer, research specialist at the US Postal Service Office of Inspector General. Today we're talking about our latest white paper entitled Benchmarking Hiring Strategies insights for the Postal Service's Pre Career Hiring Practices. The paper looks at the recruitment and hiring processes of public and private sector organizations, with the goal of identifying best practices that the Postal Service can implement to more effectively meet its staffing needs.

To learn more about our paper. I'm joined by its principal author, David Garcia. Research analyst at the OIG. Welcome, David. Thanks.

Good to be here.

We know that the Postal Service recruits, hires and on boards many different types of employees. Who did you specifically focus on in this paper?

Yeah. So this paper specifically focuses on the Postal Service's pre career workforce. And that includes about 100,000 of the agency's roughly 630,000 employees. And we focus on the workforce because the majority of new field employees are hired at the pre career level. These employees are temporary workers. They don't get the same benefits as career employees, and they're not guaranteed a regular schedule.

But they may become eligible for a career position after a while. And they can include carriers. They can include clerks who staff post offices, and also the employees who process mail and packages and plants.

So the Postal Service has been involved in recruiting and hiring employees. Census inception 250 years ago. So what makes this paper especially timely?

Well, there are a few things. So first of all, the Postal Service has encountered some challenges recruiting and retaining the employees that it needs. Also, while the US labor market isn't as tight as it has been, the unemployment rate is still at 4.2%, and that's actually near a historical low. And then if we look ahead, an aging population, declining birth rate in the United States could shrink the labor pool and make it harder for employers to find the employees that they need.

And then finally, other organizations and these organizations in both the public and private sectors, have taken steps recently to improve how they acquire new talent. And, of course, the Postal Service has to compete with these organizations for employees. For its part, the Postal Service has pledged to become an employer of choice, and it's delivering for America ten year plan.

And the agency has made some improvements to the way that it acquires talent. And we highlight some of these improvements throughout the white paper.

You mentioned recent improvements in recruiting. What have you learned about best practices at non USPS organizations?

So one thing that the best in class organizations that we research to do is they market themselves in really creative ways. So to do that, they'll post welcome videos on their hiring websites to introduce themselves to potential job candidates, or they'll include employee testimonials in an attempt to convey what it's like to work at the organization. We also found organizations that recruit really well, proactively pursue applicants rather than just post a job announcement on the website and then cross their fingers that applicants with the right skills find that announcement and apply.

So one way that they'll do this is by forming partnerships with other groups in order to get on the radar of job candidates. So when we talk about other organizations, this can include schools like colleges, universities, even high schools. And then the paper also has some examples of organizations that use social media really effectively. So they'll prioritize posting content that comes across as authentic and non-corporate, for example.

So once you've attracted a pool of applicants, the next steps are identifying the best candidates and deciding who to hire. What are some strategies for doing that?

So we found some examples of organizations that are making the hiring process faster. We found some instances of organizations improving the candidate experience so people don't get frustrated midway through and then drop out of the process prematurely. And we also found some really good examples of organizations using data and AI to improve efficiency. So we have one example in the report of post NL and post NL is the Dutch Post.

They were receiving more applications than they could process in a timely manner. So what they did is introduced an AI powered digital recruiter that they named Charlie and Charlie has helped speed up the hiring process and also reduced the organization's costs. Some organizations that we researched are also creating a better applicant experience by improving their communication. Some organizations are introducing chatbots on their hiring websites that will answer applicants questions and help them complete their application if they want.

Now, once you have people hired, it's important to provide a good onboarding experience. So tell us what you learned about onboarding.

Yeah, well you're absolutely right. Onboarding is critical. It can help with retention. And of course, it can get new employees up to speed and enable them to become full producers faster. But onboarding is not always done well. So our paper does look at how some organizations are tackling their onboarding challenges. And we found that the Postal Service and some other organizations are doing a couple things.

One thing they're trying to do is standardize their onboarding process to make sure that all new employees receive the same high-quality experience, no matter who their supervisor is, and no matter the facility where they work. So, for example, some of these organizations are providing the same orientation session to all new employees. We also found that some organizations are trying to improve onboarding by incorporating more of a personal touch.

So, for example, at the Postal Service, after job candidates accepted job offer, but before their first day, some of these people are invited to meet with management at the facility where they're going to work. And this is a really good opportunity for these new hires to learn more about the expectations of the job, and also make sure that the role is going to be a good fit before they actually start work.

And then some other initiatives that we found at the Postal Service and some other organizations include mentoring, shadowing a more seasoned colleague, and also adding more touch points between supervisors and the new hires. And these are all ways that organizations are trying to make it a little bit more personal.

Okay, so you've talked about recruiting, hiring and onboarding best practices. How did the Postal Service's practices match up against those of comparable organizations?

So we found that the Postal Service has adopted a lot of the best practices that are being employed by other organizations, and we found that the agency is continuing to work on improving how it acquires new talent. So, for example, the Postal Service recently rolled out a new applicant tracking system. And this is really intended to create a more user friendly application experience and improve how the Postal Service communicates with job candidates.

One thing that this new applicant tracking system will do is that the Postal service in text messages to job applicants, I'm still. There are some valuable lessons that the Postal Service can learn from other organizations, and actively monitoring the practices of other organizations can help the Postal Service continue to improve how it acquires new talent.

Well, thank you very much for sharing your insights with us, David. This white paper, Benchmarking Hiring Strategies, Insights for the Postal Service's pre Career Hiring Practices, can be found on the website at www.uspsoig.gov.

Thank you for listening.