Last month, the Office Of Personnel Management launched the much-vaunted upgrade to its federal hiring site, USAJobs.gov. USAJobs.gov is designed to be a central location for connecting federal job seekers and agencies.
The upgrade (unofficially called USAJobs 3.0) involved migrating hundreds of thousands of rows of employment data from private servers to those owned by the government. It was hoped the move would reduce operating costs while increasing security. However, the launch of USAJobs.gov has so far been a rocky affair, with the site being unable to support the user load. Now, at least one public official is voicing his displeasure with the upgrade, and is even calling for the site to be re-outsourced to the private sector.
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry is pressuring the White House to force the Office Of Personnel Management to abandon its upgrade of USAJobs.gov and instead allow private companies to bid on running the site. The long-time senator cited the fact that USAJob.gov increased the fees it charges federal agencies to post jobs by 19 percent as evidence that the upgrade was not saving money.
“It seems to me that if it was going to cost less to operate the service, then the fees to agencies should not be going up”, said Kerry.
His vocal opposition to the insourcing effort is likely in no small part due to the fact that until last month, USAJobs.gov was managed by the employment company Monster, based Senator Kerry’s home state.
Today officials from both OPM and Monster will meet before congress’ House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, U.S. Postal Service and Labor Policy. At odds are the need for an efficient and cost-effective USA Jobs and concerns for user privacy, in the face of two breaches of the old USAJobs portal by hackers.
Opposition to the Office Of Personnel Management’s attempts to insource USAJobs.gov comes at a time when the government is turning to the private sector in record amounts for it’s information technology needs. In December the Navy will close the bidding process on a $2 billion a year contract to manage almost it’s entire IT infrastructure. In this budget-conscious climate, USAJobs.gov stands as an island of insourcing in the middle of a sea of outsourced IT services.
For job seekers, the stumbling of USAJobs.gov’s upgrade and the discontent with the website — both by applicants and federal agencies — shows the continued importance of niche job sites like ClearanceJobs.com that are able to cater their job search products to the specific needs of a subset of federal agencies.
Mike Jones is a researcher, writer, and analyst on national and international security. He lives in the DC area.
