Making Easier Onramps to Cleared Jobs

This is Lindy Kyzer with ClearanceJobs.com and welcome. I have a great topic today, something that popped up and the research that we’re doing around the security clearance process and a study done by the RAND Corporation that I had not actually seen come up around the security clearance process, which is national security employment, how to improve the candidate experience journey through the personnel vetting process. And as we can think about these things within two different stove pipes, you have the security clearance process and you have hiring and onboarding. But as anybody in this space knows, the two are actually connected and you can’t have one without the other. So that mean I have two of the authors of that paper and research and report, David Stebbins, who is a political scientist with the RAND Corporation and Rich Gervin who is a senior international defense researcher with RAND. Thank you gentlemen, both of you for being here and chatting with me today.

Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks. Great to be here.

I loved that you were focusing on candidate experience. I hadn’t seen a specific line of research like this looking into candidate experience through the lens of the personnel vetting process, but it’s important. This is a big candidate’s market in national security now and we have a hard time onboarding enough new talent. So can you just give me broad strokes overview, why did you do this study? Who commissioned you to do this kind of research, and what were some of the big overall findings?

Hi, Lindy. Sure, thanks. So this is Dave. I’ll start and then Rich, please do feel free to fill in any gaps that I’ve missed here. So this research was sponsored by the PAC PMO, which is the Performance Accountability Council Program Management Office. And really I think this research falls into the larger context of the government’s overall trusted workforce 2.0 initiative. And again, I defer to Rich speak about some of that if you’d like to. One of the lines of effort, again as part of this TW 2.0 initiative is to focus on customer engagement. So I think that sort of sets the backdrop for this work. And again, I think that’s why this research was commissioned by the PAC PMO, right? They’re looking to obviously see what we can do better moving forward for those who either have already gone through the vetting process because there’s still a piece of this once they’re in the system, but then also those going through this for the first time.

(02:40)
So that’s sort of the backdrop for you. I can give sort of the high wave tops of our findings and then happy to dive in on any of those. I think one of the biggest findings from our research is that really there’s no institutionalized approach to this, that standardization for candidate experience across the vetting enterprise. And so one of the things we found too is that stakeholder buy-in is going to be super important. And since there’s no institutionalized approach, again across investigative service providers, you’re right, the authorized adjudicated agencies, we really need a strong demand signal in order to create sort of that institutionalized approach that again, long-term can really improve a lot of the areas that are in our report. Third, we found that training is lacking in this area. This is not to say that there is not training in this area. We did speak to some pockets of communities of interest that are doing this and are really focusing on improving that, right? Picking up the phone after a candidate first submits their SF 85, 85 P or 86 and trying to help them walk through the process. That’s not the norm with folks we spoke with. And then finally, probably no surprise here, but the private sector is far outpacing the government’s ability to sort of hire, vet and onboard candidates in a timely manner.

I would just point out that the single biggest observation that we had, this lack of institutionalized approach. If you think for a minute, and this isn’t in the report, it’s just me sort of spitballing, but if you think about what may be the closest experience that many Americans might have to getting a security clearance, it’s applying for it, getting a mortgage loan, it’s really intense. There’s a lot of paperwork involved, there’s a lot of stress, but there are laws in place that protect people. There’s transparency that’s required. The loan officer has to provide certain information by a certain date. When it comes to security clearance, though, you’re filling out 120 plus pages on an SSF 86 the last seven or 10 years of your life putting all these details in, and then you sit and there’s crickets and you don’t hear anything and you don’t know what’s going on. And some agencies do a little bit better than other, but we’ve determined with a lack of institutionalized approach that basically people are just out there waiting to hear something. And that’s not a good experience. And because as Dave pointed out, the private sector is running circles around the government at being able to provide a better candidate experience. People don’t wait and they say, you know what? I’m going to take this job or this job or this job, and I’m not going to wait for the job that I thought I wanted with the government.

I love that. And it’s ridiculous how much the lack of information can come into play, and I appreciate that you mentioned that there’s the two sides of it, what we expect from the commercial sector and what you get from a government hiring process. And I recently was having a conversation with somebody and they were pushing back. The candidate had done a testimonial and talked about how well he really appreciated that through the six month onboarding process, the employer was in touch with him and somebody outside of the security clearance process. Well, we can’t talk about that. We can’t let people know that this process took six months. And I was like, if anybody’s applied for a government job recently, they are well aware that it takes that long. And the critical difference for this candidate is that he was actually getting touch points throughout that process.

(05:42)
So the report I thought touched really well on the fact that we might not be able to snap our fingers and have government onboarding take 30 days, but what we can do is actually change the candidate experience portion of it and saying, Hey, this might take six months, but you’re actually going to hear from me once a month, and that might make you hold out for that government job or opportunity that you are really passionate about. So you included some of the research about existing examples of candidate experience in the government hiring process. Did you think that there were lessons learned or some overlap there when it comes to government considerations of candidate experience and then how that plays into personnel vetting?

I think one of the big things is, and again all of this is in our report, but I think one of the biggest things is communication. And again, the folks we talked to, right? We’ve talked to investigative service providers, we talked to some authorized adjudicated agencies. We also talked to folks who have recently gone through the process. So again, we were trying to triangulate the best practices, lessons learned as we were speaking across our entire interview population. But I think obviously communication is key across all of the folks we talked to. So on the government side, this is from our literature review, but there’s something out there called two-Way matching. And so the traditional view of this is the government wants to pull, they want to extract information from a candidate at every step of the way. The new way of thinking about this, and again this is how the private sector is doing it, is they want to push information too.

(07:05)
Not only is there a push of information from the government, but it’s this sort of cyclic process where there’s really good situational awareness going across. And this can come in various different forms, right? In the private sector, obviously there are candidate dashboards, there are candidate experience teams. They have whole sub-organization set around this who are primarily focused on ensuring they’re texting with candidates, getting on video calls if they need some help doing things. As we know, there’s not a timeline that someone going through the vetting process, they can’t sign into something. Maybe there’s a couple of dots like paperwork received and there’s some various other things, but there’s no dashboard to see, oh, who can I talk to at this step? Or who could I talk to at that step? Usually there there’s sort of one point of contact within a vetting office, sort of your investigator, and that’s the only person you have to talk to while you’re going through that. The problem with that is that is one single point of failure. So all of a sudden you’re filling out your forms, you have questions. If that one investigator has maybe 50 folks they’re working with, that’s really going to detract from that one person who feels like they’re sort of being ignored or the new lingo is ghosted, right by their investigators. So I think that’s a big issue.

Adding a little bit to what Dave said, the one thing that’s missing on the government side that we suggested is that there needs to be relevant candidate metrics. If you’re not capturing data, you don’t know how you’re doing. And unfortunately the way the government mostly does it is they will do an onboarding survey of the person they actually hired. But if 50 people apply to an open batch position where they might be hiring eight people out of that 50 to some GS 13 or 14 position in an organization, they don’t know about the 42 people that they didn’t hire, why they gave up or why they walked. If they didn’t wait the process out because it was too long or they had a difficult time with a form online or they had a problem getting some of the information, whatever it is. And it could be that in that population of 42, I’m making these numbers up, but in that population of 42 that don’t get hired, were the eight best candidates. They just didn’t get through the process because the experience was so bad. And if we’re not capturing data, if we don’t have metrics, then we don’t know what to improve. And we’re sort of just guessing based on what the people we actually hire tell us about what needs to be improved. And I don’t think that that gives you the full picture.

And I think the push for quality metrics and research is definitely something I’m seeing out of the PAC PMO and a part of this trusted Workforce 2.0 effort. And we were speaking to that earlier Rich talk maybe about how does this study fit into other studies that you’ve done and the continuation of work. Is there a broader story being told here with some of this research that you’re doing?

Well, I’ll start and then of course Dave can weigh in because he’s been on a number of these studies with me and with other colleagues at RAND. The whole security clearance reform, if you put that in air quotes, security clearance reform, which is what the PAC PMO stood up to focus on, the real thing that people were concerned about was the timelines. How long is it taking for somebody to get a clearance? And if you’re talking on average 400 days from the time you apply to the time you enter on active duty, say to a national security position in the intelligence community, that’s not a good statistic. So the real push initially was get the timelines down, but that whole idea of how do we go faster has to be balanced with the notion of we have this process in place because we’re trying to protect national security.

(10:20)
So there has to be a balance between getting people into government in a timely manner and allowing people who should have a clearance and access to have clearance and access and preventing those who might be a risk to national security in some way from getting access and clearance. And so there’s a balance across all those. And we’ve done studies on pretty much every aspect of the security clearance reform. How do you improve the process? How do you get the timelines down? How do you improve hiring and onboarding? In this case for Dave and I, the candidate experience itself, there’s some psychological aspects, there’s some aspects that we’ve done related to determining when somebody’s telling a lie using different technologies than have used in the past or different methods and approaches as have been used in the past. We’ve taken over the past, I think Dave can correct me, six years of this research for PAC PMO six or seven years, a really holistic approach to trying to improve the entire national security clearance and access process.

Rich, I want to pick up on your trail of that timeline, Lydia, those process timelines. We sort of know or expect that this process is going to be lengthy. One of the things we heard, and again this is back to my piece on communication, is really creating effective signposts along the way. And let me just give you a small vignette. So let’s say you go to Disneyland or Disney World, you have a ride you really want to go on, there’s probably a thousand people who want to go on that same ride, but as you’re going through the line, there are literally signs that are stood up that say 45 minutes till ride, 30 minutes till ride, 15 minutes until you’re going to get on this ride. And so you’re sort of keeping that engagement up, keeping them slightly excited.

(12:04)
They know they’re progressing along in this process even though they know it’s going to be a 60 minute wait. Obviously very different in the vetting world. Maybe as Richard just said, 400 days in sort of those worst case scenarios. But even something as simple as that, we’ll keep somebody in the line, we’ll keep them engaged. They know that there’s sort of a payoff at the end for waiting. The one other piece of research I wanted to talk about, and I ran this with another fellow at RAND last year, Lindy, this was the harnessing mobile technology report. And I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but we used a lot of the findings and observations from that research, the development of our framework in this candidate experience report. And really we found that COVID-19 was really sort of a wake up call and even getting us to even think about moving to the virtual realm with a lot of these vetting processes.

(12:51)
So obviously a big candidate experience factor there, but talking to folks on the phone doing video chats so forth, we were forced to do that in some aspects during the global pandemic. One of the things we started to see as we closed out that report again this was last year, is that a lot of government agencies had started to revert to those more traditional in-person types of vetting, right? Manual ink, fingerprints, those sorts of things. Instead of a remote kiosk or something like that, department of Homeland Security had some flexibilities in place for I-9 documentation, right? Maybe you could hold your passport up to your webcam, something like that. I can say that I don’t know the current status of a lot of those things, but they were due to sunset fairly recently after the report was done. So that was one of our concerns is the traditional investigator, they want to see hands, they want to see feet, they want to do these sort of traditional, you can’t see my fingers doing quotes, but tells is this person being truthful as opposed to, Hey, no, we can actually still converse with somebody online and note some of these things too.

(13:51)
But I just wanted to pick up on that thread because I think it is relevant to this candidate experience.

No, I appreciate that. And yeah, I think it is an interesting time, the dynamics right now with what they’re doing with security clearance reform and like you said, also kind of looking into what are some of those COVID accommodations that have been in place and how do we change that and how can we maybe even use some of that to improve the candidate experience reading the report, obviously I have the two sides of the clearance jobs that we’re constantly corresponding with, which is the recruiters and certainly the security officers. I can absolutely tell you right now I see some of the security officers saying, Hey, security is one thing and candidate experience is another. Don’t try to give your customer experience vibes over to my very security focused enterprise. So do you have any answer to that and why a security officer should be concerned about things like how a candidate is feeling about the process and their impression of the agency through the personnel vetting process?

I go back to the first thing I said a moment ago about not knowing if we’re getting the best we get what we get. And if you’re a security officer, your number one job should not just be providing security for the organization that you work for. It should be ensuring that your organization’s mission is as successful as possible, which means that you should be contributing to trying to get the best people in place. And I’ll tell you a little bit about a study that I conducted with a colleague, Courtney Weinbaum in 2016 and 2017 for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and they were looking at trying to improve the way NGA did its work in open spaces, and we called that project succeeding in the Open. It included a roadmap for federal agencies to telework, and it was allowing us to follow the Federal Telework Act in a better way and to improve the agency’s ability to do telework.

(15:33)
Well, as we did that research, there were all kinds of people, mostly security people saying, over my dead body will I ever allow – there’s no crisis that would ever happen in the nation – that would allow us that have our employees teleworking. Of course, we published in 2018, and by 2020 in the early days of the pandemic, Courtney and I were on the telework roadshow going all over the federal government explaining to people how you were going to have to do that. So change is hard, but things are going to change. So in that example, there were so many people who said, oh, telework’s never going to happen over my dead body. And now it’s the norm for a lot of the things that we do. There’s done so many changes. The same thing is true, I think for candidate experience. There are agencies who still think what we do is really cool, you should wait as long as it takes.

(16:20)
If you really want this job, you’ll wait two years or three years or however long it takes, and if not, then you can walk. And what is happening is more and more often, although we don’t have all the data to say this, I believe the best people are walking somewhere else. They’re going to Amazon and Facebook and to places that are also doing really cool things. There’s privatized SIGINT, there’s open source intelligence, there are large business intelligence aggregators that are doing much of the work of the intelligence community on the open side. People have choices now. And so if you really want to ensure that your organization is secure as possible, you’ll help improve the experience so that you have the best people working inside your organization to begin with. Because security isn’t just about hiring and access, it’s also about the work that people do once they get there.

Rich, I think that’s great, and nothing major to add there. The tagline is, do you want good people or not? Because right now, very competitive, right? Hiring is picking back up across our nation, but thinking about those hot job titles, the data scientists, the folks doing ai, the emerging technologists, those folks don’t want to wait a whole lot, especially if they’re coming fresh out of school or a more advanced degree university, but they don’t want to wait a whole long time. So the other thing is surprise, surprise, they probably just don’t have one application in. Maybe they submit something on USA jobs and then fingers crossed, but oh, by the way, as Rich mentioned, they’re also applying to Amazon, Meta a lot of those other big tech firms. And so if they do it quicker, not only have they sort of now wasted the government’s time in starting that vetting, but we’re losing that talent if we can’t do it in sort of an efficient and effective way.

(17:57)
The other thing I wanted to point out, and I’m going to say this at a two because I’m sure your listeners will hear this at a 10. This is really a cultural mindset change. It’s really about change management. Traditionally, this process has been in place since, oh gosh, rich help, but I think it’s 1947 sort of national security act kinds of stuff. This process has not changed a whole lot since then. And on another project, we actually looked at some historical versions of the SF 86. Even just looking at some of those things, the forties, fifties, and sixties, especially within today’s social context, are extremely nauseating. So I think what we really need to be thinking about is vetting in versus vetting out. So that traditional mindset is really all about excluding folks. We want to make sure because we don’t want that person supposed to be here. But I think sort of flipping that model, and I hope this comes through in our report a little bit, is really we need to move to a more inclusionary practice or field of practice or practice perhaps where we’re really looking to vet in and again, really sort of understand these things from the candidates viewpoint.

Yeah, I love that. I love the notion vetting in and saying, how do we make it clear you want to be a part of this process and this community? Because that’s really the demand right there across the national security workforce. Your report included a lot of questions, a lot of things that folks could layer on to be a part of the candidate experience. I’m curious, how much do you think of that could be applied universally saying, Hey, we could do X, Y, Z better across personnel vetting, and how much of it really needs to be agency specific in terms of applying some of these aspects of candidate experience to the hiring process?

So we originally started out just looking at the vetting process, but about maybe a month or two, maybe a month or two live, we sort of realized, wait a second, a process before this and a process after this. And so that’s why we’ve really split our framework into pre sections. I’m going to relate this back to your question in just a moment. First phase really starts at that pre what we’re calling the pre initial vetting stage. So this is everything that comes before that packet descent onto an ISP for AAA, right? Those authorized adjudicative agencies. So we’ve got the pre initial vetting phase, we’ve got the vetting phase, and then, oh, by the way, the candidate experience does not stop as soon as you are vetted in, right? I’m going to use my own term now every day is day one. So the candidate experience needs to extend beyond that vetting stage into once you’ve got your foot in the door, really ensuring that they’re comfortable, that they’ve got mentors or job buddies, things like this.

(20:22)
So that’s again why we’ve got it in three phases. Now, what we’ve done, I think it is applicable across the USG, the way we’ve developed this, right? Because we’ve developed it at a fairly generalized level, and what we’ve done is try to create a worked example or a workbook for those who really do want to improve the candidate experience. We’ve got a couple of reflexive questions, I’ve got them pulled up in front of me. But in that pre initial vetting stage, very simple from a three-year-old mindset sort of frame, how do candidates even know we exist? How do candidates know where to find more information about us? So some very simple questions there that again, are applicable I think across the vetting enterprise for all security, suitability, credentialing stakeholders, what we’ve done is, again, we’ve provided some work examples at a generalized level so that the departments and agencies can tailor this as needed.

(21:13)
Obviously, we would be hypocritical if it was a one size fits all approach. And so we didn’t want to do that. We didn’t want to say, Hey, this is the way to do it. But what we’ve tried to do is hopefully set a baseline to inform more tailored experiences by agency. Now, this isn’t to say, right, that we still need some sort of comprehensive candidate experience strategy that at least folks can refer to. And backing up, I think some of our first points about the institutionalization, right? This isn’t to say that the government isn’t doing anything, right? We have some good baselines within the federal personnel engagement guidelines, and OPM has also put out the PBQ, I think it’s the personal vetting questionnaire where they’re trying to simplify some of these questions. So there is some movement in this area, but again, to sum that up, we’ve provided the framework at a generalized level so that folks can take adopt and sort of tailor it to their needs.

I agree a hundred percent with Dave, and I think our framework has laid out probably 90 to 95% universal across the government. Obviously, there are some things from agency to agency that might be a little bit different. If your agency requires a lifestyle polygraph or psychological evaluation or some specific thing that’s different from the rest, then that little slice is going to be different. But the vast majority from the moment that the candidate comes into contact with you in whatever way it is, when they acknowledge that you exist and think about applying to the time that they’re brought in on duty on their first day, all of that is part of an experience that is mostly universal across the government.

When you’re going through this process, do you find areas where the policy needs to change to implement these ideas? I get pushback literally almost every week from somebody who is really reading the fine print on something. There’s no one like a security officer to try to find a policy that doesn’t actually exist. So I again, can see the pushback on this saying, Hey, there’s X, Y, Z policy that prevents me from engaging with a candidate in the process or reviewing an SSF 86 or et cetera, et cetera. So I’m sure that was a part of your consideration or even something that you’ve had in your conversations with government. Did you find areas where, hey, yeah, policy needs to change, or is this just baking new thoughts and ideas into the guidelines and the best practices at the individual level?

In most RAND studies where we spend a lot of time, we end up with findings and recommendations in this study because there’s a lot of philosophical nature to this. We’re looking at what’s done in the private sector and trying to apply it best practices over into a very compartmentalized and very secret system within inside the government. We did, instead of recommendations and findings, we did observations and suggestions. But I think we touch upon suggestions that get into the policy space, and I already mentioned that one of the things that you need to do is to create specific candidate experience metrics that cover all the vetting phases that would require, if you’re going to do it across the entire federal government or across the intelligence community or across some sector, there would probably need to be a policy that made those metrics all the same. Or what invariably happens the minute you start capture metrics is Congress and the media and the public all start to compare those metrics to figure out which organization is doing better or which organization doing worse or who needs to improve.

(24:21)
And so you want to all be counting things the same way. So you need to have relevant candidate experience metrics across all the vetting phases that are the same, wherever they can be the same. And in order to do that, one of those suggestions that we made was that you should institutionalize the data collection platform. How do you collect this information and then standardize the data collection process. So how are you going to go about capturing these metrics? So what are the metrics? How are you going to put the metrics in place, and what is the process that you use so that you can inform those candidate experience decisions along the way?

Yeah, yeah. Great. And Lindy, I should have mentioned this upfront too. One of the initial things when we were going through part of our literature view where we’re looking at government policy guidance documents, first of all, we thought we had a treasure trove. We had all of these policies, but then we started to take out our magnifying glasses. Oh, wait a minute. This is customer experience. What is this?

(25:46)
They’re not looking at our own reflexively looking at our own internal rate hiring processes, vetting process, so forth. There is really useful language, it’s talking about the need to collect metrics. I think it’s actually mandated. So if someone goes to Performance.gov, first of all, there’s a list of customer experience strategists. So we have a whole workforce dedicated to improving service delivery for the US public. Also, you’ll see the metrics and goalposts and so forth, how they’re looking to meet those OMB requirements for ensuring that again, they’re an effective efficiently providing specific services to the US public. And so I mentioned IRS education department, State Department is another one, right? Because they’re in charge of passports. But again, those are all externally focused endeavors. So again, we thought we had a treasure trove, but again, that lexicon we realized, oh, wait a minute, this is customer experience, not candidate experience.

(26:42)
I say that because there are some really great existing frameworks out there for customer experience. So the Department of the Veterans Administration, right, the VA, they have a wonderful framework out there. I think it’s called the VA Cookbook Department of Education. Another one great framework out there. And again, I think this starts to look at least interrogate some of those policies you’re thinking about within the vetting context, but calls for metrics all relaying that towards creating a better service delivery. Now, I’ll also say we were a little surprised that DCSA, for example, Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency, who does a high number of clearances for DOD, are not designated a high impact service provider. We were very curious and maybe even a bit perplexed that I don’t want to overstep why those processes aren’t designated as a hiss, because until those folks are in the government, that’s still the US public. And so one of the things about being designated as a his is you get some amount of dedicated resources and staff to help you stand up your website to help you sort of implement some of these metrics and how best to measure, right? So there’s a couple of, perks is the wrong word, but perks you will get as designated his organization by OMB.

I think that’s super relevant. I think that touches on a key point. How do we consider these people who have applied for the process and what is their status, and are we intentionally leaving them on the outside of the process as long as we can or how are their ways? I think that on-ramping is so important. Finding better strategies for getting engagement at the point of application for a lot of candidates could make a big difference. But I appreciate the study. I do think there is a takeaway here. Government is not doing everything right, but they are asking some of these questions. When I saw the report, I was definitely surprised that the candidate experience was something that we were actually considering for personnel vetting. There were some really interesting kind of thought processes there, even around how do we treat background investigators as a part of this process?

(28:37)
What difference would it make if instead of immediately flashing a badge and making you feel like you might be under arrest, a background investigator offered you a snack or made sure you were doing your interview in a location that didn’t make you sweat? So I think there’s some interesting ideas, some food for thought, and I’m glad that we’re asking these questions. So thank you so much, rich and David for being on the show. I so appreciate your time, your research, and check out what Rand Corporation is doing. They have a lot of studies around personal betting and the security clearance process, so there’s a lot more to learn here. Thank you so much, guys.