Opportunities Exist To Improve the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hiring Process

While some of HUD’s efforts to improve its hiring and human capital functions and reduce its average time-to-hire have been successful, HUD’s hiring process overall was not efficient. HUD’s Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer (OCHCO), which is responsible for developing and implementing policies and procedures associated with human capital management, set a goal to reduce the average time-to-hire but did not meet this goal. OCHCO must implement efforts to improve HUD’s hiring and human capital functions and increase hiring efficiency, as defined in its own human capital operating plans. Hiring process owners, including program office hiring managers and administrative staff, received limited and inconsistent training on the hiring process and were not aware of the roles or responsibilities in the hiring process. The unclear roles and responsibilities, along with the inconsistent training, impacted HUD’s ability to hire efficiently. Additionally, OCHCO had inconsistent and unreliable hiring data due to the manual nature of the data input and the lack of interaction among the various data-tracking tools. As a result, OCHCO may not fully understand how well HUD’s hiring process is operating or where its shortcomings exist. The unreliable hiring data impede OCHCO’s and the program offices’ ability to properly identify when to take actions for improvement. We offer 11 recommendations to improve HUD’s hiring process. Six of the recommendations are aimed at process reform, and five recommendations are designed to support data improvement. The status of each recommendation is “unresolved-open.”