

OPM Director Katherine Archuleta throws the first pitch at a Nationals game on May 6. (Patrick McDermott/Washington Nationals.)

The federal government’s personnel chief said Friday that her agency is revamping the much-maligned job board USAJobs.gov “to make sure it’s just what our applicants need and our hiring managers find helpful.”

Katherine Archuleta, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the revamp is designed to help applicants through the often-cumbersome process of applying for federal employment.

“We’re looking at all the parts” of USAJobs.gov, Archuleta said at an hour-long digital Town Hall for federal workers and others interested in joining the government. “Let’s take a look at the language we’re using [in job announcements]. Let’s make sure we don’t have redundant questions,” she said. In short, let’s try again to streamline a process that has confounded applicants for years.

“We’re looking at USAJobs from beginning to end,” Archuleta said, calling the redo “USAJobs 2.0.”

Archuleta, a year into her tenure as personnel chief, took questions via Google Hangouts, live streaming and Twitter, Instagram and Facebook on the government’s efforts to recruit young people, veterans’ preference in hiring, telework and how to keep civil servants engaged in their work after years of salary freezes, furloughs and Republican-led efforts in Congress to reduce some of their benefits.

Steve Ressler, founder of GovLoop, the popular social networking site for feds, served as facilitator for the meeting, which was streamed live on YouTube from OPM headquarters in downtown Washington.

Archuleta said she has traveled the country in the past year to meet with federal workers about their concerns and recruit new employees, including veterans, to a government focused on “how we develop the next generation of leaders” now that thousands of retirement-age civil servants are leaving.

She acknowledged the the millenial generation tends to view federal service as one stop in a career that includes private-sector and nonprofit jobs. To keep the younger generation in government, “We’re looking at young leadership and how to grow it,” she said. “How are we making sure we keep our employees engaged so they feel good about what they’re doing?”

Asked to respond to concerns that the government is giving veterans such a leg up in hiring that non-veterans have trouble getting in the door, Archuleta said that veterans “bring a richness and talent” to government: “We need to take advantage of all we’ve invested in our military.”

USAJobs.gov, the main job site for federal employment, has discouraged applicants for years, with its lengthy résumé requirements and voluminous questions. Applicants complain that they apply for open positions only to hear nothing from the agency that posted the job. They also say that getting through the process is based less on talent and more on how well they tailor their résumé to keywords in the job listing.

OPM spent millions of dollars in 2011 to revamp the site, but the launch was plagued by delays and computer glitches.