Hiring hurdles at USPS? A new report offers fresh ideas that could help clear the path

Terry Gerton Let’s start by having you give us an explanation for how the U.S. Postal Service uses the pre-career employee category. It’s very different from what happens in other organizations.

David Garcia It is. So a little bit about pre-career employees at the Postal Service. They make up about 100,000 of the agency’s roughly 630,000 employees. They are temporary workers. They don’t receive the same benefits as the career workforce, and they’re not always guaranteed a regular schedule. But after working at the agency for a while, they may become eligible for a career position, and they provide the postal service with a degree of financial and operational flexibility. So when we talk about pre-career employees, they can include a number of different groups. They can include letter carriers, the clerks who staff post offices and sell you stamps, and they can also include employees who process mail and packages in the processing plants.

Terry Gerton That’s really helpful and gives us a good feel for this new report that you’ve put out, which is on benchmarking hiring and retention strategies for that particular segment of the Postal Services workforce. Because there are some troubling statistics, right, that pre-career job postings are not receiving applications, you have a pretty significant loss within the first 90 days. So in your examination of this issue, did you identify some root causes for those kinds of challenges?

David Garcia We did. So you’re right to point out that the Postal Service has encountered some challenges recruiting and retaining all the employees that it needs. And there are a few things that can make recruiting and retaining difficult. So, first of all, the United States has had a really tight labor market over the last few years. It’s cooled recently, but even today, I believe the unemployment rate’s at 4.2%. And that’s still near-record low. Meanwhile, other organizations, and these are both public and private sector organizations, have really responded to that tight labor market by taking steps to improve how they recruit and hire employees. And of course, the Postal Service has to compete with these organizations for talent. There are also some inherent aspects of the job that can make hiring and retention difficult at the Postal Service. So for example, you see letter carriers out on the street when it’s 100 degrees. These employees do really physically demanding work. I should say, having said all of that, there are some things that the Postal Service can do to boost its appeal with potential job candidates, and then make sure that it’s able to retain those employees once they come on board. And we try to highlight a lot of those practices in our white paper.

Terry Gerton Well, let’s dig into some of those, because you looked at the corporate world as a benchmarking opportunity, and you noticed some successful recruitment strategies that they practice. What are some of these that you think the Postal Service might realistically adopt?

David Garcia So one thing that we found the best-in-class organizations doing is they really market themselves in creative ways, and then they sell themselves to job seekers, and that’s very important. So they’ll do things like post welcome videos on their hiring websites where they talk a little bit about their mission, vision and values, or some organizations that we came across will post employee testimonials to convey a little bit about what it’s like to work at the organization. And those testimonials are a good way to do this in an authentic way that maybe an organization can’t do in a job description alone. So I can give you one example that I really liked. Royal Mail, which is the United Kingdom’s postal operator, they include these employee testimonial videos on their website, but they do it a little bit different. So their employees will talk about what they like about their jobs, what they do on a day-to-day basis and what drew them to the organization. But the employees actually film themselves doing this on their mobile devices, so they’ll be holding the device and then talk about those things that I mentioned. And this just seems to make it a little bit less corporate and a little more authentic.

I can also say that the best organizations that we came across will also proactively pursue job candidates, rather than just post a job announcement on their website and then cross their fingers that enough people who currently hate their jobs find that job announcement and apply. One HR executive told us that the “post and pray” method does not work. So to recruit proactively, organizations that we researched will creatively use their non-human resources employees to help. One example that we came across was at a transit agency in Minneapolis. This group actually sends its bus operators out to a whole bunch of different community events to talk about what it’s like to work for the company. And they found that to be a very effective way to recruit. Other organizations will form partnerships with other groups to get on the radar of job candidates. And this can include schools, including universities. It can include the military community and also downsizing businesses. As far as schools go, some organizations even will engage with high school students. So it’s not limited to colleges and universities. So we found a really neat example at the Coast Guard. They are partnering with a Baltimore-area high school to offer these students summer internships at Coast Guard Yard, which is a local shipyard where the agency’s vessels are renovated and constructed. And this is a really good training opportunity for students. They get hands-on vocational training and it’s actually led to full-time jobs in a lot of cases after these students graduate from high school.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with David Garcia. He’s a research analyst in the US Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General. Those are great examples about outreach and messaging. What about onboarding? You’ve got a section in there about onboarding once you could get through the hiring process, really emphasizes consistency and personalization. What is your recommendation for how the U.S. Postal Service should think about onboarding?

David Garcia Yeah, well, onboarding is, of course, critical. It can quickly prepare employees to become full producers. And if it’s done well, and it’s not always done well, it can boost retention. So like you said, we found that some organizations are, on one hand, trying to standardize their onboarding processes to make sure that all employees receive a really good experience, no matter who their supervisor is and no matter where they work. Some ways that they’re doing this is by providing the same orientation session to every new employee. But like you said, other organizations are also trying to make the onboarding process more personal. So including personal touches like welcome kits for new hires or assigning new hires a buddy. One organization that we interviewed got some feedback from its new employees that the orientation session had too many formal presentations, and actually some of its employees were having trouble staying engaged. So this company tried to gamify its orientation by introducing competitions and group activities with prizes. You asked about the Postal Service. They’ve actually taken some steps to improve how they onboard new employees, and they’ve made some progress here, but still some additional work to be done. So recently, the Postal Service introduced what they call the 511 Initiative. It’s really geared toward increasing pre-career employee retention. But a piece of it relates to onboarding. So what this initiative does is limits the number of hours that new employees can work during their first 90 days. And it also requires supervisors to have three performance discussions with employees during their first 80 days. Recently, the OIG evaluated how well the Postal Service is implementing the 511 initiative. And we found that those facilities that fully embraced it actually improved retention. But we also found that it was sort of being unevenly implemented across the Postal Services facilities.

Terry Gerton So between your report and the 511 project, you’ve got kind of a roadmap for Postal Service to consider as they work to address the issues, especially with the pre-career workforce. Where are you seeing progress? What sort of suggestions have they already taken on board? And maybe where do you see the most opportunity for improvement?

David Garcia So throughout our research, we found some really neat examples of organizations prioritizing the candidate experience. And this is an area where the Postal Service has made strides. But of course, there’s still some work to be done. So we found some really good examples of organizations that are making it easier to apply for jobs. And also improving how they communicate with job applicants. So some organizations have done this by introducing artificial intelligence solutions, and the report has some pretty neat examples of that. So chatbots are one way. FedEx has a chatbot on its hiring website and so does Royal Mail, the UK’s postal operator. And these chatbots are great because they can answer a range of applicant questions like, what jobs are available, what’s required in the position and even how much the positions pay. And the nice thing about chatbots is they’re available to help 24 hours a day. So if applying for jobs at three o’clock in the morning is your thing — not my thing, but if it is — the chatbot’s there and it’s available to help. I’ll give you one more great example. And you know, you love all your kids, but this is probably my favorite example from the report. PostNL, the Dutch postal operator, recently introduced an AI-powered digital recruiter named Charlie to help its HR staff. This post was receiving too many applications, couldn’t process them all in a timely manner and it found that some of its applicants were dropping out of the process prematurely. Either they were getting frustrated or they got other jobs before Post NL could catch up with them. So, when somebody applies for a job, immediately, within a minute, they’ll get either a WhatsApp message or a phone call from Charlie. Charlie will thank them for their application and then ask them a few initial questions. So if you apply to be a letter carrier, Charlie might ask if you have a driver’s license. If that applicant passes that initial screen, Charlie will immediately access a human HR employee’s calendar and set up a first-round interview. And this has actually been very successful so far for PostNL. The post recruitment costs have fallen, the time it took to schedule that first interview also fell and so did the number of applicants who dropped out prematurely.

Terry Gerton I’ve been speaking with David Garcia, a research analyst in the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General. David, thank you for sharing this report with us. It sounds like there are practices that every agency could use.

David Garcia That’s right. We’ve identified a ton of them. And Terry, if your listeners are interested in reading the full report, they can find it at uspsoig.gov.