U.S. Office of Personnel Management - Ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce

Executive Order 13163 requires agencies to prepare plans to increase the opportunities for individuals with disabilities to be employed in Federal agencies. In addition, agencies should develop tracking systems to ensure their plans are being appropriately implemented.

Agencies can learn from other organizations that have established successful tracking systems. For example, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has established a successful system to accomplish their goals. SSA uses a statistical report of new hires to monitor the progress of recruiting initiatives.

The SSA system has the following characteristics:

1. It focuses on results, not plans or efforts.
2. It is simple, consisting of one page containing all the necessary information to accurately assess the status of SSA's recruitment and hiring efforts at a glance.
3. It is timely, since it is updated the first week of every month and discussed by the Commissioner with the heads of major SSA components at a staff meeting that same week. The timeliness is crucial because it gives components plenty of time to take needed corrective actions before the end of the fiscal year.
4. It tracks all groups and it does not set numerical quotas or targets, so that it does not violate Adarand. The report contains a table that has a row for each major ethnic/race group, people with severe disabilities, and veterans.
5. It is easy to generate from the agency's human resources management information system. After the initial computer routines are developed to generate the report, it takes less than one hour of an analyst's time each month to produce the update.
6. It is comprehensive. The report's first numeric column lists the number of new employees hired year-to-date from each group for the agency as a whole. The other numeric columns provide the same information for each of SSA's major components. If this report were for a cabinet department, the first column would show department-wide totals and the other columns would each show data for a separate agency, bureau, or major operating division in the department.
7. It provides comparative metrics on the recruitment of historically underrepresented groups. SSA tracks four groups (Hispanics, Asians, people with disabilities and veterans) who have been historically underrepresented in SSA's metrics.
8. It operationalized top-level support for recruitment initiatives by regularly and frequently keeping the agency's Commissioner apprised of the results obtained by top agency executives.