The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has reduced its onboarding process for new hires – from application to hiring – from 492 days to 280 days, with expectations that the timeline will continue to decrease, according to a senior agency official.
During GovExec’s Cybersecurity Futures Forum on Nov. 20, Cynthia Snyder, assistant director of National Intelligence for Human Capital at ODNI, explained that the intelligence community faces a workforce challenge. Among the top priorities are making career opportunities known to new hires and simplifying the onboarding process.
Back in 2019, ODNI launched its 180-day hiring timeline, which introduced several initiatives designed to address the intelligence community’s hiring challenges and which are now yielding results, Snyder explained.
“One of the main things […we] did was automating a number of [our] processes. A number of our agencies started automating their processes, some modernized their new capital systems, some developed tools that would integrate the security and the manual assessment so that would help improve that [hiring] timeline,” Snyder said.
The result of that effort, she explained, was a decrease in the time it takes to hire new talent by nearly half. Previously, it would take the intelligence agency an average of 492 days for a candidate to be notified if they were hired.
“We’re down to close to 280 days right now,” she said, adding that while the number of days is still quite large, she expects that with initiatives currently underway, the timeline could decrease again in the near future.
Another initiative ODNI launched was moving recruitment efforts “over to USAJobs … so this way we had a system or single location where individuals could find us,” Snyder said. She added that the expansion to USAJobs began in fiscal year (FY) 2022 with 2,000 job announcements, followed by 6,000 announcements in FY 2023.
By leveraging USAJobs, ODNI received “up to over 150,000 applicants in 2022, [by] just informing others of who we are and where we are,” she said.
