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Imagine your agency had been responsible for hiring about 60,000 people initially and more than 10,000 people per year for the last five years. The starting annual salary for a large number of these positions would be around $25,000. And the staff would be faced with angry, scowling people during their career, perhaps on their first day and perhaps every day! On top of all that, these employees would be responsible for the security of the nation’s airports. Welcome to the U.S. Federal Government’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA). TSA was created on November 19, 2001. One of its initial mandates was to recruit, assess, hire and train Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) for 450 commercial airports in 12 months – nearly 60,000 individuals. TSA was successful at meeting that mandate. In December 2002, the agency entered into a five-year contract with CPS Human Resource Services to help maintain that level of staffing with the goal of reaching attrition based just in time hiring. For Jerry Greenwell, CEO of CPS, it was an exciting time. “CPS had to be ready in a very short time to go to work on the largest contract we’d ever started. Initially, there was some strain on the organization with the sheer size and volume of activity required to stand up the program, but our employees overcame every obstacle. Business units covered for each other while we rapidly built up the required staff and systems.” The recruitment and testing of TSOs is one aspect of the CPS/TSA collaboration. During the first years of the contract, CPS and its subcontractor partners, such as pan, CHS, Taleo and FPMI, followed a centralized model for recruitment and assessment of TSO positions. Up to 26 teams of highly trained individuals traveled the country holding assessment centers at hotels nationwide. Although this process had some success, it did not provide the bandwidth to meet the needs of all 450 airports. In March 2006, CPS/TSA designed and implemented the current hiring process called the “Local Hiring Initiative.” The new process achieved three goals: it created additional bandwidth, it provided a decentralized approach to hiring, and it engaged the airport staff as the “owners” of the process results. This, in turn, led to improved coordination and accountability in the hiring process. Although airports are responsible for conducting their own hiring assessments, CPS maintains and deploys a cadre of HR Specialists to assist airports with the assessment and recruitment efforts. Under this model CPS has complete responsibility for managing the vacancy announcements, nationwide recruitment efforts and computer-based testing; processing medical and drug testing; providing real-time data to airports for assessing candidates; and certifying qualified applicants for hire. CPS also provides training to airport staff both on-site at the airports and at a two-day training course periodically throughout the year at either the CPS office in Sacramento, CA or at the Accenture office in Reston, VA. The benefits of this staffing model were clear almost immediately:
“CPS has been able to break down individual steps in the TSO hiring process to identify the number of days and ownership for each component in order to work with TSA to effectively reduce the time to hire,” said Janet Fulp, CPS acting deputy program manager on the TSA contract. The recruitment and hiring for TSOs never stop – since 2003, these efforts have resulted in approximately 1,900,000 applications – but CPS, in partnership with TSA, keeps identifying and implementing continuous process improvement to make the TSO Local Hiring Initiative a model for all federal agencies to consider.
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