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Job Site Returns to Feds -- and Struggles

USAjobs.gov, the federal government's central website for posting its thousands of job openings, has experienced performance problems and has been the target of complaints about search-related problems since the government took it back from Monster.com, which had run the site for years on a contract basis.

The U.S. government employs 2.6 million people , so USAjobs.gov is a popular place to look for work.

The site's operation by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) may be one of the most visible tests of a federal agency's ability to take over work previously farmed out to a contractor. The promise is to do it better and at a lower cost.

But user complaints have been piling up on the OPM's official USAjobs.gov Facebook page, even as the agency reports that thousands of people have successfully filed applications since the transition from Monster.

In one Facebook post, a user wondered why the job search function sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

OPM director John Berry, in a recent post, said that the site consistently serves at least 94% of its users successfully and that the agency is adding capacity to support higher-than-expected volume.

For its part, Monster.com offered federal agencies free help-wanted ads on its site for 30 days. "As a public service, we're offering these free postings to ease the burden during the transition," Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said in a statement.

Linda Rix, co-CEO of Avue Technologies, which provides human resources software to the public sector, criticized the OPM's decision to take back the site. Noting that her company has done extensive testing of the new USAjobs.gov site, Rix said, "[The OPM is] a personnel management agency, not a technology company, and they don't have the technology skills to do this."

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld's print edition. It was adapted from an article that appeared earlier on Computerworld.com.

Read more about management and careers in Computerworld's Management and Careers Topic Center.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Facebook, Monster, Monster.com, Topic
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