OPM chief: ‘We messed up’ USAJobs launch

[alp227]

Source: Wash. Post

The federal personnel chief said Thursday he “screwed up” the problem-filled launch of the government’s new job board and apologized “to all the applicants who’ve had trouble” finding and applying for jobs for more than three weeks.

“We messed up,” John Berry said at a briefing on USAJobs, the federal employment Web site that the government took over from Monster.com 18 months ago.

“If we had the ability to roll back the clock, I sure would do it differently,” Berry said.

Twenty-three days after the site was rolled out, the Office of Personnel Management has added servers and bandwidth and is addressing many of the software glitches that drove job seekers to Facebook and Twitter in anger over error messages, system crashes and disappearing data.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/opm-chief-we-messed-up-usajobs-launch/2011/11/03/gIQA9xvyjM_story.html

[stockholmer]

1. Mass. Senator John Kerry calls for outsourcing USAJobs

http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20111028/PERSONNEL02/110280302/1001



Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is urging the White House to step in and end the Office of Personnel Management's stumbling attempt to insource the USAJobs website.

Kerry sent a letter Wednesday to federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel asking him to pull the plug on OPM's insourcing effort. Kerry said the government should instead competitively bid USAJobs to a private vendor.

Monster.com, based in Kerry's home state, had managed USAJobs until recently.

USAJobs has been plagued with problems since OPM rebuilt and relaunched it Oct. 11. Thousands of users have complained about error messages, login difficulties, a buggy search engine and overall sluggishness. OPM scrambled to fix the problems and installed three new servers to help the site handle traffic that was more than three times heavier than anticipated.


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[No Elephants]

2. This is not good. Sincerely yours, Captain Obvious

[virgdem]

3. This doesn't surprise me at all..

I write Federal resumes, mostly for retiring Navy personnel in Norfolk/Virginia Beach. I used the Navy's program, CHART, and had no problems with it. I don't really care for the USA jobs site - the space given for job descriptions is half of what CHART allowed, making it difficult to give a full picture of the applicant's job experience. I hope they get their proverbial s**t together soon.

[Demit]

4. Sounds like you could offer your expertise.

I'm serious. As long as Kerry wants to privatize it, might as well be to a Democrat.

[TheDebbieDee]

5. USAJOBS.gov was phucked up long before three weeks ago.....

In the past 2 years, I have applied for dozens of jobs and in about 50% of the cases, none of my required e-docs are ever attached to my application. USAJOBS.gov was a POS before their recent upgrade and is only a bigger POS since the upgrade.