From Federal News Network:
After a months-long hiring freeze, the Social Security Administration is once again facing even further declining staffing numbers.
But with agency spending now determined for the rest of fiscal 2024, and hiring now unfrozen, SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley is readying the agency’s plans to rebuild its workforce as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Currently, SSA is at its lowest staffing levels in 27 years, while serving more customers than ever before, O’Malley told lawmakers on the House Ways and Means Committee during a hearing last week. As a result, customer service has worsened — there are longer wait times on phone lines, and longer delays in receiving decisions on disability applications and appeals. ...
In the 2024 spending agreement Congress reached last week, SSA received $14.2 billion for its administrative expenses. It’s a slight increase over SSA’s enacted budget of $14.1 billion for 2023. ...
Although SSA’s latest hiring freeze has ended, there have already been net staffing losses as a result of a months-long string of continuing resolutions — landing the agency once again at the lower staffing levels it had a year ago. ...
Right now, SSA employees “are understaffed, and they are overwhelmed,” O’Malley said. “Not surprisingly, when somebody’s been on hold for an hour, they come off that call hot. We right now have an attrition rate of about 24% in our teleservice centers.” ...
“We need to change our [hiring] strategy as an agency,” O’Malley told lawmakers. “I think we target too much on college graduates and not enough on high school and community college graduates. And with proper training, that could really be an investment that holds for a long time.” ...
19 comments:
Passing over colleges to hire from high-schools? I guess the race to the bottom continues.
To me this sounds like a backhanded way of saying to existing/potential employees “we aren’t going to pay you any more than we already do (given the soul crushing workloads), so we’re just going to hire candidates with lower expectations and have them do the job.”
Fine. Go ahead. The systems and policy are EXTREMELY complex, tied in with the verbal abuse (and occasional physical threats) from the public…what could go wrong!!
Well, the college hires have not been superstars during the last 20 years.
It is a race to the bottom for new hires. The hiring authorities tightened up to a ridiculous level in the last 20+ years. It was hard to hire someone not a vet or disabled. Major mistake. The script has flipped and SSA finds itself competing with McDonalds and Burger King for new staff.
Beginning pay for a service representative is sort of abysmal at this point. It’s on par with Target. College graduates are not interested in getting paid Target wages to explain policy to a constant barrage of people up front and on phones. The agency has been forced to use hiring authorities for way too long which results in candidates who have no business working with policy and processing claims. Hiring high school grads would be a joke. It feels as if lately we have been scraping bottom of the barrel with hiring, but we need better pay/incentives combined with better training, before the last of those who know what they’re doing, leave. No one wants to work for SSA due to the pay, the public facing aspect and the better opportunities found at other agencies.
@1140. I've worked with SRs and CRs that we're not college graduates that did the job very well. CR work is best done by people who can move the work and do the work well. I've worked with grads that couldn't decide what to do and hence weren't very good.
Wow. Just wow. I'm retired but worked as SSI CR and later in Baltimore in various jobs. I met and worked with a ton of really good, hired out of high school men and women who made careers of SSA. Race to the bottom, indeed. Met lots of prima donnas, college grads who left after not becoming grade 14s a year in. (Yes, in IT/Systems, but they weren't gods and were adamant they knew all there was to know and hated not being recognized as high value talent.) And frankly, never understood why people with law degrees took CR jobs. But met more than a few.
There are a ton of recently retired "out of high school" folks who did great work, managed people or projects and took claims and did service rep work and others who became programmers and more. SSA had a thing then for bringing people in and finding those who could grow in the job, including a program for ex-cons that I know had a bunch of hires of folks who stayed for over 25 years.
Looking down your nose at people on that basis alone says a lot about you instead.
O'Malley sent out an e-mail griping about not having enough money. Congress is giving him $100M more than last year. Wastefully, he's chosen to spend it by purchasing new real estate for places like Seattle, in-office equipment, and other unnecessary expenses for employees who were previously teleworking. He should be dumping every penny of it into the 1-800 number, hiring new talent and doling out overtime for the hardworking reps who want it.
@3:02 Neither have the Reps.
More money for the 800# addresses symptoms, not the disease - the backlogs at PC and DDS and insufficient staffing of Claims Specialists. Address those deficiencies and millions of calls per year do not happen.
The entire problem with SSA hiring and retention comes down to hiring qualified candidates and training. SSA HR sucks at picking candidates, and management as a whole pushes new employees as hard as they can to complete unrealistic training schedules as quickly as possible using absolute sub-par training materials and sucktatic training processes solely to get a producing employee ASAP regardless of whether the employee is actually able to do the job or not. Because of this, new hire retention sucks. Period.
And, lets face it -- CSR work isn't rocket science. Anyone who can read and reason at a high school level and can do basic math on a calculator can do it. The biggest issue is training people to understand SSA's arcane and ancient, backwards workload processes. Learning to read queries like MBRs, PHUSes, SSIDs, or the DEQY is the equivalent of learning a abbreviated new language. Plus, truthfully, SSA policy often doesn't make sense to the average person considering that a lot of it is based more on politics than common sense.
I wouldn't have a problem with hiring high school graduates except in two areas: maturity and dependability. I've in the past had college graduate hires (people 4-6 years older than a high school graduate) reduced to literal bawling wrecks while trying to learn to deal with the public. I don't know if the majority of high school graduates these days, as coddled as many of them are, could deal with that kind of pressure as a first job. Plus, they have to be dependable and actually show up for work on time and when scheduled. A single unexpected absence can throw an entire office into chaos, depending upon the size of the office and how well management plans for and handles it (something that isn't equal in all offices).
But, that is the same as for any hire. In the end, I say give it a chance and see what happens. Worst case, it probably won't turn out any worse than any other hire SSA makes.
All the hiring in the world isn’t going to help one iota until the absurd performance expectations that drive everyone away are adjusted or replaced with something more reasonable and realistic. We’re losing staff faster than new staff can be onboarded.
Totally agree with 10:25. We desperately need people who know have a depth of policy knowledge and can process claims.
You have to acquire the space and equipment for employees before you can hire more. We all know you have to show up to work to learn the job.
@1134. When I heard hiring high school graduates I wasn't thinking of 18 year olds. My thought was people who had perhaps done a bit of college, or not, but who had worked maybe 5 years at various jobs. 2 of the better CRs in my office are not college graduates ( not sure if any college or not) and the absolute worst was a college graduate. The college graduate was super smart but terrible at organizing work and processing it timely. The other two probably weren't quite as smart but much better doing the job.
If you want to reduce the necessary education level to be successful in SSA, maybe fix the IT systems to use plain English. And don't require 20 clicks to get to everything.
I won't trust O'Malley's leadership until I see the entire team responsible for CCE up in stocks.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-03-27/social-security-is-again-in-the-political-crosshairs-but-a-long-term-fix-would-be-simple
@8:39pm,
Don't you know? CCE is a resounding success according to our management team. They say they can't wait until they get around to adding MCS.
And, granted, there are reasons for the existence of CCE. Not good ones, but there are reasons.
A you indicate, it is a stupid design using a incompetent user interface pushed by ignorant management who refuse to recognize that lazy and incompetent employees can't be forced to do their jobs via software design. The same employees who did their jobs badly before CCE are continuing to do their jobs badly with CCE. Only now, the good employees who have always attempted to do their jobs correctly end up being the ones punished.
Typical SSA. That ain't changing anytime soon....
TED to be declared an astounding success by management in 3-2-1. . .
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