The Social Security Administration is seeking attorneys to work in Employment Law and Program Litigation positions. They don’t say how many they expect to hire but they’re only accepting the first 200 applications for each type of job.
There are employees needed across the agency. Why are they hiring for these positions?
Do these attorneys have to pass a loyalty test?
ReplyDeleteYes, actually, they do.
DeleteRead the questions in the accompanying questionnaire linked in the job announcement.
DeleteI only care if these attorneys are going to help clear the lobby or answer the phones.
ReplyDeleteSurprised they dont have to answer phones LOL
DeleteYes! The field got an abysmal amount of hires. Until you have to automation to help our jobs then we need people to do the work. You don’t cut and then start working on things to replace the lost productivity of the lost employees. You put the tools in place first…
DeleteThey're hiring for these positions because these are the people who help keep beneficiaries OFF the rolls.
ReplyDeleteMost likely this. If we can’t hire and retain people, we need to decrease the number of people we serve, so that the employees left can handle the workloads.
DeleteThe next logical step is to close all SSA doors so employees can clear pending cases. How long would that experiment last?
DeleteIt takes less employees to keep people on the rolls. Appeals, new claims, etc take more time than changing the address for someone receiving.
DeleteThey’re hiring for these positions because they made the job so horrendously godawful that attrition in these jobs has been sky high. Even decision writers in OHO are avoiding OGC like the plague. Anyone who gets one of these jobs is quickly going to regret their lives.
DeleteIf you read the employment law announcement crefully you'll see it is geared towards defending the agency against soon to be coming complaints and lawsuits by current employees who are soon to be fired after being moved to the Schedule Policy/Career position.
ReplyDeleteSSA is only eligible for 20 schedule F positions.
DeleteWhich positions?
DeleteThey can try to hire for the essential positions, but they aren’t hiring enough in those positions to actually help the situation. The understaffing is so severe, they would have to hire at least 10,000 frontline employees to help see any meaningful improvements.
ReplyDeleteAnd those employees would have to want to stay for longer than the time it takes to find another job. As it currently stands, the jobs don’t pay enough, they are too complex for the pay offered, and there aren’t any flexibilities offered to retain people. The “best of the best” will never stay long for GS 5-7 pay, no telework, difficult/complex jobs with so many policies, rules, and regulations to learn, all while not having time to stop and breathe for a minute (because there’s no time for that).
Quite frankly, the work output quality in the people who have been hired more recently is not the same as it was in years’ past. I think that comes down to not being able to attract and retain good talent (see the challenges mentioned above), no time for seasoned employees to actually train and develop the new employees the way they need to be trained, and the fact that SSAs policies and procedures are so complex and convoluted, it’s almost impossible to maintain accuracy when all agency leadership cares about is numbers.
Hard to attract applicants to a job that involves incredibly tedious and frustrating work you have no real control over, slaving away under impossible productivity expectations and losing 100% of your cases. Add in the lack of telework, the public hatred of civil servants, the total elimination of job security, and the ridiculous loyalty tests, and it’s easy to see why people don’t want these jobs.
ReplyDeleteCry me a river. It’s a job that helps pay the bills.
Delete12:46- and they stay just long enough to find something else. SSA in its current state is not set up for a constant revolving door of employees.
DeleteCurrent OGC employee here, and I can confirm that the job sucks and shows no sign of improving. Between attrition and increasing federal court appeals, each attorney is handling around 4x as many cases as before the Musketeers started gutting and shuffling.
ReplyDeleteI'm still here because I'm trapped financially and in terms of career prospects, but I'd never consider this job if I had to pass their loyalty questionnaire:
"How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired."
If you can answer that question enthusiastically and sincerely, you might be qualified to work in this administration, but you're probably a sociopath who belong nowhere near cases involving actual humans.
I work in OGC and second this do not work here.
Delete