The Top 10 Government Agencies Hiring Right Now

“The best talent doesn’t wait around for 140 days — they find another job […] We need to streamline our hiring process to make it more competitive and candidate-friendly. Across 20 years in the private sector, I’ve seen that the best performing organizations focus on people as their most important tool for improving performance. It is time for the federal government to start doing the same.”—Jeff Zients, U.S. Chief Performance Officer, quoted in the Washington Business Journal.

It's no secret that the government's hiring practices need updating and, if recent pronouncements by the President are anything to go by, we're now well on our way to actually seeing something done about them. Chief among the initiatives for bringing the average hiring time down to the targeted 80 days: the much-derided Knowledge, Skills and Abilities essays (or KSAs, as they're known to seasoned federal job seekers) are to be replaced by a resume system that bears much more resemblance to what those of us in the private sector are used to.

In honor of the upcoming changes (most have to be implemented by November), we've spent some time seeking out opportunities on the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) official site--USAJOBS.gov--and have uncovered some interesting facts and opportunities.

Let's start with this one: over the last calendar month, the top 50 Federal agencies for job postings have 12,882 job posts between them, for the year to date at time of writing. While the site does point out that "postings are not equal to job openings," it’s still not a bad starting figure, and there's no reason to assume that job openings would be lower than postings: many of them, after all, advertise a number of openings with a single post.

For the curious, the Top 10 Agencies by ads posted so far this year are as follows:

1. Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration: 1674 postings
2. Veterans Health Administration: 1402 postings
3. Army Corps of Engineers: 1145 postings
4. Forest Service: 909 postings
5. Army Medical Command: 531 postings
6. Department of the Air Force: 356 postings
7. Army Installation Management Command: 349 postings
8. Social Security Administration: 280 postings
9. Bureau of Prisons/Federal Prison System: 256 postings
10. Air Force Personnel Center: 250 postings

Read the full top 50.

Read the Top 10 Occupations the Government is Hiring

Read the Top 10 Locations for Government Hiring

For more on getting hired by the Government—and what it takes to break into specific agencies—check out Vault's Guide to Government Agency Careers.

--Posted by Phil Stott, Vault.com