Building Talent Capacity for Permitting: Insights from Civil Servants
Have you ever asked a civil servant in the federal government what it was like to hire new staff? It’s quite common to hear how challenging it is to navigate the hiring process and how long it takes to get someone through the door. At FAS, we know it’s hard. We’ve seen how it works, and we’ve heard stories from civil servants in government.
Following the wave of legislation aimed at addressing infrastructure, environment, and economic vulnerabilities (i.e., the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS)), we knew that the federal government’s hiring needs were going to soar. As we previously stated, permitting is a common bottleneck that would hinder the implementation of BIL, IRA, and CHIPS. The increase in work following this legislation came in conjunction with a push for faster permits, which in turn significantly increased agency workload. Many agencies did not have the capacity to clear the existing backlogs of permitting projects they already had in their pipeline, which would not even begin to address the new demand that would result from these laws. As such, talent capacity, or having staff with the knowledge and skills needed to meet the work demands, presented a major bottleneck.
We also knew that surge hiring is not a strength of the government, and there are a number of reasons for that; some we highlighted in our recent blog post. It’s a difficult task to coordinate, manage, and support the hiring process for a variety of roles across many agencies. And agencies that are responsible for permitting activities, like environmental reviews and authorizations, do not have standardized roles and team structures to make it easier to hire. Furthermore, permitting responsibility and roles are disaggregated within and across agencies – some roles are permanent, others are temporary. Sometimes responsibility for permitting is core to the job. In other cases, the responsibility is part of other program or regional/state needs. This makes it hard to take concerted and sustained action across government to improve hiring.
While this sounds like a challenge, FAS saw an opportunity to apply our talent expertise to permitting hiring with the aim of reducing the time to hire and improving the hiring experience for both hiring managers and HR specialists. Our ultimate goal was to enable the implementation of this new legislation. We also knew that focusing on hiring for permitting would offer a lens to better understand and solve for systemic talent challenges across government.
As part of this work, we had the opportunity to connect and collaborate with the Permitting Council, which serves as a central body to improve the transparency, predictability, and accountability of the federal environmental review and authorization process, to gain a broad understanding of the hiring difficulties experienced across permitting agencies. This helped us identify some of the biggest challenges preventing progress, which enabled us to co-host two webinars for hiring managers, HR specialists, HR leaders, and program leaders within permitting agencies, focused on showcasing tactical solutions that could be applied today to improve hiring processes.
Our team wanted to complement this understanding of the core challenges with voices from agencies – hiring managers, HR specialists, HR teams, and leaders – who have all been involved in the process. We hoped to validate the challenges we heard and identify new issues, as well as capture best practices and talent capacity strategies that had been successfully employed. The intention of this blog is to capture the lessons from our discussions that could support civil servants in building talent capacity for permitting-related activities and beyond, as many solutions identified are broadly applicable across the federal government.
Approach
Our team at FAS reached out to over 55 civil servants who work across six agencies and 17 different offices identified through our hiring webinars to see if they’d be willing to share about their experiences trying to hire for permitting-related roles in the implementation of IRA, BIL, and CHIPS. Through this outreach, we facilitated 14 interviews and connected with 18 civil servants from six different organizations within the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Defense, Department of Interior, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Commerce. The roles of the participants varied; it included Hiring Managers, HR Specialists, HR Leaders, Chief Environmental Review and Permitting Officers, and Chief Human Capital Officers.
In our conversations, we focused on identifying their hiring needs to support permitting-related activities within their respective organization, the challenges they experience in trying to hire for those new positions, what practices were successful in their hiring efforts, and any recommendations they had for other agencies. We synthesized the data we gathered through these discussions and identified common challenges in hiring, successful hiring practices, talent capacity strategies, and additional tips for civil servants to consider.
Challenges to Hiring
We identified many challenges hindering agencies from quickly bringing on new staff to fill their open roles. From the start, many teams responsible for permitting were already very understaffed. One interviewee explained that they had serious backlogs requiring complex analysis, but were only able to triage and take on what was feasible. Another shared that they initially were only processing 60% of their workload annually. A third interviewee explained that some of their staff had previously been working on 4-5 Environment Impact Statements (EIS) at one time, which is very high and not common for the field. Their team had a longstanding complaint about high workload that led to a high attrition rate, which only increased the need for more hires. In addition to the permitting teams being under resourced, many HR counterpart teams were also understaffed. This created an environment where teams needed to hire a significant number of new staff, but did not necessarily have the HR support necessary to execute.
The budget was the next issue many agencies faced. The budget constraints resulting from the time-bound funding of IRA and BIL raised a number of important questions for the agencies. BIL funds expire at the end of FY2026 and IRA funds expire anywhere between 2-10 years from the legislation passing in 2022. For example, the funds allocated to the Permitting Council in the IRA expire at the end of FY2031, and some of these funds have been given to agencies to bolster workforce capacity for supporting timely permitting reviews. Ultimately, agencies needed to decide if they wanted to hire temporary or full time employees. This decision cannot be made without additional information and analysis of retirement rates, attrition rates, and other funding sources.
In addition to managing the budgetary constraints, agencies needed to determine how they would allocate the funds provided to their bureaus and programs. This required negotiations, justifications, and many discussions. The ability of Program Leaders to negotiate and justify their allocation is dependent upon their ability to accurately conduct workforce planning, which was a challenge identified through interviews. Specifically, some managers were challenged to accurately plan in an environment that is demand-driven and continuously evolving. Additionally, managing staff who have a variety of responsibilities and may only work on permitting projects for a portion of their time only increases the complexity of the planning process.
A number of challenges we heard were common pain points in the federal government’s hiring process, as noted in Many Chutes and Few Ladders in the Federal Hiring Process. These include:
- Assessments: Inadequate assessments have led to issues with the certificate lists of eligible candidates provided from the HR Specialist to the hiring manager. Some hiring managers have received lists with too many candidates to choose from, while others have been disappointed to not see qualified candidates on the list. This is largely a result of assessments that do not effectively screen qualified applicants. Self-assessments are an example of this, where applicants score their own abilities in response to a series of multiple choice questions. From our conversations, self-assessments are still a commonly used practice, and skills-based assessments have not been widely adopted.
- Job Descriptions: Both creating new and updating job descriptions has caused delays in the hiring process. Some agencies have started moving towards standardized job descriptions with the goal of making the process more efficient, but this has not been an easy task and has required a lot of time for collaboration across a variety of stakeholders.
- Background Checks: Delays in background checks have slowed the process. These delays often result from mistakes in or incomplete Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (e-QIP) forms, delays in scheduling fingerprint appointments, a lack of infrastructure for sharing and tracking information between key stakeholders (e.g., selected applicant, suitability manager, hiring manager), and delayed responses to notifications in the process.
- Candidate Declinations: Candidates declining a job offer have set a number of agencies back, especially those lacking deep applicant pools. The reasons provided have varied. Some applicants believed that the temporary positions were negotiable or did not realize they had applied to a term position, and they were no longer interested. In some cases, agency hiring managers did not know they had hiring flexibilities or incentives to offer that may have bridged the gap for the candidate. Others were unable to accept the offer for the specific location, citing the increased cost of living and housing prices as a barrier.
Lastly, recruiting was noted as a challenge by a number of participants. Recruiting for a qualified applicant pool has been difficult, especially for those looking to hire very specialized roles. One participant explained their need for someone with experience working in a specific region of the country and the limitations that came with not being able to offer a relocation bonus. Another participant described the difficulty in finding qualified candidates at the right grade level because the pay scale was very limiting for the expertise required. These challenges are exacerbated in agencies that lack recruiting infrastructure and dedicated resources to support recruitment.
These challenges manifested as bottlenecks in the hiring process and present opportunities for improvement. Apart from the new, uncertain funding, these challenges are not novel. Rather, these are issues agencies have been facing for many years. The new legislation has drawn broader attention back to these problems and presents an opportunity for action.
Successful Hiring Practices
Despite these bottlenecks, participants shared a number of practices they employed to improve the hiring process and successfully bring new staff onboard. We wanted to share seven (7) practices that could be adopted by civil servants today.
Establish Hiring Priority and Gain Leadership Support
One agency leveraged the Biden-Harris Permitting Action Plan to establish and elevate their hiring needs. Following the guidance shared by OMB, CEQ, and the Permitting Council, this agency set out to develop an action plan that would function as a strategic document over the next few years. They employed a collaborative approach to develop their plan. The Chief Environmental Review and Permitting Officer (CERPO) and Deputy CERPO, the roles responsible for overseeing environmental review and permitting projects within their agencies and under their jurisdiction, brought together a team of NEPA Specialists and other staff engaged in environmental reviews and permitting across their organizations with equities. This group collectively brainstormed what they could do to strengthen and streamline permitting and environmental reviews at their agency. From this list, they prioritized five key focus areas for the first phase of their plan. This included hiring as the highest priority because it had been identified as a critical issue. Given their positioning within the organization and the Administration’s mandate, they were able to gain the support of the Secretary, and as a result, escalate their hiring needs to fill over 30 open positions over the course of FY24.
Collaborate and Share Across the Organization
Sharing and collaborating across the agency helped many expedite the hiring process. Here are examples that highlight the importance of this for success.
(1) One agency described how they share position descriptions across the enterprise. They have a system that allows any hiring manager to search for a similar position that they could use themselves or refine for their specific role. This reduces the time spent by hiring managers recreating positions.
(2) Another agency explained how they created an open tracking tool of positions they were interested in hiring across the organization. This tool allowed hiring managers across the agency to share the positions they wanted to hire. The initial list included 300 potential positions; it allowed them to prioritize and identify opportunities for collaboration. By leveraging shared certificates, they were able to reduce duplication. This tool evolved into an open repository of positions the organization was looking to recruit and a timeline for when they would be recruiting for those roles. Once announcements were closed, they would share the certificate lists widely to hiring managers.
(3) In another example, the participant explained how they facilitated ongoing collaboration between the CERPO, CHCO, HQ, and both HR and Program Leads from each relevant bureau to drive forward the hiring process. They initially worked with the Program Leads from the key bureaus impacted to identify their hiring needs and discuss the challenges they were facing. Then they reached out to the CHCO to engage them and share their priority hiring needs and worked to bring in each bureau’s respective HR teams to provide technical assistance. With everyone engaged, they set up a regular check-in to discuss progress, and the group collaborated to develop and classify position descriptions for the open positions. Later once candidates had been selected, they collaborated with operations to prioritize their hires in suitability. This ultimately saved time and streamlined the process.
Improve Hiring Processes
Participants described improving hiring processes within their organization through a variety of approaches. One method that we heard numerous times is standardizing job descriptions across the enterprise to reduce duplicative job revision and classification efforts and support the use of shared certifications. One agency approached this by facilitating focus groups with key stakeholders to define the non-negotiable and “nice to have” duties for the role. These sessions included classifiers, domain specialists, leadership, and data analysts. They found that when the group started discussing the knowledge and skills that really mattered, they were able to understand why combining efforts would help them achieve their goals more quickly. They realized that some of the minute details (e.g., expertise in Atlantic Salmon) did not need to be in the position description and rather could be deduced through the interview process. While this took a great deal of buy in and leadership support, they were successful in standardizing some position descriptions.
Other methods for improving hiring processes included standardizing the process for establishing pay to reduce competition across the agency, setting a 30-day time limit for making selections, setting applicant limits for closing job announcements, and using data to drive improvements. In one interview with an agency’s HR team, we learned about their role in collecting and analyzing data in each step of the hiring process (e.g., overall hiring time, time at each step, etc.). They use this information to monitor progress, track performance, understand which incentives are being employed, and identify opportunities for improvement in the overall process. This data helps inform their decisions and allows them to identify where they need to provide more support.
Leverage Position and Recruiting Incentives
Multiple participants described using incentives to make a position more attractive to a candidate and encourage the acceptance of a job offer. Multiple agencies offered remote and hybrid positions where possible, which they cited as generating more interest in the role. One HR team shared how they employ a series of OPM approved recruiting incentives to make positions more compelling. These included starting bonuses, student loan repayment, credit for industry work, advanced leave, higher step options, relocation bonuses, and additional leave time. They find these incentives to be particularly helpful when the location requires a far move (e.g., Alaska, Hawaii) or is difficult to hire into for whatever reason.
Leverage Hiring Flexibilities
Multiple agencies cited using different hiring flexibilities to hire for their open positions and remove some of the barriers embedded in the competitive service hiring process. The flexibilities included, Direct Hire Authority, Schedule A, Pathways Programs, retired annuitants, internship conversions, internal detailees, Presidential Innovation Fellows via GSA, Digital Service Fellows Program, as well as contract staff to support IT development. Many agencies also hired for term or temporary positions that ranged from three to 10 years, depending on the additional funding sources that could be found. Employing these authorities helped to streamline the hiring process.
Seek HR Recruiting Support
One agency described how their HR office supported and collaborated with hiring managers throughout the hiring process, especially in bolstering their recruitment efforts. One HR team helped lead recruitment outreach, sharing their open positions on a variety of media in coordination with their communications team (i.e., their website, facebook, instagram). They also developed standard language for hiring managers to share with their networks that highlighted information about the role and mistakes to avoid when applying. This helped relieve the pressure on the hiring manager to lead the recruiting effort.
Invest in Dedicated HR Staff to Manage and Support Permitting Hiring
Multiple agencies shared how they hired a dedicated resource to oversee the hiring process for their organization. One agency hired a retired annuitant (i.e., someone who retired from working in the federal government and is rehired) to help manage the organization’s hiring process after they realized that they were making minimal progress against their hiring needs. This individual returned to the government workforce and brought a deep understanding of government hiring. They collaborated with the HR Specialists and hiring managers to develop position descriptions, organize procurement packages, schedule interviews, and support the applicant selection process. They said, “we would not have been able to do any of the 40 hires without this person.”
Another agency described how they detailed someone to manage BIL and IRA hiring requests across their organization. This person was situated outside of HR, and they were responsible for tracking the end-to-end hiring and recruitment efforts. They maintained a repository of the positions each office needed to recruit and generated weekly reports on BIL and IRA hiring efforts that highlighted how many positions are open, how many are closed, and where certificate lists are available. This allowed the broader team to identify how they could drive progress.
While there were a number of challenges, many participants described successfully hiring 15-30+ new employees over the last year alone. One agency in particular described hiring over 2,000 people in 2024 for the IRA, which was an all time high for their organization. These seven practices have enabled agencies to be successful in filling new positions to support permitting-related activities, and they can be applied to other hiring needs as well. Any future talent surge in the federal government could benefit from adopting these hiring practices.
Solutions to Build Talent Capacity
While the majority of the interviews focused on hiring due to concerns of understaffed teams and the new funding availability, there are many other ways to build talent capacity in government. Some of the participants we interviewed shared other strategies they employed to address high workload demands, which present opportunities for other agencies to consider, especially as we move into the new administration. Here are six (6) strategies for building workforce capacity.
Establish Strike Teams
During our conversations, two different agencies described creating a strike team, or making an investment in additional, flexible staff, to provide supplemental capacity where there is insufficient staff for the current demand. One organization accomplished this by hiring project managers with NEPA expertise into their CERPO Office. These Project Managers could then be detailed out to specific bureaus to fill capacity gaps and provide management for high priority, multi-agency projects. This helped fill immediate capacity gaps, as teams were continuing to hire.
Another agency piloted a relief brigade, or a pool of Headquarters (HQ) staff who could be detailed to support regional staffing needs on large projects, consultations, and backlogs with temporary funding. This team was formed from a national perspective and aimed to reduce the pressure on each region and center. Based on this organization’s needs, the team was composed of natural resource management and biological science generalists. Participants shared that some efficiencies have been gained, but there was a substantial learning curve that required training and learning on the job. One hiring manager stated, the “relief brigade is the permanent embodiment of what we need more of.” These types of teams can help address dynamic capacity needs and provide more flexibility to the organization more broadly.
Conduct Bottom Up Workforce Analysis
One Program Manager shared their experience joining a new team and conducting workforce analysis to quantify their staffing needs and inform strategic decisions for their organizational structure. In their initial discussions with staff, they learned that many employees were feeling overworked and capacity was a major concern. To understand the need, they conducted a bottom up workforce analysis to estimate the office’s workload and identify gaps. This involved gathering project data from the past two years, identifying the average time frame by activity type and NEPA category, the staff hours needed to accomplish the work, and the delta between existing and needed staff hours. This data provided evidence of capacity gaps, which they were able to bring to their senior leadership to advocate and secure approval for a team expansion. This analysis enabled them to make data informed decisions about hiring that would reduce the overall workload of staff and ultimately increase staff morale and improve retention rates, which had been a concern. This approach can serve as a model for other agencies who have had difficulty in workforce planning.
Reorganize Team to Drive Efficiencies
The Program Manager who conducted bottom-up workforce analysis applied this new understanding of the work and the demands to reorganize their team to drive efficiencies and share the workload. They established three branches in their team and added four supervisory roles. The branches included one NEPA Branch, one Archeological Branch, and a Program and Policy Branch, and a supervisor was established for each. An additional leadership Deputy role was created to focus on overseeing their programs and coordinating on integration points with relevant agencies.
With this shift, they created new processes and roles to support continuous improvements and fill outstanding duties. Specifically, the Program and Policy Branch is designed to be more proactive, support throughput, and build programmatic and tribal agreements. They added an environmental trainer who is responsible for educating both internal staff and external stakeholders. Two Environmental Protection Specialists now oversee project intake, collaborate with applicants to ensure the applications are complete, manage applicant communications, and then distribute the projects to the assigned owner. A GIS Program Manager was added to the team to support data and analytics. Their role is to identify process delays and their causes, analyze points of failure, and create a geological database to understand where there are project overlaps to expedite and streamline processes. In addition to these internal changes, the Program Manager has also brought on additional contractors to provide greater capacity.
These changes have significantly increased their team’s capacity and has over doubled the number of projects they are able to complete in a year, from 400 projects two years ago to over 900+ projects this year.
Reallocate Work Across Offices and Regions
Numerous participants described work reallocation as a solution to addressing some of their capacity gaps. For example, when one agency was struggling to hire people in a particular location due to the high cost of living, they redistributed the work to another region in the country, where the cost of living was lower. This made it easier to hire into the position. Another HR Leader described supporting their overcapacity teams by redistributing hiring efforts from one office to another in the same region. The original office had minimal bandwidth, while the other had capacity, so they were able to help post the job announcement for the region. They explained the importance of encouraging local offices to help one another deliver, when appropriate.
Others described the reallocation of staff and projects to different regions. This not only allows the organization to match staff with demand, but it also allows for staff to gain experience and knowledge working on a new topic or in a new region. For example, most offshore wind projects are located in the greater Atlantic region, but these projects are gaining traction in the Pacific, so they assigned staff to work in the Atlantic region with the goal of building experience and gaining lessons learned to apply to future Pacific projects. One of these participants emphasized the value and efficiencies that could be derived from developing staff to have more interagency and interservice experience. These examples highlight how leaders can be creative in addressing workload gaps by strategically reallocating work to pair capacity and demand.
Invest in Recruiting Networks
One agency stood out as being an exemplar for their recruiting efforts, which have the potential to be replicated across agencies. They have spent significant time and effort investing in building out their recruitment networks and engaging in career fairs to hire talent. Their organization has been building a repository of potential candidates that is maintained in a system to capture candidate information, educational background, contact information, locations of interest, areas of interest, and remote and relocation preferences. This has been used to generate a list of potential candidates for hiring managers.
They have made connections through affinity groups, communities of practice, and social media. They’ve also built many partnerships with schools and organizations and have a calendar of events (e.g., career fairs) that they attend over the course of the year. At some events, they’ll have their HR team facilitate breakout sessions to discuss the benefits of working at their organization. To make sure they’re getting diverse candidates, they are continuously reaching out to new sources and potential candidate pools.
In addition to engaging in others’ events, they have hosted their own career fair, where they hired about 200 people. Prior to the event, they reviewed and vetted resumes to know who might be a qualified candidate for a position. With Direct Hire Authority for some of their positions, this allowed hiring managers to interview candidates at the fair and immediately make temporary job offers to attendees. HR staff also worked with the hiring managers at the career fair. This infrastructure sets hiring managers up for success and enables them to easily tap into a variety of networks to find qualified candidates.
Invest in Hiring Manager Training
One agency’s training and support for hiring managers can serve as a model for other HR teams to learn from. This agency offers a robust toolkit for supporting hiring managers through the hiring process. While the Supervisor is ultimately responsible for the hiring, the HR team ensures that they have the tools needed to execute and are equipped to be successful. These tools include:
- Handouts on HR highlights to ensure key information is simple and clear;
- Videos on Recruitment, Relocation, and Retention Incentives and Direct Hire Authority, which are posted on their website for all employees to access;
- Annual talent acquisition workshops in-person and virtually to hear from speakers and discuss recruitment and marketing strategies; and
- A Train-the-Trainer program on how to have recruitment conversations.
In addition to these tools and training, HR Specialists work with hiring managers to coach them on how to determine the duties for their open position, especially if they need to re-announce a position multiple times. They are also developing a new marketing strategy centered on everyone being a recruiter. This strategy will result in a new resource to support all staff in recruiting and retaining staff based on their needs.
Another participant identified this as a key opportunity. “Agencies need to educate hiring managers on those processes and what’s out there and available to them… [hiring managers need to] utilize those tools and work with HR to get the best candidates.” This agency’s approach empowers hiring managers to navigate the process, leverage incentives, and successfully recruit.
Establish Apprenticeship Programs
One participant highlighted the need for apprenticeship programs in their permitting work. Short-term or summer internship programs present difficulties with early career staff because there is not enough time for the interns to learn. They explained that it takes about six months for a new employee to become independent. Given this need, they have invested in a 1-year internship program through GeoCorps America. This duration provides interns with the time needed to learn on-the-job through practice, understand the laws and regulations, and gain exposure to the work (e.g., problem solving and stakeholder communication). This program has been successful in creating a pipeline of early career talent; 12 of their interns have moved into permanent federal service positions at different agencies (i.e., DOI, USFS, USGS, and BLM). This type of apprenticeship program could serve as a model for developing early career talent that can be trained on the job and build expertise to take on more complex projects as they grow.
These strategies offer a few examples for how agencies could build workforce capacity. These strategies do not necessarily require bringing on new talent, but rather finding opportunities to improve their internal processes to drive efficiencies and build a more dynamic, flexible workforce to respond to new demand.
Other Considerations
At the end of our interviews, we asked participants if they had any tips or recommendations that they’d want to share with others looking to hire in the government. Here are a few things we heard that we have not already captured in our best practices or talent capacity strategies.
- Always Be Recruiting: Everyone is a recruiter, and you should always be building relationships and connections, being present at events even if you do not have any active job announcements.
- Maintain Communication with Candidates: Stay in touch with potential candidates before there is a job open, while recruiting, and throughout the entire hiring process. This can keep them engaged and help you ultimately receive a job acceptance.
- Invest in Suitability Case Management: Invest in a case management system that sends automatic notifications to each user (i.e., hiring manager, HR specialist, applicant, suitability team) when an action is required. This will streamline the process and ensure that no cases slip through the cracks.
- Cast a Wide Net: Invest in a wide distribution for your job announcements, interview as many qualified people as you can, and identify multiple candidates that you would like to hire, in case someone declines. Also, leave the announcement open for longer, and if you have large offices with continuous turnover, consider keeping a job open on USAJobs, where you can always accept resumes.
- Keep Certificate Lists Open: Keep certificate lists open for a long time, so if a candidate declines, you can return to the list of potential candidates. If it is a shared certificate, then this can also assist your colleagues in quickly finding qualified candidates to interview and hire.
- Regularly Update Position Descriptions: Update your position descriptions to accurately capture the duties of the role and to align with any updated technology. Many agencies have policies for how regularly position descriptions need to be updated, but many question how well these guidelines are followed.
- Listen to Your Staff’s Plans: Engage with your staff on a regular basis and pay attention to who says they may retire or leave in the next year. This will allow you to more proactively plan and predict your future staffing needs.
Hiring into the federal government is not easy – you will very likely experience challenges even if you follow the practices and strategies highlighted here. However, there are things you can do to set yourself up for success in the future and strategies you can use to address workload demands even if you are not currently hiring. This permitting hiring surge has offered an opportunity to learn how you can effectively hire people into the federal workforce, which can serve as an example for future talent surges. Within the permitting space itself, these strategies have proven successful in supporting more timely and efficient reviews. Bolstering workforce capacity has enabled more effective mission execution.
FAS reached out to over 55 civil servants who work across six agencies and 17 different offices to lea about their experiences trying to hire for permitting-related roles in the implementation of IRA, BIL, and CHIPS.
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