Job seekers looking for safety inside the federal enclaves got a boost yesterday as the Office of Personnel Management unveiled a renovated USAjobs.gov website. Unfortunately, the update was merely a facelift when the site is badly in need of an organ transplant. 

Forgive my ingratitude at OPM for spending resources on improving a site that was already easily navigated by over four million people a month. Was it the smoothest interface in the world before? No, but it was far easier than 99 percent of federal websites to navigate, a heck of a lot prettier than Craigslist.org -- the 11th most popular site in the U.S. -- and it was easy to search for jobs.

With this makeover, "OPM officials said a key change was adding more flexibility to refine job searches based on location, grade, salary and type of profession," reported Govexec.com. But these features were already in place and worked just as well as today's features. The "new" features also include the ability to keep resumes on file and upload resumes -- features that were actually in place many months ago.

In fact, save for a bland, Google-esk home page that now requires an additional step to refine searches, and a moving module on the right that allows the user to save jobs, apply to jobs, or share the job on social networking sites, there's very little difference to the website. Thankfully, the update was part of Monster Inc's $5 million contract to manage and maintain the site, but the money is not really the point.

The main frustration job seekers have with USAJobs is not the fact that the pages looked too busy; it lay in the need to submit 12 completely different applications when applying to 12 different agencies. Given that the average application on USAJobs takes 2-3 hours if the user is working fast, applying for multiple jobs quickly leads to user exhaustion and ultimately abandonment.  

In 2008, a study of federal hiring patterns conducted by the Merit Systems Protection Board -- an independent, quasi-judicial agency in the Executive branch -- revealed that a third of those hired by the government admitted to not applying for other federal jobs to avoid spending more time writing new essays or revising existing essays describing their knowledge, skills and abilities. Additional findings of the study showed that one out of every four new hires to the federal government stated they did not apply to other jobs because they would have needed to rewrite or reformat their résumé. 

What the OPM ought to be spending their time on is the creation of the federal job application equivalent of the "Common Application" that college students use to apply to different universities. It was that way once upon a time, and then the system made way for individuality among the agency application process. The end result is a bureaucratic entanglement akin to the one agencies are in the process of creating today by building internal social networks on systems incapable of communicating with those inside the walls of neighboring agencies. As long as would-be federal job applicants need to spend a full week applying to federal jobs, the government is going to continue losing quality folks to the private sector.

So OPM, let's save all the back patting and focus on the true source of aggravation, not just the low hanging fruit of facades.