Recruiting Diverse, World-Class Talent

Did you know that, across the entire government, about half of all open and competitive job announcements close with no job selection?

As part of our goal to develop a state-of-the-art workforce, we need to make sure open positions get filled quickly and with qualified people. In 2022, CDC partnered with the U.S. Digital Service to pilot Subject Matter Expert-Quality Assessments (SME-QA), an innovative strategy used by federal agencies to recruit world class and diverse talent as efficiently as possible.

SME-QA is based on the idea that subject matter experts (SMEs) are uniquely positioned to help hiring managers find the right candidates. Having experts assess qualification early in the hiring process can help hiring managers receive higher quality candidate lists and hire qualified applicants more quickly.

In addition to being a streamlined process for hiring managers, SME-QA also simplifies the process for the applicant and improves the overall experience for job candidates. In the first test of the new hiring process at CDC, 600 applications were received in record time, and qualified candidates were shared with hiring managers across the agency.

Attracting and retaining the best talent will accelerate the work currently underway and will maximize CDC’s modernization success. It means we will be able to better identify, recruit, and retain a critical workforce in Health IT, data science, and cybersecurity who can be stewards of larger quantities of data and tools, and who can help public health work better and faster to generate meaningful public health insights.