Trump-mandated tests are making it hard to hire seasonal workers for national

Her current residence may technically be the back of a Ford F-150, but Utah’s rugged canyon country is where she has made her career and home.

After spending nine years as a commercial raft guide and several seasons as a National Park Service ranger, her resume highlights those skills: a familiarity with remote wilderness travel, technical search and rescue experience, and the ability to row a raft through whitewater rapids, to name a few.

But this year, when the ranger was applying for seasonal jobs with the Interior Department along with thousands of hopeful candidates across the United States, her application was ranked by a new metric: her ability to complete complex logic and reading comprehension problems on a timed, online multiple-choice test.

For the first time in her career with the federal government, the river ranger, who asked not to be named so she could speak freely about the ongoing hiring process, didn’t even land an interview for jobs she previously was deemed qualified to perform. She believes the tests are to blame.

“I am a good employee who has done well, and I’m not getting referred for the position that I did [last year],” she said. “This is insane.”

Using competency assessments to rank job candidates is hardly new to the federal government, but it’s growing quickly. Last summer, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order that mandated federal agencies, including Interior, expand the use of assessments when hiring.

Trump’s order argues the tests, which are administered through a website called USA Hire and designed by a private company that recently signed a $210.7 million contract with the federal government, will reduce hiring officials’ reliance on educational attainment when sorting job applicants and help them find the most-qualified candidates.

But since the order took effect in December, USA Hire assessments have been upending the process used to hire entry-level employees to Interior’s 70,000-person workforce, which oversees more than a dozen national park sites in Utah, hundreds more across the U.S. and millions of acres of public lands.

Utah’s “Mighty 5” national parks — Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce and Capitol Reef — see tens of millions of visitors a year. All the parks rely on seasonal workers to patrol trails, develop interpretive programs, facilitate visitor safety and manage campgrounds. Additionally, nearly 40% of Utah’s land is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, which uses the tests to hire park rangers and certain other nonsupervisory employees.

The Salt Lake Tribune conducted interviews with a dozen current and former Interior employees and reviewed hundreds of comments about the USA Hire program posted on social media. An overwhelming consensus emerged among hiring officials and job applicants: The competency assessments fail to identify the most-qualified candidates for many public lands positions.

In an open letter sent to a high-ranking Interior official last month, the Association of National Park Rangers highlighted many of the common concerns. “The new … assessment is likely to screen out qualified applicants for reasons that have little or nothing to do with measuring job-related competence,” wrote Paul Anderson, the organization’s president.

“This assessment,” he added, “is more of a generic standardized cognitive test instead of one that measures specific relevant skills [or] competencies of the job.”

In addition to reading and reasoning tests, personality questionnaires are also being used to rank candidates, which Anderson said raises “discrimination” concerns.

Civil service exams were used to hire for federal jobs in the mid-20th century, but they were largely eliminated in the 1970s after a series of lawsuits alleged the exams favored white applicants. The tests started making a comeback under the Obama administration, however, as hiring officials complained of being swamped by hundreds of applications for a single position. USA Hire tests, which were first used in 2011, were seen as a way to help thin the applicant pool.

The trend accelerated under Trump, who created the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board — which was co-led by his daughter Ivanka Trump and included leaders of various Fortune 500 companies. Citing the advisory board’s recommendations, Trump signed an executive order last June that gave the director of the Office of Personnel Management 180 days to work with all federal agencies to implement a “multiple hurdle process” and to “expand the use of valid, competency-based assessments and narrow the use of educational qualifications in the federal hiring process.”

In 2013, two years after USA Hire was created, fewer than 1,300 assessments were completed by job applicants across the entire federal government. In 2019, that number swelled to over half a million. Trump’s order is expected to bring the 2021…