Role Call: Technologists
This tech role focuses on creating user-friendly interfaces and improving the overall experience of interacting with digital products.
What is a UX Designer?
This process is the standard method for hiring into the federal government, requiring public announcements and fair competition.
What is Competitive Service?
To refine a search for a software engineer with Python expertise, you might use a search string like "Python AND Software Engineer NOT Internship". What is this method called?
What is Boolean searching?
In the Candidate’s Trail game, players earned this form of currency by completing tasks, overcoming challenges, and collaborating with their teams to support their persona’s journey.
What are GRITcoins?
These pages serve as a hub for showcasing your agency’s mission, culture, and opportunities, making them a critical touchpoint for engaging tech candidates online.
What are Career Landing Pages?
This type of engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining systems that process and analyze large datasets.
What is a Data Engineer?
This authority allows federal employees to apply for jobs based on their existing status, without opening the position to the public.
What is Merit Promotion?
This process involves working with hiring managers to identify the technical and interpersonal skills, motivators, and experiences of the ideal candidate before beginning the sourcing process.
What is building a candidate profile?
The personas in the Candidate’s Trail Game were fictional tech job seekers. Name on of them.
Who are Harper Taylor, Maya Rodriguez, Jordan Davis, David Patel, Jamie Lee, or Ashley Carr?
According to the HX memo, agencies should send updates to applicants multiple times during the hiring process. These updates help keep candidates informed and improve their experience. How many stages of updates are recommended?
What is four?
Professionals in this role analyze how people engage with websites and services to improve usability and create seamless experiences.
What is a CX (Customer Experience) Researcher?
(*We will also accept User Experience Researcher or "Designer")
This hiring authority enables agencies to bypass traditional competitive hiring processes for roles with critical skill shortages or urgent needs.
What is Direct Hire?
When sourcing candidates with technical expertise, recruiters can use this platform to evaluate coding repositories and contributions to open-source projects.
What is GitHub?
The Candidate’s Trail game is based on this strategy, which prioritizes understanding and addressing the needs, motivations, and challenges of the end user—in this case, tech job candidates.
What is Human-Centered Design (HCD)?
Applying these design methods, such as usability testing and journey mapping, ensures your agency’s website is intuitive, visually appealing, and tailored to the needs of tech candidates.
What are UX methods?
Experts in this field design systems that can process information, identify patterns, and solve problems without direct instructions.
What is an AI Engineer?
(*Machine Learning Engineer is also acceptable)
Established under Title 5, this hiring mechanism allows agencies to foster mutual understanding and exchange ideas with the private sector by hiring experienced practitioners on term appointments for up to 4 years.
What is Schedule A(r)?
These recruitment methods include attending industry conferences, hosting tech meetups, and building partnerships with universities that offer degrees in relevant technical fields.
What are in-person (OR live, face-to-face, synchronous) engagement strategies?
The Candidate’s Trail game was designed to align with federal hiring guidance, including this memo, which emphasizes “designing and building an improved applicant experience” and “enhancing hiring processes to attract and retain diverse talent.”
What is the HX Memo: Improving the Federal Hiring Experience?
This practice involves replacing formal job titles like "IT Specialist" with more relatable and descriptive names, such as "DevOps Engineer" or "Cloud Solutions Architect," to better appeal to tech candidates coming from industry.
What is switching to working titles?
In this Cyber role, individuals simulate security breaches to uncover weaknesses and help improve defenses in networks and systems.
What is a Red Team Penetration Tester?
Your agency is collaborating with a university to temporarily bring in a researcher or academic expert to support a special project. Which hiring mechanism should you use?
What is the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA)?
This sourcing strategy involves combining Boolean strings with the search operator site: to target specific websites like LinkedIn or GitHub for talent searches.
What is Google X-Ray searching?
This Human-Centered Design tool, used in the Candidate’s Trail game, visually represents a persona’s job search experience, showcasing the steps they take, their interactions, emotions, pain points, and key moments. It helps identify opportunities to improve the overall user experience on their path to federal employment.
What is a Journey Map?
This term refers to the practice of strengthening an organization’s reputation among its employees by celebrating achievements, aligning staff with the mission, and fostering pride and collaboration.
What is internal branding?