My Uncle Rahm Suggested I Write

Jae C. Hong/AP The Obama transition team's collection of 300,000 resumes online is touted as a symbol of change. So why do so few candidates have a shot?

You may be applying for a job in the Obama administration via Change.gov, but most people hired will get their jobs the old fashioned way: They know someone.

While widely touted as symbol of Barack Obama's commitment to transform government—and Washington—the transition team's massive resume-gathering operation is both methodologically unsuited to the task of filing government positions and clearly not the first-resort (or second-or third-resort, for that matter) recruitment tool that Obama's transition team is using.

The transition team's apparent lack of interest in pursuing the candidates who come to them online does have one bright side for would-be Obama hires: Their failure will remain personal.

A transition team spokesman confirms that about 50 people are in charge of vetting, sifting and sorting the more than 300,000 applications submitted through the website—all vying for just under 3,000 jobs. This number, from the transition spokesman, is significantly less than the 7,000 previously reported, which is simply the potential number of appointees listed in the so-called "plum book."

Who these vetters are, what they're looking for and whether or not they've contacted anyone remains a mystery. An Obama spokesman refused to comment and could not confirm having seen anyone actually working at this task.

And it is an enormous task. The initial application for an Obama job asks for traditional resume-style material as well as information about what areas of the government the applicant is interested in. Spending just a couple of minutes on each screen of information would give the staff of 50 about a year's worth of 8 hour days. That’s hardly the way to "hit the ground running."

Not that anyone should be worried about the delay. For one thing, the transition team has outsourced the preliminary examination of applications submitted through Change.gov to Cluen, a private firm that specializes in (according to their website) "Resume Firewall" technology, a filtering process designed to "avoid all of the 'noise' out there," or, more plainly, "allows you to let in the quality candidates and keep out the ones you don't want." Cluen did not return calls seeking comment on the company's transition-team contract and, in turn, the Obama transition team declined to comment on what kinds of filtering processes transition leaders asked for.

Filtering and matching play an important part in any electronic resume-based hiring method. The vast majority of federal jobs—the ones that applicants pursue through what's called the "competitive civil service" sector—use an even more lengthy and detailed application to match up applicants with specific jobs. One of the many problems with the Change.gov process is that it doesn't allow hopefuls to target specific jobs. Dennis Vamp, a consultant on civil sector government hiring, and the proprietor of federaljobs.net, was dismissive of the approach: "There's no target? To match everyone [job candidate with a job] generically is an impossibility."

The transition team's apparent lack of interest in pursuing the candidates who come to them online does have one bright side for would-be Obama hires: Their failure will remain personal. As a not-quite-public but definitely not-private entity, the transition team doesn't clearly fall under any clear regulatory mandate to disclose its procedures. As reported by The Politico earlier this week, the National Archives is certainly interested in the disclosure forms that applicants clearing the first hurdle must complete. But a transition spokesman would not confirm if anyone who applied online has even made it that far.