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human resources executives been in charge of hiring platoons of qualified
airport screeners at the Transportation Security Administration instead of high
government officials, they might have responded differently. Nick Corcodilos,
editor of Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, calls the whole post-9/11 TSA
enterprise "a classic example of bureaucratic foibles," and then says that the
agency’s assignment was chiefly a "resources-allocation problem."
He would have taken a two-step approach to quickly filling
essential roles. First, he would have looked into "renting, begging, borrowing
people who have at least been vetted" by other government agencies--the post
office, for instance, or the military. Step two: Corcodilos would have asked
American business to identify good workers who were about to be let go for
non-performance-related reasons unrelated to performance and signed them up.
Les Rosen is not intimidated by the idea of staffing the
TSA. "Over a 10-month period, the hiring needs come down to 5,500 hires a month,
or 250 people a day (assuming 22 workdays)," he says. "Given the fact the
workers are spread out across the United States, on the average that is only
five hires per working day per state." Rosen would have created a generic hiring
procedure, and then had local human resources people do the actual hiring.
Rosen’s TSA would include an incentive plan for local recruiters. "Since part of
the fee would be based upon ‘success,’ the hiring professionals have an economic
incentive to hire the best, not just move bodies."
Roy Bordes, International Council vice president of ASIS
in Virginia, suggests a straightforward, alphabetized plan that is impressively
detailed, including a series of steps from A to J. He would have set up a series
of committees, deadlines, and on-the-job training processes. (His inspiration
comes from the military: "The best way to know how to shoot a gun is to shoot a
gun, thereby requiring limited class time and extended range time.")
Bordes says that the TSA should have worked with private
industry from the very beginning. The agency, he reports, spent "six months in
getting each political appointee on board, most of whom were worthless." He also
maintains that the organization needed better crisis management. "They had
blow-ups every day in the beginning and really provided some dumb responses to
the American people."
Nonetheless, Bordes concludes that "TSA did a relatively
good job in addressing the situation in light of the fact that they had to fight
all of the political games occurring at that time. As a frequent flier (150,000
milers per year) I have seen improvements in the overall screening process and
in the attitudes of passengers toward that process."
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