The Office of Personnel Management or OPM has been dealing with a huge, never-ending wave of incoming applications in the past few months, bu during the month of March, that changed considerably.
OPM RECEIVES A BREAK FROM MASSIVE APPLICATIONS INFLUX:
During the first two months of the year, the organization reported record figures of applicants pushing their application forms on the OPM desks. When you consider the figure of 5,741 (Applications in March), you might think that it is a lot, however, it’s considerably smaller when you take into account the numbers from the past 2 months. Before March, the figures were very high for both January and February.
Apart from the influx decrease, OPM also managed to decrease their backlog substantially as around 9,200 applications were processed in March. The remaining applications now stand at 19,211 after seeing a 15 percent reduction from 22,962. It’s appreciable and of course worth mentioning that the number of processed applications also increased compared to that of the past 2 months.
When we take into account the numbers from the past few years, we observe a trend that’s quite similar; the backlog’s ebb and flow depicts a consistent pattern. That being said, the backlog after March 2015 was slightly heavier at 20,954.
This increase in the processing power is largely a result of the increased vigor that has been instilled into the employees of the organization; especially after the past few hiccups faced by the data breach and its repercussions. The influx of applications is expected to rise soon and we might see similar trends to last year. Here it’s hoped that the backlog keeps getting decreased quickly so that the applications of the waiting employees get processed before their expected time frames. We are certainly counting on OPM to do that.
