Draft Statement of Objectives - TalentSI

DRAFT

TalentSI: Integrated Statement of Objectives (SOO)

I. Background, Purpose, Operational Vision

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) must substantially reduce time-to-hire and the administrative burden associated with recruiting, hiring, and onboarding for the Transportation Security Officer (TSO), Federal Air Marshals (FAM) and Management, Administrative, and Professional (MAP) positions. TSA’s backbone hiring system, USA Staffing (USAS) does not natively let Human Capital (HC) or Airport Human Resources staff automatically sort, extract, or operationalize applicant and new hire data. This is most acute for candidates who apply to more than one duty location: each location's application is its own USAS record, with no automated way to link or consolidate them. Staff must sort each location's data by hand and manually build a single consolidated record per candidate - a process that introduces delay and inconsistency and does not scale. TSA needs a capability that runs in parallel to USAS - extracting, sorting, and building consolidated candidate-level records on demand as the data foundation for automation.
Currently, candidate progression through pre-hire screening and onboarding is severely hampered by manual administrative handoffs, asynchronous data entry, and delayed updates within the enterprise human capital system of record (USAS). Key candidate milestones, including medical evaluation results, drug screening clearances, background investigations, and structured interview scores, require labor-intensive, manual reconciliation that introduces latency, candidate drop-off, and tracking errors.
USAS’s structure also lacks automated cross-crediting mechanisms for shared qualifications across job opportunity announcements (JOAs), permit non-responsive applicants to languish in active queues without timely business-rule enforcement (such as automated involuntary withdrawals), and lack proactive system health-checks to flag out-ofsequence candidate records. TSA seeks to improve the connection between onboarding and workforce readiness. Candidates and employees need clearer pathways from entry through basic training, certification, continuing standards, and career development. A coordinated solution can reduce duplicative administrative effort, improve candidate and employee experience, and give TSA a more complete view of workforce progression. The hiring process for FAM, TSO, and MAP position is similar but different. Any solution should drive consistency where appropriate and re-use existing workstreams but also be able to