Postal management rejects inspector general findings and says it has encountered few workforce challenges.
The U.S. Postal Service is improving its hiring practices and onboarding employees more quickly, according to a new report, but is still struggling to recruit applicants for large swaths of positions across the country.
USPS added 192,000 employees in fiscal 2022, 184,000 in fiscal 2023 and 93,000 so far this fiscal year, but has still failed to solicit a single application for hundreds of thousands of positions over that period.
The issue is particularly acute in the “pre-career” workforce, or employees who generally only work part time and do not receive the same suite of benefits as career workers. The mailing agency had 700,000 pre-career job openings between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, the USPS inspector general found in its new report, but no prospective employees applied for more than half of them.
Two-thirds of those positions were rural carrier associates. While the IG credited postal management with taking steps that significantly improved the agency’s hiring processes, the number of postings without applicants increased to 58% in fiscal 2023. In the Wisconsin and Minnesota-North Dakota districts, 87% and 84% of RCA postings, respectively, received no applicants. Those areas also had the highest no-applicant rates for city carrier assistants.