Shortfalls and Challenges in Current MD-715 Reporting Processes

Every agency in the Federal Government is required to complete the same reporting for MD-715 compliance. Whether you have a dedicated team in your agency managing these reports every year or it’s a team effort, 

it’s likely you struggle each year to both complete the reporting and perform the analysis needed to take meaningful action on the results.

A lot of agencies and components struggle and have shortfalls that keep them from truly addressing the core purpose of MD-715 – to identify and take action to improve gaps in diversity in government. Most agencies are focused on the data collection and meeting those strict reporting requirements. The barrier analysis that would enable improvements over the results to these reports is often missing.

Manual Identification of Triggers is a Recurring Challenge

There are thousands of potential triggers that could identify a diversity gap. The simplest can be found manually by your HR specialists, but what about more nuanced triggers? Triggers based on geography, role, factors beyond immediate hiring, or long-term issues that don’t create immediate problems are often overlooked.

Triggers occur at every stage of the hiring cycle – from recruiting to application processing to the interviews and eventual hiring of staff. And then there are outside factors like the availability of people in certain decisions – factors that are best explored in census data that does not immediately reconcile with the MD-715 reports.

>>> Download the eBook on How to Shift from Data Gathering to Data Driven Decisions in Your MD-715 Reporting.

To effectively identify all potential triggers, analytics tools are needed. EconSys Diversity Analysis is designed to do just this, evaluating thousands of potential triggers rapidly to build a profile of the most likely gaps in an agency.

Time is a Major Challenge

Another recurring challenge in agencies is a lack of time. Not only is the volume of data significant enough to make the process extremely time consuming, but there are limited resources for in-depth analysis of the data once the reporting has been prepared. The result is a series of Excel spreadsheets with demographic information about the organization, segmented by gender and race, but limited barrier analysis to identify where problems might occur, and more importantly, how to address them.

With most agencies investing the majority of their available time to producing these reports, few are able to take the next step and, even with analytics tools, evaluate the results and make recommendations for future changes.

How to Improve the Results of MD-715 Reporting

One of the most effective ways to ensure improvements from the MD-715 reporting that your agency is performing is to streamline the evaluation of potential triggers and focus your team’s time on barrier analysis. Algorithmic evaluation of the potential triggers that might create diversity gaps in your agency, using geographic, census, and internal data sources can help to create the list of potential barriers that leads toward real change in an agency.

To learn more about how EconSys Diversity Analysis supports this kind of change and what better MD-715 Reporting looks like, download our eBook, How to Shift from Data Gathering to Data Driven Decisions in Your MD-715 Reporting.