The Army is testing a new civilian talent management platform designed to give employees a one-stop shop for information about jobs, benefits, retirement and more.

The Employee Management Processing and Recruitment System (EMPReS) Hub gives users a single front door to an array of fragmented personnel programs, like the voluntary reassignment program and the USAJOBS employment database, said Karen Pane, who runs the Army’s Civilian Human Resources Agency. The idea, she said, is to give commanders a holistic picture of the scope and finances of the service’s civilian workforce, and to help employees better understand their own careers.

“It’s our [Department of Defense]-wide and Army capability of HR talent management,” she said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington. “It’s designed to bring automation, artificial intelligence and workforce tools together in support of civilian talent management.”

Though it appears to have launched in 2023 to replace the Army’s Civilian Personnel On-Line platform, the service is still figuring out what the system can do now that it’s up and running.

“Very soon, any manager, any leader, any employee inside, but also external, will be able to connect,” Pane said. “They don’t have to remember all the websites. They’ll just have to go into EMPReS Hub, and they’ll have it there.”

The Army plans to connect the hub to a massive federal personnel management system in the works that looks to consolidate more than 100 legacy platforms across government and move that data to the cloud. The Office of Personnel Management awarded Oracle a nearly $400 million, 10-year IT modernization contract over the summer to begin that process.

Pane added the service is building on its civilian talent marketplace so current employees, military spouses and external candidates can look for new jobs across the Army and manage their career development.

“Everyone, whether you’re a junior person or a senior person, will be able to go in there and see what kinds of things you should be doing,” she said of professional development.

As the HR agency turns to AI tools to work more efficiently, its director bets technology can become a partner for HR professionals to lighten administrative loads and enable smarter choices.

“I’ve heard people say, ‘Let’s fire CHRA. Let’s do this. Let’s do that.’ And I always say, ‘Well, time out before you fire anybody. What are the issues? And let’s look at the data and see where it supports making changes,’” Pane said. “Informed decision making versus emotional.”

Brig. Gen. Gregory Johnson, the Army’s director of military personnel management, told reporters that having greater insight into data has also helped the service target the specialties and skills it most needs to recruit and retain, instead of trying to hit a broad number.

“It opens up all these things that we just have never been able to do for soldiers,” he said. 

The Army is trying out automation to whittle down civilian hiring timelines in a pilot program that began over the summer. It has also shortened the time it takes to decide the details of a job posting, like the official title and grade level, from 40 days to one hour on average. Pane argues humans will continue to take part in those decisions rather than delegating to algorithms altogether.

The agency wants to build new software quickly, but implement it slowly to ensure it works well. The worst thing that could happen, Pane said, is launching a new system with bugs that undermine its credibility. 

“CHRA will make a mistake … We’ll fix them,” she said. “But in order to be creative, you sometimes have to have the possibility of failing.”

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