You already know the delays are real. A hire that should take a few weeks stretches into two months. A reclassification sits in limbo while a department waits. A promotion that everyone agreed on weeks ago still hasn’t moved. 

When you try to explain it, the usual suspects come up: not enough staff in HR, a complicated approval structure, a legacy system that wasn’t built for this. Those things are real. But they’re rarely the root cause. 

In most government agencies, the biggest driver of slow personnel actions isn’t a staffing problem or a technology problem. It’s a process problem. And the good news is that process problems, unlike budget constraints or staffing shortages, are actually fixable. 

What the Request for Personnel Action Process Usually Looks Like Up Close 

If you traced a typical request for personnel action (RPA) from submission to final approval, you’d likely find the same patterns repeated across different request types and departments. 

It starts at intake. A department manager submits an RPA, but it arrives missing something. A funding code. A justification narrative. A required attachment. HR catches it and reaches out. The manager responds when they can. The request gets resubmitted. The clock resets. 

Then it moves into routing. Except “routing” is generous. What actually happens is that someone manually decides who needs to see it next, sends an email, and hopes it gets prioritized. When it doesn’t, a follow-up gets sent. Sometimes another one after that. 

Along the way, reviewers in budget, classification, and HR are each working from their own inboxes and spreadsheets, with no shared picture of what’s pending. Nobody gets an alert when something has been sitting too long. And when a department manager asks for a status update, someone has to stop what they’re doing to go find the answer. 

By the time the personnel action is fully approved, weeks of elapsed time often reflect just a few hours of actual work. The rest was waiting, chasing, and correcting. 

Why Government Hiring Delays Get Blamed on the Wrong Things 

It’s understandable that delays get blamed on staffing levels or outdated systems. Those are visible, tangible problems. When HR is stretched thin, it’s natural to assume that more people would help. 

But adding staff to a broken process doesn’t fix the process. It just gives you more people dealing with the same bottlenecks. The incomplete submissions keep arriving. The approval emails keep getting buried. The visibility problem doesn’t go away. 

The same is true for your HRIS. Platforms like Workday, PeopleSoft, UKG, and MUNIS are excellent systems of record — but they weren’t designed to manage the coordination that surrounds a personnel action workflow. They hold the records. They don’t move the work. 

General workflow tools like ServiceNow, Laserfiche, Appian, and Power Apps can be configured to help, but they typically require IT to build and maintain them. HR teams end up waiting on development queues every time a routing rule or form needs to change — which in government HR happens often. 

The real constraint is the process that connects all of these people and systems together. When that process is informal and dependent on individual effort to keep things moving, government HR workflow bottlenecks are the predictable result — regardless of how capable your team is. 

What Slow Personnel Actions Actually Cost 

Slow RPA processing isn’t just an HR headache. The effects show up across the organization in ways that are easy to feel but hard to trace back to a single cause. 

Departments stay short-staffed longer than they need to. The people covering vacant roles take on extra work, wear down, and in some cases decide to leave — creating more vacancies and more requests to process. Services slow down. Overtime climbs. Managers grow frustrated with a process they can’t see or influence. 

Meanwhile, HR teams spend a disproportionate amount of time on administrative tasks: chasing missing information, assembling approval packets by hand, answering status questions that a better process would make unnecessary. That’s time that doesn’t go toward workforce planning or the strategic work that actually moves the organization forward. 

And underneath all of it is a compliance risk that often goes unexamined. When personnel action approvals happen through email chains and informal routing, documentation is inconsistent and audit trails are incomplete. If a decision ever gets questioned — by an employee, a union, or an auditor — piecing together what happened is far harder than it should be. 

The Pattern Behind Government HR Workflow Bottlenecks 

When HR teams map out their RPA approval processes end to end, a few patterns tend to show up regardless of agency size. 

• Intake isn’t standardized. Different departments submit personnel action requests in different formats, with different levels of completeness, through different channels. HR has to sort it all out before any review can begin.
• Routing is manual. The path a request takes depends on who’s handling it and what they know — not on a defined set of rules. That creates variability in both timing and compliance.
• Visibility is limited. Nobody, not HR, not the requesting department, not leadership, has a reliable way to see where a personnel action is or what’s holding it up. 

These aren’t isolated failures. They’re what happens when a government HR workflow was never formally designed. It grew organically over time, filling gaps with email and individual judgment, and it’s been running that way long enough that the friction feels normal. 

It isn’t normal. And recognizing that is the first step toward fixing it. 

What a Modern RPA Process Actually Looks Like 

Improving your request for personnel action process doesn’t require more headcount or a full system overhaul. It requires clarity: clear intake requirements, clear routing rules, and a shared view of where things stand. 

When RPA requests start complete, reviews begin right away. When routing is automatic and rule-based, approvals move predictably. When everyone can see the status of open personnel actions in real time, follow-ups drop and accountability improves. And when clean data flows into your HRIS at the end of the process, the downstream errors and rework disappear too. 

The government hiring delays you’re experiencing aren’t inevitable. They’re the output of a personnel action process that hasn’t been updated. And that’s exactly what makes them solvable.