WASHINGTON - Within hours of its debut, the federal government's ballyhooed new jobs board was on the fritz: USAJobs crashed repeatedly, error messages popped up over and over, résumés disappeared, passwords were obliterated.
It even got basic geography wrong, with searches for Delaware, for example, turning up jobs in Germany.
"It's now a mess," Donna Walli wrote on the site's Facebook page on Oct. 13, two days after it went live after a costly 18-month redo. "Hopefully I'll finally get a job soon and I won't have to deal with USAJobs anymore."
USAJobs 3.0, the next step in the government's effort to make finding federal jobs easier and faster, was looking more like USAJobs 1.0.
It was 48 hours before frustrated applicants stopped getting this cheerleading message: "USAJOBS 3.0 is here and you're not the only one excited about it!" Any "unexpected errors … have now been resolved."
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Sixteen days later, problems have ebbed somewhat as the Office of Personnel Management, which took over the system from Monster and troubleshoot other problems.
But the biggest board for federal work remains riddled with bugs that are frustrating desperate candidates.
Personnel officials have blamed USAJobs' poor performance on what they call an unanticipated spike in traffic to the site.
Much of America now looks for employment online, with widely used technology. But the federal government's failure to get it right has embarrassed a tech-proud White House.
