Senior HR Assistant

AvantGarde, LLC (AG) seeks to engage a Senior Human Resources (HR) Assistant who will provide advanced broad-based administrative and technical support to the USPTO federal HR and contractor team including, but not limited to, performing all staffing and operational support, processing personnel actions or client requests, and completing other administrative duties.

• Assist Human Resources Specialists with day-to-day transactional work.
• Maintain confidentiality when handling critical and sensitive information, records, and reports.
• Assist with the preparation of offer letters and other client related correspondence.
• Support New Employee Orientation(s) and other client related operational activities by collecting and entering data/information from forms collected during Orientations.
• Scan and upload highly confidential information; create folders for case-related work and new hires.
• Complete and process a full range of personnel and payroll actions selecting the proper Nature of Action (NOA) and Legal Authority (LAC) codes and assigning proper remarks to each action using the Guide to Processing Personnel Actions and other appropriate guides; proof and verify accuracy before forwarding to HR Specialists for quality control review. 
• Enter accession actions after initial Entry on Duty (EOD) paperwork has cleared (but before EOD) and set a future effective date within the system to stay ahead of workload volumes and prevent last minute processing.
• Monitor processed actions each day to ensure that actions processed the previous day have not fallen into the Suspense Inquiry and Correction System (SINQ). For those that do appear in SINQ, correct the erroneous or missing information within 24 hours to avoid trying to resolve issues around the pay period deadline.
• For more complex actions, such as those involving change to lower grade, pay setting/pay retention, or other nuanced placement actions, conduct research to become fully knowledgeable about any interconnected and impacted data that may reside in other fields.  Ensures a thorough approach to process complex actions correctly.
• Accurately process History Correction Update Processing (HCUP) cases.
• Respond accurately and in a timely manner to inquiries from employees and management; notify HR team of specific HR issues or actions and refer inquiries to the appropriate staff members.
• Assist with audits by reviewing, checking, and verifying employee or case-file data to ensure accuracy and performing final closing of case files in appropriate client hiring systems.
• Use automated tools to retrieve or process onboarding paperwork such as USAStaffing Onboarding Manager.
• Coordinate with Employee Relations and Security representatives to begin security adjudication processing following the receipt of the candidate’s completed OF-306.  Conduct searches for  former Patent Examiner candidates in the new hire process to ensure they are vetted appropriately. 
• Input candidate data into the Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (e-QIP) system to initiate the security process and PALM for credentialing processes.
• Coordinate receipt and data entry of all payroll documents following new employee orientation and coordinate as appropriate with the Compensation and Benefits Division.
• Gather and validate SF-75 information for transferring federal employees.
• Use the Government Retirement Benefits (GRB) system to compute and enter service computation dates.
• Following NEO and EOD, promptly load all appropriate documentation into the appropriate system.
• Collaborate with team members to evaluate and implement improvements to processes and procedures.