President Obama’s recent executive order on federal hiring instructs managers to “become more involved in the hiring process.” Some suggestions on how managers might do so: End preselection. In competitive service agencies, a manager can’t simply promote a prized employee who has reached the General Schedule ceiling of his job. Instead, he must create a new, higher-level job and then — in the name of fairness — advertise and fill the new job by an open competition designed to select the most qualified applicant, whether or not he turns out to be the favored insider. But sometimes, managers only consider…