OPM and OMB unveil a new plan to improve the federal hiring ‘experience’ for both workers and HR managers

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a new initiative aimed at improving the hiring process for federal job applicants, hiring managers and other agency HR officials alike, as the White House continues to search for ways to speed up the process and better compete for top talent.

Strategic human capital management has been on the Government Accountability Office’s famed High-Risk List, a biennial report highlighting issues that present potential liabilities of at least $1 billion for the federal government, for more than two decades. In 2021, GAO found that the government had actually regressed in its effort to address difficulties in hiring new federal workers during the final two years of the Trump administration.

The Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget worked jointly on the effort, announced Wednesday in a memo to agency heads entitled “Improving the Federal Hiring Experience.” The document encompasses plans to improve strategic workforce planning, making it easier for potential job applicants to find jobs they are interested in and making the hiring process both faster and more transparent for jobseekers, as well as making hiring less agonizing for the hiring managers and other human resources personnel.

“We aim to continuously improve the federal government’s ability to recruit, hire and retain a diverse and skilled workforce to strengthen the way agencies deliver on their missions for the American people,” said acting OPM Director Rob Shriver in a statement. “This memorandum builds on that success and is a culmination of years of data-driven and innovative thinking about the federal hiring experience.”

On the strategic planning front, the memo tasks agencies with creating—and regularly updating—agency strategic workforce plans, as well as using data analysis to create annual hiring objectives and strategies. Agencies are also expected to create broader and more diverse talent pipelines, including through outreach, active recruitment of candidates for hiring announcements, and working together with other agencies to plan and deploy skills-based hiring, pooled hiring and shared certifications, three initiatives that have already proven successful in recent years.

The plan also includes a laundry list of changes to how federal agencies engage with federal job applicants and other potential jobseekers, from writing job announcements and advertising job titles in “plain language” instead of HR jargon to providing applicants with timely updates about the status of the hiring process, including sending emails at each step.

“The federal government processes over 22 million applications for employment and hires over 350,000 individuals into public service each year,” the White House wrote in a press release accompanying the memo. “Given this volume, improving the federal hiring experience is essential to effectively attracting and retaining a capable workforce equipped to tackle the array of challenges and opportunities facing the nation.

The list of ideas for improving hiring managers’ and other HR officials’ experience in the hiring process is even longer, incorporating proposed agency investments both in the HR workforce and technological innovations to reduce “HR burden,” improving information sharing across agencies, allowing hiring managers to use “any rating and ranking method allowed by law” for a given competitive hiring action. And it calls for the creation of new agency talent teams, who will work both on strategic recruitment efforts and other hiring “innovations.”

And it calls on agencies to finally implement efforts to ditch the traditional federal process, by which federal job applicants would self-assess their skillsets and experience, which many HR leaders have long said makes it harder to find truly qualified candidates.

OPM and OMB also stressed in Wednesday’s memo that their involvement in the effort was only the beginning.

“In recent years, OPM has made significant investments in new tools and resources to improve the hiring process across government,” the document states. “OPM will continue to produce resources to support agency adoption of the practices outlined in this memorandum and, along with OMB, will engage regularly with stakeholders to ensure alignment with economy-wide leading practices . . . OPM is poised to partner with agencies to help drive these improvements and innovations through its Hiring Experience Group. The HX Group serves as an innovation hub to help agencies establish and support talent teams to lead innovation at their agencies and drive the use of more rigorous applicant assessments and pooled and shared certificates.”