Could Biden’s recent strategy to streamline government hiring be scuttled under Trump?

Angie Quirarte, a senior talent strategy advisor in the Executive Office of the President, noticed a recurring roadblock in her work to implement the Biden administration’s initiatives to streamline federal hiring.

“One of the more surprising things that I've learned in this role in this past year is that a lot of agencies don't know what [hiring tools] they already have access to, and so it becomes an information vacuum,” she said at a webinar on Tuesday about agency talent management. 

The Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management in August put out a plan to improve the federal hiring process, not just for applicants but also for hiring managers and agency HR officials. 

Among the plan’s action items, it calls for agencies to ensure hiring managers have access to USAJOBS’ portal of more than 1.5 million resumes and to promote the use of shared certificates, which enable multiple agencies to hire candidates from the same job announcement. 

“What this memo highlights is practices and approaches that we are trying to get agencies to adopt,” Quirarte said. 

Agencies have reported early results nearly four months in, but continued progress could be in jeopardy soon when Donald Trump — whose incoming administration has called for downsizing the federal workforce — is sworn in for a second term.  

In a November update regarding the President’s Management Agenda, the White House touted initiatives that advance the objectives of the OMB/OPM plan. 

For example, OPM launched a “Federal Hiring Experience Learning Series” for hiring managers and HR officials that has hosted 10 events since September. USAJOBS the same month created an online tool that matches job seekers to open federal jobs based on their interests. 

Neither OMB or OPM responded to a request for comment about additional actions agencies have taken in conjunction with the hiring improvement plan. 

The average time-to-hire, which covers the time from when a manager submits a request to hire until the job candidate's first day, for mission critical federal occupations increased from 97 days in fiscal 2021 to 101.2 days in fiscal 2023, according to a dashboard from OPM. 

Steve Krauss — a director at OPM who also spoke at Tuesday’s Digital Government Institute webinar — said regular meetings of officials from across government have helped to spread awareness of existing solutions for enhancing talent management. 

“For pretty much any problem we can name, somebody out there has either solved it or is very close to solving it. Across the federal community, one of the biggest challenges we have — one of the best things we can do — is really work to continue networking and sharing the things that people are doing so everybody can learn from each other and grow that much faster,” he said. 

The OMB/OPM plan also calls for “investing in modern, standardized human capital systems and automated tools for HR professionals.” While that might sound straightforward, Krauss warned that many agencies use multiple systems from varied software providers just to support current HR information technology processes. 

“The fact that these [HR IT] systems are disjointed and fragmented just slows down the  processes,” he said. “It’s a big factor in why it might take a year or year-and-a-half to be able to get somebody with real talent into the government.” 

But Krauss said that artificial intelligence could help to update these systems. As an example, he pointed to OPM’s plan to use artificial intelligence to modernize the 40-year-old code for its retirement system. 

Still, such technological improvements require funding, and the soon-to-be Trump administration, along with reducing the number of federal employees, has promised to cut government spending. 

However Jonathan Alboum — ServiceNow’s federal chief technology officer and a former chief information officer at the Agriculture Department — said during an interview after the webinar that streamlining talent management has historically been a bipartisan priority. 

“I think that there's value, irrespective of an administration, in making [the hiring] process more efficient, creating more transparency and using the data we have in our organizations to make good decisions,” he said. “There's lots of questions about how many federal employees do we have with this skill set or where are they located? And we don't have that data. It's very hard to make good decisions about how to evolve the workforce over time — and every administration has to evolve the workforce, whether it's for AI or it's for other policy initiatives, the workforce is going to change.”