More federal hiring reforms to come, as Congress passes Chance to Compete Act

A bipartisan bill to reform the way federal agencies recruit and hire their employees is heading to President Joe Biden’s desk for a signature.

Congress has passed the Chance to Compete Act, a bill that will codify skills-based hiring practices for the federal workforce. The House cleared the bill Monday evening by voice vote, following shortly after the Senate’s passage of the companion legislation late last week.

Once enacted, the Chance to Compete Act will require agencies to conduct technical and skills-based assessments of federal job candidates, rather than the current and common practice of candidate self-evaluations.

By asking job applicants to rank themselves on their own skill levels, federal hiring managers frequently struggle to find a truly qualified candidate for an open position. More often than not, self-assessments lead to dead ends in federal hiring, according to Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service.

“[With self-assessments,] people tend to self-rate that they’re an expert on everything, so by the time it makes its way through the process, hiring managers get a list of applicants who say they’re qualified, but don’t actually have the demonstrated skills to do the job,” Mattingley said in an interview.

By contrast, the Chance to Compete Act tells agencies to move away from self-assessment questionnaires, and design new assessments that consider applicants’ qualifications based on the practical skills they would need to be successful in a position. A skill-based, technical assessment could include, for instance, a more structured interview process and a deeper resume review.

In cases where a technical assessment isn’t possible, the bill says agencies would still be able to use an alternative candidate assessment, as long as they submit a rationale for any hiring done using alternative assessments.

The Chance to Compete Act also brings subject-matter experts more centrally into the federal hiring process. Under the bill, SMEs would be more involved in reviewing resumes and conducting interviews, aiming to support hiring managers and bring a better understanding of the skills needed on the job.

With technical assessments in place, the bill should also, by extension, help agencies take further advantage of shared certificates. With a shared certificate, one agency can share its list of qualified but unhired candidates with other agencies that are hiring for the same position.

“Once you add that layer of [skills-based] assessments in, it should make it easier for agencies to find efficiencies and hire more as an enterprise versus as individual offices or job announcements,” Mattingley said. “That’s the whole premise of skills-based hiring — we’re not hiring based off individual jobs and positions, but really looking at qualifications that are potentially transferable.”

The Office of Personnel Management will also be required to conduct a feasibility study on the possibility of creating a shared assessment platform, where agencies would be able to both share and customize their technical assessments for similar positions across government.

The newest version of Chance to Compete Act was first introduced in 2023, at the beginning of the 118th Congress. The passage of the largely bipartisan legislation comes after years of calls for improvements to the often slow and cumbersome federal hiring process.

“The Chance to Compete Act is an exceedingly rare instance of bipartisan, common-sense legislation that targets a specific problem, applies proven solutions and reflects private-sector best practices,” House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a statement. “Rigid higher-education degree requirements should not be a barrier to entry for qualified and skilled applicants to perform job roles within the federal government.”

Once signed into law, agencies will have three years to fully adopt the requirements of the Chance to Compete Act and make the switch over to skills-based, technical assessments.

To some extent, over the past several years, agencies have already started incorporating skills-based federal hiring reforms, such as sharing certificates and involving SMEs in recruitment. But the presence of the legislation should now bring a greater and more concrete focus to the strategies and broaden their use across government.

“It’s a really wonderful sign to see Congress agreeing on a bipartisan basis to approve hiring reforms, especially reforms to improve the competitive hiring process, which has been degraded in recent years,” Jason Briefel, director of policy and outreach at the Senior Executives Association, said in an interview. “This is really the model and the way that reform should happen, in part because it’s going to have more lasting and sustainable benefits and effects.”

The American Federation of Government Employees also expressed support for the planned federal hiring reforms under the Chance to Compete Act.

“Federal employees protect public safety, serve our veterans, safeguard our borders and advance the frontiers of knowledge,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement Tuesday. “The American people should have confidence that we are recruiting the best and most qualified candidates to work in the federal government, and this legislation will set up agencies for success.”

But implementing the required changes under the Chance to Compete Act may also present challenges. It will take investments of time and resources for agencies, particularly in their human resources offices. OPM recently sent a legislative proposal to Congress asking for statutory authority over the federal HR workforce, aiming to create clearer career paths and better support HR staff who currently face a governmentwide mission-critical skills gap.

“The challenge we’ve seen is that there’s still a need for a lot of tools, a lot of education, for both hiring managers and HR on how to do skills-based hiring,” Mattingley said. “That’s going to take some time to work out — what does it actually mean, and are there different levels of employees and types of positions where skills-based hiring works better, than, say, entry-level positions?”

Though it might still be years away from full implementation, at the end of the day, the legislation’s goal is to make the federal hiring process more efficient and result in more successful hires into the federal workforce. For Mattingley, there are some signs she’ll be looking for to see when those changes are truly in effect.

“Maybe we’ll hear fewer hiring managers saying, ‘I went out to try to hire for a position, and all I got back was a list of people who had none of the skills that I was needing to hire for,’ and fewer applicants saying, ‘I filled out a self-assessment questionnaire, and never heard back,’” Mattingley said. “When those two common anecdotes lessen, I think we’ll see that it’s working.”

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