Each year, agencies attempt to move just a little bit closer to reforms in the federal hiring process — one that’s often seen as slow and difficult to get through.

But over the last year, it appears that agencies have been particularly focused on making changes to the way they recruit and onboard federal employees.

For instance, over the summer, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget asked agencies to refocus their recruitment strategies to center on three key groups: federal hiring managers, HR staff and federal job applicants. OMB and OPM’s joint memo on improving the federal hiring experience detailed various actions that can support each of the three groups, all of whom are centrally involved in the overall federal hiring process.

“This joint memo asks agencies to prioritize implementation of hiring experience practices that make the most difference for the applicant, hiring manager and HR professional experience,” Roseanna Ciarlante, OPM’s director of hiring experience, said during a Dec. 12 CHCO Council meeting. “It’s so important that federal agencies utilize innovative and proven recruiting and hiring practices and processes in order to better compete for the talent they need to support their complex missions.”

The memo generally covers practices related to workforce planning, strategic recruitment and governmentwide hiring coordination, such as pooled hiring and shared certificates. The practice of sharing certificates has grown further over the last year and has been shown to ease workloads for HR staff. It lets multiple agencies hire from the same list of qualified candidates for positions that are common governmentwide.

It’s likely to take more time before agencies will see the impacts of these practices take root. But some agencies already using the strategies outlined in the memo — such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development — have started seeing signs of success.

Over more than a decade of annual hiring losses, HUD was for a long time struggling to increase its workforce headcount, according to Lori Michalski, HUD’s CHCO.

“We knew we had to think differently about hiring if we truly wanted that trend to change, so we began to focus on both operational efficiency as well as communication and partnership,” Michalski said during the CHCO Council meeting. “We started to meet every other month with our client offices to discuss hiring trends, statuses, timelines, strategies and concerns, and I think most importantly, to solicit feedback on previously implemented initiatives and how they were working. This transparency was the key to enabling us to make customer-informed decisions about hiring and start trending in the right direction.”

As a result of the changes, and by implementing the practices included in the hiring experience memo, HUD has managed to decrease its time to hire from 97 days to 57 days, on average. The agency has also been able to handle a higher volume of federal hiring actions, Michalski said.

Early-career recruitment gaining traction

Aside from the federal hiring experience memo, early-career recruitment has also been an increasingly big priority for agencies, as the federal workforce continues to see more employees reaching retirement eligibility.

The most notable example of renewing focus on the recruitment of younger talent came from OPM’s final regulations on the Pathways Program in April. The new final rule broadened eligibility for the program and offered options for higher pay.

“You can now earn a lot more money when you get hired in the Pathways Program, and the qualifications are much broader — now you’ve got community colleges, technical programs, apprenticeship programs, AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, Job Corps,” OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said at a White House event on the President’s Management Agenda. “All of these things open the door to a federal job, a ladder to the middle class.”

The results of those efforts to ramp up early-career recruitment are starting to show through, according to Shriver.

“We have reversed a many-year-long slide where the federal government’s early-career talent numbers were getting worse and worse and worse,” Shriver said.

More recently, there has been an uptick in the number of federal employees under age 30. After an increase of 13% in the last few years, feds under 30 years old now make up 8.6% of the workforce, rather than the previous 7%.

The early-career recruitment effort extends governmentwide, but there is a push on early-career hiring within OPM’s own workforce as well. For example, OPM has been able to allocate centralized funding for Pathways Program participants and consider backfilling positions at lower grade levels when appropriate, according to OPM CHCO Carmen Garcia.

“OPM has also modernized its outreach initiatives and shifted to an active talent sourcing model to hire for its positions and improve its brand as an employer,” Garcia said during the CHCO Council meeting.

A skills-based focus in federal hiring

Skills-based hiring has been another key priority over the last year, which has similarly seen some recent changes. Agencies have increased the number of skills-based assessments they use by more than 2.5 times what they were four years ago, according to OPM.

In April, the White House announced plans to transition the government’s primary job series for federal IT specialists away from college degree requirements over the next year. OPM set a summer 2025 deadline to fully move the 2210 job series — consisting of nearly 100,000 IT jobs — to skills-based hiring assessments.

The growth and emphasis on skills-based hiring builds on an effort from the Trump administration in 2020. At the time, Trump’s executive order urged agencies to prioritize the actual skills of job applicants over college degrees in the federal hiring process.

Further building on the current momentum for skills-based hiring, OPM’s Shriver said it would be possible to “learn lessons, and pick up and move further across other occupations,” in future administrations.

The efforts of skills-based hiring may also get moved even further along after the passage of the Chance to Compete Act. The legislation, which Congress passed in December, includes a push for agencies to transition to more technical and skills-based assessments in federal hiring.

“If you can demonstrate that you’ve got the skills,” Shriver said, “you [should have] a chance to compete for the job.”

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