OPM seeks early-career talent for ‘Tech Force’ federal hiring initiative

The Office of Personnel Management is seeking to bring a surge of technical expertise into the government’s ranks, as part of a new federal hiring initiative called the “U.S. Tech Force.”

The effort from OPM looks to hire 1,000 new federal employees for the initial class of the Tech Force. OPM plans to run recruitment as a “pooled hiring” effort, where agencies will be able to bring in employees for two-year stints to work on various modernization projects.

Agencies involved in OPM’s new program include the departments of State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Agriculture and Labor, as well as the IRS, OPM and the General Services Administration, among many others.

“With almost no exception, we have basically every agency willing to participate in this program, and we’ve got grand ambition,” OPM Director Scott Kupor told reporters Monday. “Our hope is that as this works, we can grow that cohort, and also that we can use this as a model for how we can do more centralized, efficient hiring across government.”

Kupor said the Tech Force aims to help fill two workforce gaps simultaneously: technology expertise and early-career talent. The program will focus in particular on federal hiring for those with skills in AI, software engineering and data science.

Individuals who are recruited into government through the Tech Force will mostly be brought in as GS-13 or GS-14 level employees, according to Kupor, with salaries ranging from about $130,000 to $195,000. OPM has opened applications for the program and will assess candidates on a rolling basis. The agency is targeting 1,000 Tech Force hires by the end of March.

The new initiative comes after the loss of over 300,000 employees from government this year, due to the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the federal workforce. Tech Force hiring may also coincide with annual staffing plans, Kupor said, which all agencies are required to submit to OPM and the Office of Management and Budget this month.

It’s not the first time the government has sought to recruit technologists and early-career talent through a tailored federal hiring initiative. The Obama administration, for instance, launched the U.S. Digital Service, now called the “U.S. DOGE Service.” The effort similarly sought to bring in tech talent temporarily to work on specific agency modernization projects.

In 2021, the Biden administration also created the U.S. Digital Corps, an effort designed to recruit entry-level talent with software engineering, data science, design, cybersecurity and other critical IT skills into public service careers.

Programs including the Presidential Innovation Fellowship and 18F have additionally looked to recruit federal workforce expertise in specific sectors, and integrate digital services into agencies’ workflows. In March, however, GSA shuttered the 18F program.

Kupor said OPM’s new Tech Force effort is different than prior initiatives, since employees will be hired directly into agencies, and because it’s happening on a larger scale.

“A lot of what USDS does today is they get brought in on a project-by-project basis,” Kupor said. “But these will be full-time employees assigned to agencies, working on what the leadership believes are the most important priorities.”

Ushering more early-career employees into government has also been a common goal across several administrations. Currently, about 7% of the federal workforce is under age 30.

In an attempt to target early-career talent, recruitment for the Tech Force will include partnerships with universities, non-profits, professional associations and private sector companies.

“We’re less worried about where they’re coming from. We’re more concerned about, do they have the appropriate merit to be able to do the job, and are they excited about the prospect of working on these programs for the next two years?” Kupor said.

OPM is partnering with more than 20 private-sector tech companies to help recruit and manage Tech Force. The initial cohort will include hires from outside government, as well as early-career managers at private sector companies who will be pulled into public service temporarily for the program.

Kupor also expressed a desire to add flexibility for employees who may be interested in switching between the private sector and the federal sector over the course of their careers.

“I think both organizations benefit tremendously from that,” he said. “What we really want to do is get the benefit of really smart people working on some of the world’s most complex and difficult problems, and then also demonstrate to them that, if they so choose, they can take those skills and work in the private sector.”

OPM will lead federal hiring for the Tech Force as a pooled recruitment effort, by assessing applicants and creating a roster of qualified candidates. From there, agencies across government will be able to select and hire from a shared list of candidates that OPM has vetted. OPM’s goal is to repeat the pooled hiring effort once per year, for each new cohort of early-career technologists.

The strategies of pooling hiring and sharing certificates have been growing across agencies for the last several years. Many of the Biden administration’s federal hiring efforts under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, for instance, used pooled hiring.

“We’ve got to crawl before we run on this stuff, but I think is going to be, hopefully, a model for us to … increase the efficiency of hiring, both for the applicants and for the agency,” Kupor said. “You’ll see us do a bunch of stuff here at OPM, over the course of next several years, on figuring out, how do we attract people who are early career, to think about government?”

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