OPM releases first round of Tech Force candidates for agencies to consider hiring

Agencies are closing in on an opportunity to hire talent for temporary technology jobs, after the Office of Personnel Management released its first two shared certificates on Tuesday for the Trump administration’s “Tech Force” program.

Lists of eligible candidates for software engineering and data engineering positions are now available for participating agencies to review and potentially hire, an OPM spokesperson confirmed to Federal News Network. If hired, selected employees would move into two-year roles to temporarily work on technology-related initiatives.

Candidates who are listed on the new shared certificates have already passed three rounds of hiring evaluations, including a technical assessment, a resume review and a screening interview, said OPM Director Scott Kupor.

“We hope to have several hundred people now who passed all three phases of that, where we will put them on a shared certificate, and then we will start to push that certificate out to all the participating agencies,” Kupor said during a March 5 event hosted by Federal News Network. “The agencies then have an opportunity, if they so choose, to do an additional round of interviews, if they want to make sure the person is the right fit for their organization.”

By using shared certificates for upcoming Tech Force hires, OPM will let different agencies across government recruit from a common list of candidates who have already been vetted and deemed qualified for the open positions. The process of sharing certificates has been shown to speed up the government’s often long and cumbersome hiring process, while also easing the workload for federal hiring managers and HR staff.

Over the next few years, the Trump administration has set a goal of moving 60% of all federal hiring opportunities to shared certificates.

“We’re nowhere near that today, so it’s a very, very ambitious goal,” Kupor said. “But in my mind, it’s really important, because it not only makes the experience for the applicant better, but it’ll make the experience, obviously, in the efficiency for government much better.”

The remainder of the hiring process for Tech Force depends on how quickly agencies will assess candidates and potentially send out job offers. An OPM spokesperson declined to share how many candidates there were on the two shared certificates released this week. But more certificates are expected to soon roll out for other technology-related positions under the Tech Force initiative.

The Tech Force hiring initiative appears to be a reversal from the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, which included a loss of tech talent. The 2210 IT management job series saw one of the highest levels of federal employee separations last year, OPM data shows.

Governmentwide, more than 386,000 federal employees have left their jobs, either voluntarily or by force, since President Donald Trump took office. In that same time, agencies hired about 123,000 new federal employees, resulting in a net loss of 264,000 employees since January 2025. Last year’s recruitment numbers are less than half of agencies’ hiring levels during 2023.

Amid the governmentwide staffing reductions, some agencies are now looking to expand their hiring efforts. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, has already recruited about 10,000 employees this fiscal year, according to Tracey Therit, VA’s chief human capital officer.

“We are on par to double what we did last year in terms of hiring,” Therit said during a panel at Federal News Network’s March 5 event.

But leaders at other agencies, including the General Services Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, are seeking to use AI tools to make their remaining staff more productive, while maintaining limits on federal hiring.

For the Tech Force, the Trump administration is aiming to hire about 1,000 employees governmentwide for the program’s initial cohort. So far, just under 10,000 individuals have submitted applications — that’s less than one-third of the 35,000 people whom OPM said expressed initial interest in the program earlier this year.

Kupor said agencies are particularly looking for technical skills in areas like software development, artificial intelligence and data science.

“We still have fewer people in government than we need who have those skillsets,” Kupor said. “One objective for Tech Force is, how do we start to reignite and do a better job of recruiting that skillset into government?”

A central goal of Tech Force is to address the government’s long-standing challenge of hiring young employees, by focusing on recruiting early-career talent through the program. But over the last year, early-career staffing has declined governmentwide, due to the Trump administration’s broad workforce reductions. OPM’s current data shows that 7.9% of the federal workforce is under age 30 — a 1% decline from the 8.9% a year prior.

Kupor said he hopes to attract younger employees into federal jobs, including through the Tech Force program, by providing more flexibility moving in and out of the public sector.

“I don’t think the idea of going to the federal government or any place and having a 30 or 40-year career is how they think about making job progressions at this stage of their life,” Kupor said. “I suspect many of them will want to go to the private sector, so we’ve lined up all these private sector partners who will be available to help them demonstrate that the skills they develop and the things that they learn in government are generally applicable and transferable into the private sector.”

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