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From the trenches: Lessons on skills-based federal hiring and the need for broader reform

The Trump administration’s Tech Force hiring initiative to bring technologists into government and its Merit Hiring Plan to implement skills-based hiring are the latest in a string of initiatives launched in recent decades to address issues in the federal government’s ineffective hiring process.

Despite good intentions over many years, the simple truth is that hiring hasn’t gotten easier, agencies still lack resources to move to a much-needed skills-based hiring system and workarounds remain the norm.

Why hasn’t the hiring challenge been solved?

Is it a statutory, procedural or funding issue? Have lessons learned not been shared? The answer is yes to all of these questions, and the solutions aren’t easy.

Good ideas, tough to implement

The Chance to Compete Act provided a major step forward on skills-based hiring (using more objective assessments as opposed to rigid credentials or inflated self-assessments). Now, the main barriers to implementation are not statutory. Instead, agencies are experiencing resourcing and other challenges that relate to the particularities of implementing major HR reform across a massive federal government. Below are examples related to implementing skills-based hiring stemming from recent conversations with agency HR officials and lessons from the Subject Matter Expert Qualification Assessments pilots from the past two administrations:

The scale and size of agencies matter

Almost every federal agency is larger than 99% of private sector companies, with some agencies having hundreds of thousands of employees. Between 2019 and 2024, over 2 million positions were posted on USAJobs. Methods that work in the private sector may not translate to large federal agencies. Hiring reforms must come with resources and significant change management strategies to actually implement reforms at this scale. Policy alone won’t drive change across a huge enterprise.

Two-page resumes are great in theory

Short resumes are easier for the applicant but make it harder to identify an individual’s qualifications, particularly for senior and technical positions. While federal resumes have notoriously gotten too long, short resumes that cram in keywords regurgitated by AI don’t meet the mark.

Centralization is ok, allowing agencies to share is better

Currently, the Office of Personnel Management is pushing toward a shared-services model, which is helpful for pooled hiring actions but requires agency HR offices to have budget to pay OPM, a reoccurring pain point. Instead, let agencies share assessments, position descriptions, practices and strategies with each other and focus OPM on providing consultation and shared IT platforms.

HR offices need resources to scale skills-based hiring

Job analysis workshops (a robust method to determine skills and assessments for positions) are an underused method. OPM does this well, but cannot do it at scale across the government. Agencies need the tools – HR training, industrial/organizational psychologists, budget and SME involvement – to move to this model. This is another necessary practice that doesn’t work in large agencies unless paired with resources.

Pooled hiring actions and shared certificates can speed hiring but aren’t silver bullets

They have not been widely adopted yet for various reasons. It only works for truly similar roles. Agencies must have funded positions, not just workforce needs. They have to get managers on board to give their teams time to participate as SMEs in hiring actions. Hiring managers must trust another agency’s process, which takes time and intentional change management – something that hasn’t been done at scale across agencies.

Fix the whole hiring problem

Hiring, pay and classification laws haven’t been meaningfully updated since the 1970s, leading to a maze of procedures and one-off fixes. OPM created complex rules to ensure compliance, agencies have layered on their own guidance, myths and risk-aversion have grown on top and HR is under resourced and understaffed. Instead of fixing the underlying federal hiring system, agencies regularly seek workarounds to the competitive hiring process, asking Congress for specific hiring and pay authorities, which provide short-term relief but only further complicates the maze.

It’s going to take more than splashy initiatives like Tech Force, mandating  assessments and the Merit Hiring Plan to fix federal government hiring. It takes clearing out the layers of calcified policies and myths, requires some statutory fixes and it means dealing with tricky issues like funding HR offices, reforming veterans’ preference and overhauling the pay and classification system. Tackling these issues won’t be easy, but it’s necessary to create effective, responsive and accountable government.

Rather than trying to retrofit the old hiring system, my team at the Partnership is analyzing root causes and examining various perspectives to explore how we can build a hiring system that makes sense today and is flexible enough for the future. Stay tuned for more analysis and options for reform.

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