US government sets out merit hiring plan in line with Trump priorities
The US government has set out a new hiring plan for the federal workforce with an objective to recruit “the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans” to work for government.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) set out the new guidance for recruitment into the US government, providing guidance to departments and agencies on how to implement president Trump’s presidential order on reforming the federal hiring process.
When he returned to office, Trump froze federal hiring and required a plan to be created in the administration’s first 120 days to implement reforms in line with the presidential action to tackle what the order from Trump called “broken, insular, and outdated” recruitment practices.
The updated merit hiring plan, now published, states that “the overly complex federal hiring system overemphasised discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats”.
The plan therefore sets out four key priorities to revise how federal government recruitment is undertaken.
These are:
- Reviewing recruitment process “to ensure that only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans are hired to the federal service”.
- Implementing skills-based hiring procedures, including what the OPM calls “unnecessary degree requirements”, and an updated requirement “to ensure candidates are selected based on their merit and competence, not their skin color or academic pedigree”.
- Streamlining and improving the job application process.
- And reducing time-to-hire to under 80 days by emphasising the use of talent pools and shared certificates and streamlining the background check process.
Under each of these points, agencies are provided with steps they should take to implement them in line with the administration’s priorities. These include what the plan calls a “bedrock principle of the Merit Hiring Plan that all Americans must be hired, recruited, and promoted in federal jobs without regard to race, sex, colour, religion, or national origin” as part of the administration’s pledge to end all diversity, equity and inclusion programmes in the federal government.
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The plan also urges federal departments and agencies to ensure that federal job positions “are properly designated and that only the appropriate level of vetting is conducted”, with targets for vetting: 21 days for low-risk positions; 25 days for non-sensitive moderate risk positions; and 45 days for those that are top secret.
According to the hiring plan, agency chief human capital officers will need to prepare a monthly report for both the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget on the progress of implementation of the plan. The first report, set for the end of June, should “identify the members of the agency’s talent team and their expected roles (including the talent pool manager and shared certificate coordinator), along with the agency’s specific plans for recruitment in the areas of veterans, early career, and STEM”.
To meet the pledge to reduce the time to hire to 80 days, the government will work to “fully implement practices like pooled hiring and shared certificates [to] significantly improve the federal hiring time average”.
Improving recruitment a global priority
The need to improve civil service recruitment was highlighted as part of Global Government Forum’s Making Government Work report.
The report highlighted five pillars of a modern, effective public service, including a highly skilled, inclusive and thriving workforce. The research, which is based on interviews with 12 of the most senior civil servants around the world, highlighted the need to revamp recruitment practices as governments face what has been described as a ‘war for talent’.
The majority of civil service leaders interviewed in the research said they face recruitment difficulties, in particular competing with private sector salaries for key skills such as digital. Frustration at the slow speed of government recruitment was highlighted by leaders, who compared government recruitment unfavourably with that of big technology companies that government is competing with for talent. “If I interview for a job at Google this morning, and they like me, I can be working in the afternoon. But our systems are so rigid and slow – all driven by the need for fairness, transparency and accountability.”
While these considerations are important, they said that “fundamental questions” need to be asked about recruitment policies, and governments around the world are working to become more proactive to attract and retain talent.
“Even getting to the point where senior posts are approved and advertised takes months,” one senior leader told GGF. “Then the actual process of running the competition can take months. Even at more junior levels, we’re finding that by the time you get around to offering a candidate the job, many of them are already working somewhere else.”
Some public services have developed practices to tackle these issues. Among areas of best practice, some governments have created “talent teams”, which are separate from departmental human resource departments and which “do nothing other than recruitment”.
Read the Making Government Work report in full to find out more about government transformation.
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