Today we have a special repeat guest: Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). OPM is the people function in the federal government — the department that sets the rules for the various HR departments in other agencies. Director Kupor was on Statecraft six months ago, and is now a little more seasoned in the federal government, having had a storied career outside.
We’ve also got Scott’s Senior Advisor, Noah Peters, with us.
In the last episode we did, shortly after the big DOGE wave, we talked about different visions of what talent in the federal government should look like. Today, we focus on a set of rules known as “veterans preference,” and proposed reforms to the regulations for Reductions In Force.
We discuss:
How veterans preference works in federal hiring
Who gets fired first when an agency conducts a Reduction In Force (RIF)
Proposed changes to prioritize performance during RIFs
Kupor’s progress in recruiting early career and tech talent to government
Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood, Shadrach Strehle, and Jasper Placio for their support in producing this episode.
For a printable PDF of this interview, click here:
Today I want to spend time with you on a particular slice of the talent question, known as veterans preference. Only the real sickos who read Statecraft will know what it is. I’m going to start by having you explain the concept.
Scott Kupor: Veterans preference typically shows up in the hiring process, and in things like the Reduction in Force (RIF) process, where we might be reducing headcount. The basic idea — this has been in place for a long time, and it’s a congressionally-mandated preference — is that we think veterans are very valuable. When we think about hiring, in addition to whatever skills and merit people bring to the job, we are required to give some preference to veterans, beyond what their score would be based purely on the skills they bring.
In most hiring, there’s a 100-point scale where we add up their qualifications, and all the feedback we get from people. A veteran will get 5-10 points added to their score. The difference tends to be whether you’re more fully disabled, versus a veteran without any ongoing disability. Out of 100 points, you have a 5-10% mathematical preference compared with other candidates.
Currently, outside of military service, veterans make up 28% of the federal workforce — over 600,000 employees. Is that 5-10% boost why? I’ve heard stories of veterans preference being applied such that only veterans were considered for the final slate for a job, even if other people were much better qualified.
How much has that been a factor in the application of veterans preference?
Noah Peters: Veterans will often have a natural connection to some of the missions of federal agencies, especially the Department of War, which is the largest civilian employer. Also veterans experience will prepare them for law enforcement roles better than most.
There’s no surprise that veterans are overrepresented in the federal government?
Kupor: Veterans are certainly overrepresented in government, at close to 30%, relative to their representation in the broader workforce at about 5%.
Peters: It’s not the same in every department. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DOD) have a much higher percentage of veterans than something like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Education. It’s not uniform, which shows that it’s not all preference-driven. A lot of it’s driven by the qualifications, background, and interests of the veterans.
With traditional competitive hiring, veterans preference is substantial. There’s also a specific law, very longstanding, that says that disabled veterans have to be listed first on what’s called a “register of eligibles.” There’s even heavier preference for disabled veterans, determined by point scales and VA ratings. The reason we call it “preference eligible” is because, in some circumstances, there can be family members of deceased or disabled veterans who also get a preference.
There’s been a remarkable spike in the number of veterans who are listed as disabled in the past decade — who are preference eligible for these roles. I know that’s outside of your control — it’s a VA and DOD question. But I’m curious what you think of that trend.
Kupor: You’re exactly right, those determinations obviously happen outside of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), so I’m not sure that we have any great insight into it. I don’t disagree with your characterization, which is: yes, those numbers have gone up. I don’t know how to compare that against what the disability rates should look like, relative to people who have been putting their lives at stake serving our country. Certainly things like that may contribute to the higher representation of veterans in the workforce, since disability can carry a higher preference ordering, in terms of additional points in the system.
Peters: Some of it may be because there’s more awareness of all the benefits that veterans have. Some of it may not be nefarious. There’s been a concerted push over the past couple of decades to make veterans aware of all the benefits they’re eligible for. In the past, it might have been more opaque. In the internet era, people can find out more about what they’re eligible for.
Noah, we’ve been talking about veterans preference in hiring — that is, if I apply for a job, and an equally-qualified veteran applies, they are going to get a boost for having been a veteran; ditto if they were disabled in their service. What about in firing, which is where you guys have been spending more of your time recently?
Where does veterans preference show up in Reductions In Force (RIFs) — which is the term of art for government firing?
Kupor: In the current system of RIFs, the way to think about the preferencing order — putting aside veterans preference — is that the first decision you make when putting together the “RIF register” is what tenure class people belong to. We don’t need to go too inside baseball, but there are three tenure classes:
You’ve been here for greater than three years;
You’ve been here for something less than that, or on a probationary-type job; or,
You’re a temp worker.
It’s not the longer you’ve been here, the more points you get.
Kupor: Not at this first cut — it gets more complicated. Let’s use Santi as an example. We say, “Santi, you’ve been here for five years. You go into that three-plus group.” You’re in the most favored group, based on the fact that you’ve got three or more years of service.
Within that group, we do apply veterans preference. If you are:
A disabled veteran, you would be at the top of that group;
A non-disabled veteran, you would be in the middle;
Neither of those, you would be at the bottom of that list.
Within that list there is further gradation, based on what we call “length of service” — which may sound like tenure, but it’s a more granular measure. At that point, the years actually matter. If you’ve been here for five years versus ten years, the ten-year person will get some additional — let’s call it “preference” again, for lack of a better word.
That’s adjusted by your performance. Most people get ranked 1-5 at the end of the year — 5 being the best. Some agencies have four-letter or three-letter systems, but think of it as, “You get a score.” That score can add to your points as well. We take the average of those last three years and add that onto your score. Unfortunately, where this gets really complicated is when you’re putting together this spreadsheet which has all these various inputs. We literally say, “Santi — he’s at the top of the list. He’s not touched in this.” We keep going down the list based on that amalgamation score. That’s the current rule.
Think of it as: category preference, plus veterans preference, plus time-based preference, then finally an adjustment for performance.
You’ve done a lot of hiring and firing in your time in the private sector. Obviously OPM operates within the constraints that Congress sets. But this process for firing is not the process that many private sector companies follow. They have far more latitude to fire people, and to determine who gets fired.
In hiring, there are states like Texas where you can say, “I think this person’s really talented. I’m going to make a spot for them.” (Statecraft spoke to Judge Glock last year to examine what federal HR can learn from the states.) One of the main reasons people are opposed to that in the federal government is that it creates an opening for patronage, corruption, or giving your cousin a plum job.
Kupor: All of which we did in our history.
The current system is a response to that. Philosophically, how should the federal government balance the demand for merit with the fear of patronage and corruption?
Kupor: I think you want to get as close [as possible] to what I would consider a merit-based system — where we actually are hiring people based upon their unique qualifications, and we have the ability to assess those qualifications in a way that is credible. If you’re applying for a software engineering job, we can give you coding tests to determine, “Does it make sense to hire you?” You’re right — the whole idea of the patronage system, and avoiding it, is important, and there has to be some balance.
As someone who has now had a chance to study this and compare it to what happens in the private sector, my personal view is we’ve gone way too far in terms of concerns around patronage-related issues, to create a system that is very rigid, both on the hiring and the firing side — as much as I hate to use that word: the ability of agencies to reshape their workforce for what they need to do.
The reason why people like Noah and others had to invent this Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) — where the vast majority of the roughly 300,000 people who left government last year exited — was because traditional things like RIFs, or being able to say “We think we need 10% fewer people across the board, let’s give agencies the ability to look across their organizations and do a 10% Reduction In Force,” are legally and practically impossible to do. DRP was a necessity, to give people some ability to reshape their organizations within the constraints of the rules.
A lot of what Noah and I are doing at OPM is trying to look at all those things and say, “How can we have a balance between the need for agencies to restructure their workforce — where it needs to happen, to reprioritize — and how do we make performance accountability realistic — versus spending years in litigation — within the constraints that we have?” We clearly don’t want a patronage system. We don’t want people hired or fired because they like the current president, or maybe don’t like the current president. Those are not valid reasons, and we can certainly protect those things. But we have handcuffed the ability of agencies to reshape things — both on the new hiring and the existing employee side — that they need to do to carry out the mission of the American people.
Peters: There’s a lot of value — because the federal government is such a big employer, and the mission is important — in the ability to do real skills-based assessments, which are far from universal in the private sector. That makes sense, even beyond the original anti-patronage justification for testing. In general, though, it is very complex, takes too long, and there are too many rules around it. Not all of them are necessary for merit.
We’re trying to change them. The RIF regulations are so difficult and intricate. They’ve evolved over the course of about 80 years through successive Civil Service Commission and then OPM rulemakings, and have been essentially untouched for the past 40 years. They’re operationally very difficult to apply, and a relatively small percentage of workforce reductions were actually conducted through these processes.
Three questions for you:
What is the problem for the public that this is operationally complex?
Tell me about the proposed rulemaking that you have out on RIFs.
Why is it an improvement on the old system?
Kupor: Let me hit the first one. To me, the answer is very simple: it’s costly, and does not give agencies the ability to serve the American people in the way that they see fit. DRP was an ingenious program, and very successful, but it’s expensive. We gave people effectively eight months’ worth of severance to voluntarily leave. While agencies have the ability to accept, or not accept, somebody’s DRP, you don’t have the ability in all cases to control who it is that might decide it’s better for them to walk out the door than to stay in the organization. To me, that was a required but unfortunately very crass way of having to do these things, given what civil service protection looks like.
In the perfect world, you want agencies to be able to say, “We’re doing these ten things for the American people. These are the most high-value. We’re understaffed there. We need more people there because that’s critical. But number nine or ten on the list — maybe we just don’t need as many people there.” It’s not rude or crass: every organization needs the ability to look at its priorities and determine how to staff against them. If you’re stuck with a situation where you can’t do that, your only option is to increase deficit spending — go ask Congress for more money to spend on items one and two on your list — or to continue serving the American people in a way that’s totally suboptimal.
If you have a RIF-based process that is not focused on merit, that’s also a real disservice to the American people, because where you go through all the hoops and try to do the RIF, if it turns out you’re getting rid of the people who are the most qualified individuals because of the way the rules work. That doesn’t do any service to anybody. Maybe Noah can give an overview of what we’re trying to do with the new RIF rules.
Peters: We’re moving towards a system that places performance as the initial ranking factor. We want to move to a system that’s more like how veterans preference is applied in hiring, where you apply a set number of points for veteran and disabled veteran status. We’re actually giving more veterans preference points than you would under the hiring point system, given that we’re using a smaller scale. The percentages are something like 25% for a disabled veteran, and 15% for a non-disabled veteran, or other preference-eligible.
That’s going to make the process a lot less painful when you go through the RIFs, because there’s going to be some assurance that employees were rank-ordered based on some measure of merit — their last three performance ratings. We understand performance ratings are far from perfect; we’ve talked about some issues with them, namely not enough differentiation. But they’re going to be better than tenure or length of service.
The other thing is to make the operational burden of conducting a RIF somewhat more manageable. The costs are very high, not just in severance pay. There are dead-weight costs of agencies having to create and quality control the lists. There’s also a tremendous amount of operational complexity, because it’s different HR systems feeding into one another to create the RIF register. If the employee’s records are wrong, it can create cascading errors. The “bump and retreat” system also creates cascading effects.
No idea what that is. Fill me in.
Kupor: This is exciting, this is one of my favorite parts of the system.
Peters: It’s the process of the number of people at the agency fitting the number of slots the agency has at the end of the RIF. The process by which you determine the employees who will remain is called, colloquially and in our regulation, “bump and retreat.” The metaphor is of somebody from a higher tenure group bumping somebody in a lower group, and somebody within the same tenure group retreating to another position. These can have cascading effects across the organization when you’re going from 50 positions to 25.
Kupor: Let’s say I get eliminated on the RIF register. The concept of retreat is, if there is a lower-graded job that is still available — that we are keeping in the organization — I could retreat. I was a GS-13, and I’m willing to take a GS-12. I can have preference over the person who otherwise would have gone into that GS-12, because I’m willing to take a downgraded position and retreat from where I was.
Kupor: As long as we’re getting geeky on this, Santi, maybe you know about this, but there’s a second piece referred to as CTAP and ICTAP.
No idea.
Kupor: Let’s assume a RIF has happened, and I did get RIF-ed. Tomorrow, the agency puts out a job description for some new job they didn’t have before. I can apply for that job. I get additional points and preference, over an otherwise potentially more qualified candidate, because I was subject to a RIF.
Is that wise rulemaking on the part of the federal government?
Kupor: My personal view is: if we go back to the fundamental principles — we want the right people in the right seats to deliver for the American people — I would like to get as close to a pure merit-based system as possible. If you were to talk to hiring managers in government, this is a challenge, because the extent of that preference can be quite significant. That doesn’t mean that everybody who got RIF-ed isn’t qualified, but it does mean you might be fitting a square peg in a round hole.
You can imagine a world in which I’m RIF-ed, I’m not qualified for the role I had, then I come right back in the application for another role, and you have to take me on. Seems wrong.
Peters: To be fair, you do have to be qualified for the position — that’s the same with bumping and retreating. The problem that ICTAP can create for hiring managers is, if there’s somebody who is, on paper, qualified for the position, but you hear that they were just terrible to work with at their old agency and led to the failure of numerous projects, you’ll have to hire that person, given the rules. That can be really tough if you have somebody who’s a known bad quantity.
Not that they’re literally unqualified for the role, but if they’re just really difficult to work with.
Kupor: In a merit-based system, you would think that, if working with other people is part of the job description, you could actually take that into consideration. Unfortunately, in practice these things become very difficult.
Help me understand your RIF proposal, and who’s against it.
Kupor: In the current way of doing RIFs — because we’re still going through the regulatory process — tenure, time, and service are in many respects double-counted: there’s a huge preference associated with how long you’ve been in the seat. On top of that, there is veterans preference.
The basic way to think about what we’re trying to do in this new system is that the most important criteria for determining where you fall should be performance. We’re going to start by giving you three years of credit, based upon the ratings that you receive. If you receive the top rating, for example, you get 7 points per year. If you have 5s every year, you get 21 points to start with. Then we apply veterans preference on top of that. Depending upon whether you’re disabled, you will get 3-5 points added to that score.
Our proposal is: that’s how we do it. If Noah and I are tied after that, then we can look at tenure, length of service. Tie goes to Noah because he’s been here longer than I have. That seems totally fair. But what we’re trying to invert is, performance should be the number one criteria, and tenure is the tiebreaker. Whereas today, years of service, coupled with veterans preference, determines who’s on the register.
The proposal is to invert the current model, without taking any of these things off the table? Veterans preference still exists, but we want performance first.
Kupor: That’s exactly right. On a numerical basis, veterans preference is even more consequential. If the total [performance] score you could get is 21 — you got 7 points for every 5 rating for three years — and you’re a disabled vet, we give you 5 points on top. Now 5 out of [your] 26 [total points come from] veterans preference. That’s over 20% of your preference — even more than the 5-10% we were applying in the hiring situation.
To your question, who’s against this? Anybody who believes that time in-seat is more important than performance would be against it.
Who might that be?
My own view is that these are people who are not excited about high-performance cultures, and people who maybe aren’t performing well — because certainly if you’ve been here a long time and you’re continuously not performing well, you’re going to fare worse under this system than you were. I don’t want to paint unions with a single brush, but if you’re looking for much more parity, and more time-based promotional and tenure opportunities, my guess is that if you sampled, most folks from a union perspective probably prefer that type of mechanism over a pure performance-based system.
Where we’ve seen comments on the veteran side, there haven’t been that many, and I think some of those are from people who haven’t actually dug deep enough into the rule to understand what we’re doing with veterans preference — which is preserving, if not increasing, the percentage contribution.
Peters: The objection is that you’re having people compete against each other based on performance-based factors in a direct way — much more so than under the current system. You’re turning a categorical, hierarchical system — which can feel like a right to somebody who’s been in the government for a long time — into a system where the difference between who is going to be kept and who is going to be let go will be performance. It won’t be how long you’ve been in the seat, in all cases. Sometimes that will matter. Veterans preference will matter. But there aren’t going to be these absolute hierarchical categories. There have been some people who have said, “These feel like rights to us, and we object to them being watered down with the new system.” There’s a lot of resistance to changes within the federal workforce, especially from people who’ve been in the government for a very long time.
Let me ask you about the strategic approach here, knowing that it’s totally possible that there’s another administration after this one which is much more attentive to what federal public sector unions want out of it. We talked about how you make sure to bring Congress along — how to build a base of support for these reforms so they don’t get overturned in 2030.
How are you thinking about making sure this rule is durable?
Kupor: In the perfect world, we would codify everything we’re doing here from a legislative perspective, so that we don’t run the risk of people rolling back regulations. When I look at the priorities that Congress has, and the ability to ultimately get things done from a legislative perspective — anecdotally, when I talk to members of Congress, most people agree with the general ideas that we’re talking about, which is: merit, and skills-based assessments are important, and how people perform in a job should probably be the primary determinant of whether they get promoted, fired, or RIF-ed. I just think the realities of where we sit today make it such that it’s probably prohibitive to get anything done meaningful in this area. Maybe I’m jaded in my short tenure here in Washington.
Peters: There’s hope here. DOD, in 2016 and 2017 — under the late Obama administration, during their last National Defense Authorization Act — was directed by Congress to adopt a performance-first RIF system, and they did, in early 2017. There was a slight rollback of the language in their particular RIF provision, so it doesn’t say “performance first” any more, but they kept their current system, because they felt it fulfilled their mission better when there was a need to downsize. They didn’t want to go to a system with tenure, length of service, and the categorical, hierarchical system the current regulations create. In terms of core mission delivery, given limited budgets and time, there’s a lot of value in having a performance-first RIF system. I do think there’s hope that it’s not going to be a light switch where it goes back the other way. The current rules are just so incredibly unadministerable from a technical standpoint, that going back to the old rules would be a little difficult to justify.
I guess this is about trying to forecast what Congress actually wants, or cares about. There’s evidence that Congress doesn’t really care about the hassles it creates for agencies in administering a rule. And there’s evidence in the other direction. Hopefully the work you do will be so effective that it’ll be obvious, even to people who might have preferred the status quo, that it would be foolish to go back.
Kupor: I’ll give Congress the benefit of the doubt.
I won’t, but you should.
Kupor: Maybe I’m too nice, but I don’t think Congress intends to create really impossible-to-administer rules. The federal government has gotten so darn complicated that it’s practically impossible for them to be able to adjudicate in a way that would be very precise, because the domain expertise you need is incredible. [In discussing reforms to federal student aid with Statecraft, Jeremy Singer described the problems that precise drafting in Congress causes.]
Anecdotally, as I’ve talked to both congresspeople and senators, everyone agrees that there are reforms needed in the federal workforce, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. I think everyone agrees that we do want to hire people as close as possible based on merit, while making sure we don’t have patronage. The challenge is that, given how polarized people are today, everything gets viewed from the lens of whatever their disposition is on these topics.
Changes that Noah and I are proposing, that seem totally logical to us — to somebody else, their immediate thing is, “You must be doing that for patronage purposes.” I’m maybe not as optimistic as Noah is, but I’m optimistic in the sense that the things we’re talking about are fairly rational. I’m hopeful that if we can get past budget reconciliation — all fun things that are happening these days — and maybe a midterm election, people might say, “Now it’s time to actually address some of these issues.” There’s at least a modicum of hope that that may happen.
I’ll leave you, Scott, with a couple of questions following up on our last conversation. We talked about the balance in federal headcount between full-time employees and the contractors. We’ve talked on Statecraft about how that balance has shifted over time — how in the Clinton years there was a big Reduction In Force, and part of the challenge was that contractor spend and headcount increased to fill that void. So we didn’t actually shrink headcount, even though there were fewer people on the payrolls.
You, and many other people in this administration, as well as increasingly folks on the Democratic side of the aisle — including my mayor, Zohran Mamdani — have expressed a lot of interest in cutting back on the amount of contractor spend, because it’s often more expensive than doing things in-house.
Where are we on this? Are there places where OPM thinks it makes sense to bring in more headcount to replace contracts?
Kupor: From a guidance perspective — as we talk both internally to OPM and to other agencies — if you recall, for the first time we had agencies submit headcount plans as part of their planning, and we’re just about to kick off, in partnership with our friends at the Office of Management and Budget, a new 2028 cycle. The guidance that we’ve been giving and talking about internally is: “You need to add your contractor and your Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) spend, and treat that as a single bucket.” We should not have a world where they’re totally independent things we don’t talk about. Those are all headcount-related expenses. The question is, “What’s the optimal mix?”
The guidance we’ve been giving is: there’s nothing wrong with contractors — contractors are good people. You should use them, though, where you truly have time-based needs — where you have to surge capacity, but you know there is a definitive end date that is reasonably short-term, not ten years from now. Or if there’s some reason where there’s a specialized set of skills that we cannot recruit because we don’t pay competitively.
We’re trying to encourage people to go through the budget and say: “If you have areas that fall outside of those two buckets, you really ought to look at it.” Jared Isaacman has made a big push on this inside of NASA — he’s publicly announced that there are 3,000 contractor roles they’ve identified that they want to bring in-house, not only because they will save money, which is definitely true — on a per-unit cost, we clearly pay more for contractors — but more importantly because these are mission-critical things; these are skills that we just have to have in-house. We’ve got to develop these individuals because these are core competencies of the organization. We can’t afford to have them not living in that organization. In our organization, the biggest areas where we have a lot of contractors, we did a huge elimination last year — we reduced the number of contractors we had by almost two-thirds.
What was that area?
Kupor: It was literally across the board — we had contractors everywhere. In our Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) — a massive amount. Even today, on a per-headcount basis, we have 50% more headcount in contractors than we do FTEs in our OCIO. When we got here on January 21st of last year — a lot of this got done before I got here — it was probably three times that number. The biggest area was OCIO. Our Human Resource Solutions group — there are a lot of contractors there too. Some of those are legitimate and make total sense. We reduced our number by about two-thirds last year, and now the biggest opportunity we have is looking at our OCIO again and saying, “What are those things that are so mission-critical that we should be doing?” I think we will reduce that number very substantially again — not reduce it and lose the skill set, but replace it with people who are going to be full-time employees in the organization, who can carry the mission forward. The short answer is we’re doing better.
Over at the Treasury there’s a big push on this too. The good news is that we’ve brought visibility to this issue in a way that agencies are looking at it. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s raised to a level of interest that it just hadn’t been before. We’re avoiding the situation you described — this yo-yo effect of FTEs and contractors going in opposite directions, like in the Clinton administration.
This is not just a government thing — this happens in the private sector too. We tell people, “You’ve got to have a 10% reduction in headcount,” and they do two things. One is they do it, but they lay off the least costly people. So they don’t actually deliver 10% savings in expenses, even though they deliver 10% in headcount. Then, they naturally say, “Great, now I need to go spend this money on contractors.” This is not a unique problem. The only solution I know of, is to help people understand that “You have a single budget number of headcount-related expenses, and it is the addition of FTEs and contractors.”
Your answer leads to my last question. You were talking about the number of contractors on the technology side of your stack. You’ve thought a lot about the composition of the federal workforce in tech sectors. There’s a cross-cut, where the federal workforce is less technologically savvy than we’d like it to be, and does not have as many young people as you’d like. 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30.
One of your flagship initiatives has been Tech Force, which is trying to hire technical talent into the federal government. There’s been reporting on the speed at which you guys have been getting that up to speed, but even when that’s fully on board, that’s going to be low four digits.
Kupor: The target for the first cohort is a thousand people, yes.
How are you thinking about getting more young folks in, beyond programs like Tech Force?
Kupor: Tech Force is a very discrete project around particular skills. More generally, we have launched a broad early career effort. If you go to earlycareers.gov, you can see all this. We have set forward an incredibly ambitious goal to get to a third of new hiring being early-career. Starting from a 7% base across the workforce, it’s very ambitious and we recognize that. But we’re here to try to do bold things.
There are a couple of things we have to do to make this successful. Number one: we have to go and find the people where they are, and tell them why it’s interesting for them to come to government — tell them the cool projects we’re working on and what it means for them — not just to be patriotic, but what it does for their career development. We have not told that narrative at all well. We’ve told them, “Come to the government and have job security for 40 years.” That’s a terribly not compelling narrative for anybody in today’s generation in that age cohort. Part of early careers is — you’re going to see us on college campuses telling the story, meeting people where they are, using the technology platforms — like Handshake — that college students are used to using. Our crack social media team here is going to help communicate in a way that’s effective to people who don’t want to read my ridiculous Twitter diatribes.
We also have to make the hiring process as simple as possible. We don’t want a 22-year-old to have to navigate 50 different job descriptions for the same project manager job across different agencies. We are going to simplify that process and have a canonical project manager job description. That job may appear at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Internal Revenue Service, and others, but we can centralize the description and the ability of that person to find it. My goal is, we should tell you, “Based on your experience, you’re open to DC, but you also maybe want to be in San Antonio, Texas. It turns out these three agencies have jobs in those areas for you. Let us connect you.”
Then, we have to work on the back-end process. Pooled hiring is still not that familiar to government. A big thing that Noah and I spend a lot of time thinking about with our teams is: we can do a great job recruiting at the top of the funnel, but at the end of the day, you have to connect the dots between that and some hiring manager sitting in some organization in HHS in their Annapolis, Maryland office. How do we get that person to think about pooled hiring, and working within the constraints of early-career hiring, in a different way? Those are great challenges and opportunities, we’re super-excited about it, and we’re going to make it a priority. These things are heavy lifts, but I have no doubt that we’ll figure out a way to do it.
Peters: We’ve been given so much to do by Congress and federal agencies. To deliver better on missions, we need the right skills and the right technology. We’re never going to be able to hire so many people that we’re doing everything Congress wants us to do, so we have to be smart about the mix of skills and technology that we bring in. The good news is that with the technology we have, we have the opportunity to be so much better in terms of mission delivery. If we can get the right skills and the right technology, we can produce really great results for the American people.
As somebody who was looking for a job in DC right after college — because I had to go propose to my then-girlfriend — it would have been easier if more of those roles had been on Handshake, because I spent a lot of time on Handshake as a 22 year-old.
Kupor: You can give us some feedback on Handshake now — even though you may be beyond our target market.
My little siblings who are graduating shortly will be.
Kupor: Send your friends and neighbors our way.
