The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rolled out a “Talent Pools” tool on the USAJOBS website in December, but an OPM official said on Wednesday that many Feds still don’t know about the new tool and urged agencies to begin using it.
At the Workday Federal Forum in Washington, D.C., on May 22, OPM’s Chief Transformation Officer Catherine Manfre took the time to remind agencies to use the tool – especially when it comes to hiring AI specialists.
“I think this is a really cool thing that we have enabled, and I just want to make sure everyone knows about it because I’ve heard it be a pain point,” Manfre said.
For example, Manfre said she was recently on a panel with several other Federal agency officials in which one panelist said her agency received hundreds of resumes for an AI hiring announcement.
“The person from the other agency was like, ‘That would be so cool if we could see those resumes. You probably aren’t going to hire all of those people and we would love to get AI talent to our agency too.’ And they turned to me and said, ‘It would be great if OPM could do something about that,’” Manfre recalled. “I was like, ‘In fact, we have.’”
“We call it pooled hiring. It basically is the idea that agencies can share their certification of all the people that apply to jobs either across government or even within an agency,” she said. “Because sometimes … even within an agency you can’t share the HR specialist job announcement that went out or the IT specialist. And so, we have actually created some mechanisms for agencies to be able to do that.”
Manfre said OPM has already led several governmentwide hiring actions – including one for customer experience strategists and data scientists – but reminded agencies that they “can also do that themselves.”
However, in order to share certificates – or the lists of qualified job applicants – with another agency, agencies must follow the requirements of the Competitive Service Act (CSA). This means they need to notify the applicants and allow them to opt-in to have their names and application information shared with other agencies.
“[This is] probably one of the more innovative things that I think solves a really big challenge in the hiring process because it just takes so long, and then you multiply that time across every job across every agency,” Manfre said.
“So, this was a way for government to try to leverage the scale of the government and to share all these great candidates that obviously want to come in and work with us,” she said.
