Dear Mr. Kupor: Please fix federal hiring

A brief tour through a broken HR system that keeps great talent out of federal government

The Trump appointment I’ve been waiting for was announced last night. Scott Kupor, a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will lead the Office of Personnel Management. I have no thoughts on Kupor (don’t know anything about him other than what’s been announced), but I do have thoughts on the job he will be charged with doing, once confirmed. A lot of thoughts. Let’s start with federal hiring processes.

After the Thanksgiving break, my colleagues at Niskanen will be publishing recommendations for fixing how the federal government evaluates candidates for open positions. Assessments — or lack thereof — are just one small part of a system of hiring that needs a major overhaul, and we’ll address adjacent areas over the coming year, but these fixes are practical and should be taken up without delay. To get notified when our recommendations are published, sign up here.

I’m going to borrow liberally from a paper I wrote for Niskanen last year called Culture Eats Policy. This should give you a taste of just some of what Mr. Kupor is going to have to contend with.

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I first encountered how federal hiring works in practice when my colleague Marina Nitze tried to hire a web designer. This was 2014, and Marina was the Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs, charged with “redefining the art of the possible for how America honors and serves its veterans” but assigned no staff. By the time she finally secured approval for headcount, she’d already delivered two websites for the VA by just building them herself, and what she needed most was a web designer. She still had a desk in the White House office where I was working, and because I was trying to stand up a unit that would eventually also hire web designers and other technologists, I decided to follow along for her hiring journey.

It took countless hours to get her web designer job approved. There was no job classification for web designer, but she worked with the VA Human Resources team to adapt an existing IT job posting. Getting it posted seemed like an enormous accomplishment. Everyone in the Office of Science and Technology Policy – most of us with deep networks in consumer tech – told the best designers we knew about this amazing job, one that would literally save lives and let you work with the First Lady, and many of them applied. At that point, the HR team took over. The next steps were a black box to Marina.

A few months later, she got her first “cert.” Cert is short for certificate, and it’s just a list of candidates who, according to HR, meet the criteria for the job. This cert included no web designers. When I first heard this, I wondered if Marina was being picky. Marina had very high standards for herself; perhaps she had set too high a bar for this new role. But no, she meant it literally. It wasn’t just that none of the great web designers who had applied were on the list. There weren’t any great designers, or any good designers, or even any beginning designers. The people on the list simply weren’t designers at all.

This result is common, and it’s why almost half of all competitive, open-to-the-public job announcements result in no hire at all. (We’re excluding excepted service here — when you hear about Schedule A or Schedule C appointments, that process is separate.) If a hiring manager (like Marina) believes none of the candidates HR passes along to them can do the job, they can reject the cert. And they do, understandably, though at great cost. A hiring action can easily take months to get to a cert, so when you have to start that process over again, you’re burning shocking amounts of time and attention.

But what happens between the time a qualified candidate applies and the time the cert is issued without them on it? For one thing, a candidate might submit the kind of resume that is standard in business and nonprofits, usually one to two pages, with a high-level description of the duties of each relevant job, and a list of skills. But there’s a thing called a government resume. Government resumes are at least six pages, often longer. They have to have certain keywords. People who know how to write a government resume know what words to include that will get them through the HR review.

One candidate who somewhat famously didn’t know how to write a government resume is Jack Cable. When the Pentagon sponsored a contest to see who could find the most security flaws in its software, they invited over 600 security researchers to compete. Jack beat them all, winning the contest and demonstrating not only his enormous skills in securing critical national security systems, but an incredible enthusiasm for serving his country. He was a dream candidate, and the Defense Digital Service (DDS), the team that had sponsored the Hack the Pentagon contest, encouraged Jack to apply for a job. But the resume Jack submitted described his experience developing “mobile applications in IonicJS, mobile applications using Angular, and APIs using Node.js, MongoDB, npm, Express gulp, and Babel.” This would have given a technical manager a good sense of the range of his skills, but no one technical reviewed his resume. DoD’s hiring protocols, like those of most agencies, required that it be reviewed by an HR staffer with a background in government hiring rules, not technology. The staffer saw what looked like a grab bag of gobbledygook and tried to match it to the job description, which required “experience that demonstrated accomplishment of computer-project assignments that required a wide range of knowledge of computer requirements and techniques pertinent to the position to be filled.” The fact that he’d just beat out 600 other security researchers meant nothing. His resume was deemed “not minimally qualified” and didn’t make the first cut.

Jack did end up working for the DoD, after DDS team members and others reached out and coached both him and various HR teams through the process, but it took many tries and many months to get him past that first screen. They had to overcome several obstacles besides his non-compliant resume, including Jack’s age — he was 17 when he won the contest. In the course of the saga, an HR professional advised this highly sought-after security researcher to get a job selling computers at Best Buy for a few years and come back, because then he might be qualified for the job he was applying for. If the DDS team hadn’t dedicated countless hours over many months to fighting the system, he would have taken a much higher-paying coding job at a company that could immediately recognize his value, and he might have been lost to public service for years, if not the rest of his career.

Jack’s tech skills meant nothing to the hiring process, but there is one skill that is always valued: the ability to cut and paste. Yadira Sanchez, a tech team leader at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, described to me her attempt to hire a product manager. Like Marina, she knew there were some extremely well-qualified candidates in her pool, some of whom were already doing a great job on the project as contractors. She avoided the mistake the DDS team had made, reminding applicants to get some help from someone who knew how to write a government resume. But none of those candidates made the cert, and in fact, the cert contained no one with product-management experience. The top candidate had just “copied and pasted the exact same language in the exact same font from the bulleted list in the posting into their resume, and that qualified them,” Yadira told me. “They didn’t even put any other language around it. They didn’t even try to disguise what they’d done.” And yet, HR insisted this person was the most qualified for the job per their process.

But why do so many HR teams insist on a process that results in these unqualified candidates and the failure of half their hiring actions? Unhelpful and overly restrictive interpretations of the principle of equity collide with large candidate pools to create a decidedly inequitable and inefficient process. There can be hundreds, even thousands of applicants for a job. HR teams are supposed to consider every applicant with the same level of scrutiny, which makes assessment of large pools of candidates an enormous lift. The way to do that both quickly and “fairly” is to exercise as little judgment as possible.

The first tool in the HR toolbox at this stage is the self-assessment. This is essentially a questionnaire asking each applicant to rate themselves on the skills listed in the position description. The HR team sends this to all applicants. Of those who return it, you can take the candidates with the top scores (effectively those who know to and are willing to assess themselves at the “master” level for every competency), review their resumes for matches with the necessary keywords, and move them on to a pool of “minimally qualified” candidates.

The justification for having only HR staff with no knowledge of the domain perform screenings is that domain experts, or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), as they are known, aren’t properly trained. The sheer volume and finickiness of HR practices, which take many years to master and are often described as “rules” though they generally aren’t specified in law or policy, mean that hiring managers and SMEs could break a rule, resulting in a process that wasn’t “fair” — by some very odd definition of fair. If the qualifications include “Leading project management initiatives, methods, and practices to plan and carry out major IT projects,” you look for candidates who say they have “led project management initiatives, methods, and practices to plan and carry out major IT projects.” The closer the match, the fairer you have been.

At this point, you’ve narrowed your field (and probably knocked out most of your qualified candidates), and you have one important tool left, one that will get you to your cert. There is a notable exception to the rules of equal treatment, found in Title 5 of the U.S. Code, Section 3309, which says, in part, “a preference eligible who receives a passing grade in an examination for entrance into the competitive service is entitled to additional points above his (sic) earned rating.” “Preference eligible” is used here as a noun, and it’s defined earlier in the code with a lot of legalese, but it essentially means a veteran. Once they’ve narrowed the pool through self-assessment and resume screening, HR managers call the remaining candidates “minimally qualified,” apply veterans preference according to a set of very specific rules, and voila, they have a cert they can pass on to the hiring manager.

Title 5 Section 3308 has become the source of much frustration by people trying to hire quickly and well in federal government. But the problem is not with the words lawmakers wrote. Title 5 says that veterans preference should be applied after candidates are qualified through an examination. What’s wrong here is the way the law has been interpreted and codified into processes and procedures that HR staff in government now believe are the only way to hire. They believe that resume screens for literal matches and self-assessments are the best way (and only legally compliant way!) to get to a cert. Veterans preference, when misapplied to these certs of often unqualified candidates, is a convenient device for getting from too long a list to a cert of an appropriate length without actually doing the work of assessing candidates for their skills in this highly inflexible and time-consuming ways HR lore insists is required.

This dynamic does not serve veterans. Because hiring managers have become conditioned to seeing certs with only veterans on them and assuming none of them is qualified, the process also harms the very people, veterans, that the law was designed to help.

We know this because during the last Trump administration, the U.S Digital Service and the Office of Personnel Management devised an alternative hiring process (called SME-QA for Subject Matter Expert Qualifying Assessments) that allows domain experts to work with HR to determine who is qualified and eligible – and it works dramatically better. When the team who rolled it out delivered the first set of certs, they would occasionally get calls from the hiring managers they’d work with, complaining about certs full of veterans. “You promised this would be different,” they would say. “Look at the resumes,” the USDS team would tell them. “They’re qualified veterans.” When they looked, they agreed, and they were delighted to hire veterans who’d been properly assessed for their skills. But years of seeing certs on which veterans had floated to the top after assessing solely for knowledge of the hiring process had created understandable bias against the very people veterans preference laws were meant to help.

SME-QA is one example of the seeds of change Mr. Kupor has to work with as he takes on leadership of OPM. These seeds, and the people who champion them, need water, sunlight, and fertilizer. SME-QA started over five years ago, and it hasn’t meaningfully scaled. OPM and GSA published data in 2020 that show that 90% of competitive jobs rely entirely on resume screens and self-assessments. The number of hiring actions that use SME-QA is still quite small, and is unlikely to have moved that overall number at all. Progress is painfully slow, in part because no one has tackled the underlying conditions: the control HR staff have over the creation of the cert that excludes the judgement of the hiring manager, the difficult and finicky processes that make assessments far more time-consuming than they are in the private sector, the unreasonable and unhelpful rigidity of the entire process. There’s so much work ahead even just in this one area. We are just scratching the surface here.

Today’s civil service dates back to reforms in the mid- to late-19th century, when positions in government were filled through patronage. There’s no need to return to those practices, but those who argue that the system today is necessary to avoid abuses and favoritism are simply wrong. Kupor will have a very full plate, especially given the Trump administration’s plan to reinstate Schedule F, which unfortunately work against a merit system and come with other dangers. But there must be room on his plate for far less controversial changes, like fixing hiring. In fact, there’s a whole buffet of commonsense actions he could take. We’ll walk through others in the new year.

For now, happy holidays!