Successful Pooled Hiring Starts With Diving the Deep End
The Office of Personnel Management has been busily reversing course on federal workforce reductions with some splashy hiring announcements. In December, it launched Tech Force, a pooled recruitment effort targeting 1,000 early-career technologists to be placed across agencies for two-year stints. In March, it stood up across-government shared certificate for project managers. It launched an Early Career Talent Network spanning five job categories. Two weeks ago, it expanded Tech Force into cybersecurity. OPM Director Scott Kupor has been explicit about his ambition: this is a “model for more centralized, efficient hiring across government.”
I’ll bite: yes, there’s a lot of promise in that! The instinct behind all of these actions builds on years of initiatives meant to create efficiencies out of the hundreds of thousands of hires made federally each here. Pooled hiring, which should include one well-designed announcement, one shared assessment, and many agencies drawing from the same pool of qualified candidates, is exactly the kind of tool the federal government should be using. I saw this up close when I was at OMB and I fully drank this Kool-Aid. The logic is compelling: (typically) the federal government processes over 22 million applications and hires over 350,000 people into public service every year. No private employer operates anywhere near that scale, which I still believe can be an asset, and pooled hiring creates the entry point to get there.
But pooled hiring has a track record (going back several administrations), and it’s uneven. Most recently, the Biden administration championed it most ambitiously during the infrastructure surge, where OPM partnered with seven agencies and hired roughly 5,000 employees, doing things like USDA hiring 39 HR specialists off a single certificate (if this sounds underwhelming to you, trust me when I say it’s mindblowing to your average hiring manager; more explained shortly). But the same period produced plenty of pooled actions that generated duplicative work, agency foot-dragging, and candidates who aged off certificates before anyone made them an offer. FAS and others have been studying these challenges in the context of the permitting workforce surge, and the problems are structural, predictable, and repeating. Also? Solvable.
The concept has promise but implementation has kept breaking in the same places. This piece is about why and about how to get it right, now, while there’s political will and active momentum to use it.
The Design Error at the Center of Everything
First, a quick explainer on how this actually works — because “pooled hiring” gets used loosely and the mechanics matter. A pooled hiring action is a competitive job announcement run either by OPM centrally or by a lead agency on behalf of multiple agencies and intended to fill multiple open positions in multiple agencies. Instead of each agency posting its own announcement, recruiting its own applicants, and running its own assessment, one announcement goes out, one applicant pool forms, and one assessment process screens candidates into a shared certificate of eligibles (government-speak for a ranked list of candidates that agencies can choose from). Agencies that have signed on to participate can then make selections from that certificate without having to run their own action from scratch. OPM-run actions (like the current Tech Force or the project manager cert) work the same way, just with OPM as the lead rather than a single agency. Either way, the cert is the output: a ranked list of candidates who have been assessed as qualified, available to any participating agency to hire from without having to solicit new resumes, review their qualifications, administer assessments, or other tedious parts of the hiring process.
That’s the theory.
The shared certificate is where most implementations stop. Agencies get a screened list and then do their own thing — their own interviews, on their own timelines, with their own offer processes. Or maybe they don’t, even when they said they would! The coordination ends at the cert. Everything downstream remains fully siloed at each agency.
This is far from the ideal that most policymakers have in mind and what many private employers do. A genuine pooled hiring action pools the whole pipeline. Recruitment, assessment, interviewing, and offers — all coordinated, all running in parallel across participating agencies. That doesn’t work for every role, but in surge situations, or for roles where agencies make dozens of hires of the same roles every year, it’s great. Agencies don’t just agree to draw from the same pool. They show up on the same interviewing days. They make offers on the same compressed timeline. Candidates who applied once get considered by many agencies simultaneously with each running its own slow-motion version of the process.
Almost nothing the federal government currently calls “pooled hiring” actually does this. The new OPM actions are no exception. Tech Force is better marketed than previous efforts, and the private-sector partnerships are genuinely new. But the selection and offer stages remain siloed at each agency and I’ll be very curious if they make selections. That’s the design flaw everything else flows from.
What Breaks When You Don’t Fix the Design
When I was at OMB, we saw these failure modes up close, in what were probably deeply frustrating meetings with the valiant program team as we learned where the seams were. Some things we saw:
Pooled hiring worked when it was a clear administration priority and had OPM and OMB supplementation. Early indicators suggest that Tech Force has success because it’s clear that the administration, the OPM director, and OPM staff are both giving it attention and smoothing implementation behind the scenes. That’s good for proof of concept, but it doesn’t show the weaknesses that can emerge when administration accountability doesn’t hold agencies to delivery on innovation hiring methods.
Agencies didn’t trust screening they didn’t run. OPM’s own guidance requires agencies making selections from another agency’s certificate to verify that the original qualification and assessment criteria are appropriate for their position. That verification step becomes a second screening — which defeats the efficiency rationale entirely. Agencies that double and triple-screened candidates created more work than if each had run its own action from scratch. The fix isn’t better guidance, it’s building trust into the design upfront, by ensuring the people trusted with the most relevant subject-matter expertise help design the assessment in the first place.
Demand didn’t stay put. Agencies raised their hands, agencies or OPM ran a resource-intensive recruitment action, and then agencies were slow to hire — or circumstances changed before they did. The August 2024 OMB/OPM hiring memo specifically directed agencies to review available shared certificates before launching new hiring actions — a discipline that, if actually followed, would force better demand alignment upfront. It mostly didn’t happen and, absent the sort of prompting we talk about later, is hard to enforce. Partly this is a culture problem, but it’s also a structural one: agencies that don’t plan for talent surges find that new hiring needs don’t align with their existing workforce plans or their capacity to recruit, assess, and onboard. You can’t opt into a pooled action and then be surprised when the pool fills.
We struggled to tell the right people, and the system didn’t either. There’s a more fundamental problem sitting underneath the demand-alignment failure: hiring managers and HR specialists often don’t hear about pooled hiring announcements at all, and when they do, it’s generally not with enough lead time to actually prepare. Pooled actions get announced through OPM memos and Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council communications that circulate at the leadership level (and boy howdy did we circulate!), but that information doesn’t reliably travel to the hiring manager who is already three weeks into drafting a job announcement for the exact role sitting in a shared cert. And when it does arrive, it arrives as information: there’s no deadline attached, no checklist triggered, no reason to stop what they’re already doing. As it stands, among the 200K+ hiring managers, most made very few hires a year or in their overall career, so learning a process with barriers to entry was challenging.
Nothing interrupts the default action.The deeper problem is that nothing in the hiring workflow itself cues anyone to look. When a hiring manager initiates a new action in the hiring system, they’re not pushed or incentivized in any systematic way to check for an existing cert. When an HR specialist begins drafting a job announcement, no flag surfaces to say: a shared certificate for this position series already exists, do you want to use it? The system simply lets them proceed. This means that even when an agency or OPM has done the work of running a pooled action and producing a cert, agencies duplicate that effort anyway; less due to indifference, but because the path of least resistance is to do what they’ve always done, and nothing in the process interrupts that default.
The fix here is partly cultural but a lot technical. The Agency Talent Portal and USA Staffing need to surface available shared certificates at the moment a hiring manager or HR specialist initiates a new action for a covered position: as a required check embedded in the workflow itself. If you’re about to post a GS-12 data scientist announcement and there’s an active governmentwide cert for that exact series and grade, the system should tell you, right then, before you proceed. Opt-out, not opt-in. The current design assumes awareness that doesn’t exist and motivation that isn’t reliable.
Pooled actions were expensive for the “owner” and the experts: While cost-saving overall, running pooled actions could be resource and time consuming for the “owner,” and particularly the subject matter experts brought in for assessment, particularly when hires were not ultimately made.
The position description bottleneck. Pooled hiring inherits whatever good and bad planning exists in agencies’ position description (PD) libraries. Even for commonly-hired roles, position descriptions are not always readily accessible and, likewise, standard assessments often don’t exist at every grade level. But it’s a bigger challenge than that: the whole GS system presumes (competencies, job task analyses, and more) that every job is highly specialized, not generalizable for cross-agencies pools. FAS documented this directly: OPM and the Permitting Council collaborated to create a pooled, cross-government announcement for Environmental Protection Specialists — one job announcement producing a candidate list many agencies could use. But the assessment became a bottleneck because standard assessments didn’t exist for each grade level in the announcement, requiring significant additional development time. This isn’t an edge case, it’s a Tuesday. Breaking! OPM Director Kupor just announced a new AI tool to generate PDs! We’ll follow with interest.
Hiring managers couldn’t get access without a permission chain. For a new hiring innovation to be adopted, you’d think that all the barriers, incentives, and opt-in/out dynamics would be aligned. You’d be wrong. Pooled hiring at a “mother may I” architecture: system passwords and access, coordinators, gating processes, intermediaries between hiring managers and shared certificates. It’s a design flaw dressed up as compliance. The same 2024 memo had to explicitly direct agencies to update hiring manager permissions in the Agency Talent Portal. That it needed to be said tells you everything about how poorly the access question had been handled. As FAS and the Niskanen Center jointly documented in their analysis of the current OPM hiring memos, the toughest tasks are also the most crucial: changing the culture around hiring to empower managers, and actually letting line managers be managers.
Talent teams could be a good idea that keeps getting launched without the authority or resources to actually work. Every administration for the past decade has called for empowered agency talent teams — small, specialized units charged with driving hiring innovation, adopting new tools like SME-QA, and coordinating participation in pooled actions. M-24-16 explicitly called for agencies to create and sustain these teams, and the current OPM Merit Hiring Plan has stood one up at the central level as well. The concept has potential but execution has been consistently undercut by the same failure mode: no committed resources, no authority to intervene, no access, and no product mindset. In understaffed agency HR offices that were not empowered to “get to yes”, the function hasn’t meshed well, and moreover, it’s arrived in a system that already lacks strong strategic workforce planning, a key enabler of its potential success.
As FAS and the Niskanen Center documented agency talent teams, OPM communications and education support, and the necessary systems changes all require people, money, and IT investment that hasn’t materialized. Announcing a mandate is not the same as funding its execution.
But underfunding isn’t the only problem. Even well-resourced talent teams have struggled when they lacked the institutional standing to actually change agency behavior. The core failure mode is assuming that having good people in the building is enough — that talent solves problems on its own, without a clear theory of change about authority, access, and how decisions get made. An agency talent team that is advisory in nature, without a direct line to hiring managers and HR decision-makers, without leadership backing when they push back against entrenched process habits, and without metrics that create accountability for adoption, is not going to move the needle on pooled hiring participation. It’s going to produce reports and hold workshops and then watch agencies do what they were already going to do.
Veterans preference created confusion that nobody addressed proactively. Preference applies differently in delegated examining versus merit promotion contexts. When agencies share certificates across those lanes, legal ambiguity creates real hesitation. This is genuinely solvable — but only if OPM issues targeted guidance with each pooled action as a standard part of the launch package. Stepping back, it’s necessary to state that any type of absolute preference is going to make pooled hiring challenging. Clarifying guidance is a Band-Aid.
Small technical barriers compound the problem. One underreported friction point: shared certificate policies can constrain agencies from sharing certs across different geographic locations designated in the original announcement, or across different hire types — temporary versus permanent. An agency running a pooled action for DC-based positions can’t easily extend that cert to field office hires. A cert issued for permanent positions doesn’t smoothly cover term appointments. These are solvable technical problems that OPM and OMB could fix through policy revision but they require someone to actually map the barriers before designing the action.
And when agencies go it alone anyway, the burden multiplies for everyone. This is the part that gets lost in discussions that treat siloed hiring as merely inefficient rather than actively harmful. When agencies that are already understaffed — particularly permitting and HR teams — don’t leverage opportunities to work together, bottlenecks compound. Pooled hiring isn’t just a convenience for well-resourced agencies. For teams that are already stretched, it’s the difference between a manageable workload and an impossible one.
Agency HR leads without the skills or network to work across agencies. Like so much else, pooled hiring depends on relationships. OPM and agencies have not carefully selected the HR managers who not only understand the potential policy barriers to working across agencies but the collaboration skills and networks to solve problems quickly.
The Assessment Question: Use the Right Tool Not the Easy One
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably heard of things like SME-QA, the greatest acronym in the hiring world. Let’s talk assessments.
The default federal hiring assessment — the self-assessment questionnaire — is effectively worthless for identifying technical talent. As Jennifer Pahlka has put it, the system has been built so that the most important knowledge is how the hiring process works instead of the knowledge needed to do the job. A nationally recognized programmer once applied to the Department of Defense and was initially rejected because their resume described real expertise in language that didn’t match OPM’s classification keywords. Meanwhile, someone who understood the system could mark themselves “expert” across every self-assessment category with no verification at all.
The Subject Matter Expert Qualification Assessment, or SME-QA, was one of the skills based hiring toolkits developed to fix this: real experts screen for real skills, with HR ensuring merit principles hold. SMEs independently review every resume. Candidates who clear the initial bar then go through further steps like structured interviews, coding exercises, or written assessments — administered by other practitioners in the field, not generalist HR staff. For technical roles going into a pooled action — data scientists, cybersecurity professionals, engineers — SME-QA paired with a shared certificate is close to the ideal design. Build the assessment once with governmentwide SME input, share the cert, and every agency draws from a pool that was actually screened by people who know the field.
But any skills based hire practice has a scaling problem that’s been documented since the first USDS pilots. The work is resource intensive for federal agencies not used to dedicating so much SME time to a hiring process. As Niskanen’s recent analysis of the Chance to Compete Act makes clear, new written assessments developed by industrial-organizational psychologists are extremely resource-intensive to produce — likely prohibitively expensive at the scale needed to cover broad swaths of the federal workforce. But there are roles and moments where such dedicated investment makes sense.
The design principle that should govern this: pooled hiring should be an opportunity to concentrate assessment burden at the enterprise level, not multiply it at the agency level. Build the assessment once, or maximize use of SME-QA time, governmentwide, for roles where it genuinely matters. Actually use them consistently rather than rebuilding from scratch at each agency. And as Niskanen argues, transform OPM’s role from compliance monitor to assessment engine: a marketplace of vetted, shared tools agencies can pull from rather than commission independently.
There’s a trust dividend here too. Agencies that contribute subject-matter experts to the assessment design have far more reason to trust the resulting certificate. Skin in the game at the assessment stage translates directly to confidence at the hiring stage.
A Note On Listening
Many successful pooled actions worked because OMB and OPM (or other senior White House offices) gave attention, capacity, authority and accountability to the process, bolstering agencies who were being asked to execute hiring with unusual flexibility and competence.
Overall, however, when agencies told OPM and OMB that pooled hiring was hard for them to execute alone, the response from the center was too often some version of: the guidance is out there, the instructions are online, that’s how the process works. Agencies described a cascade of rigidities that made implementation genuinely difficult, and we weren’t always responsive. We treated compliance problems as communication problems. If agencies weren’t doing it right, they must not have understood it correctly, so the answer was more guidance, clearer FAQs, better webinars.
That’s the wrong diagnosis. What they were telling us was that the process didn’t fit their reality and that the gap between what the policy assumed and what their operations actually looked like was wide enough that no amount of additional instruction was going to close it. When the people responsible for carrying out a policy are consistently telling you it’s hard in specific, consistent ways, the right response is to ask what’s broken in the desig.. The people designing these systems need to hear that feedback as signal instead of as resistance to be overcome.
This is the reason why the recommendations in this piece are about structural changes to how pooled hiring is designed, not about better outreach or clearer communications. Agencies don’t need another memo explaining how shared certificates work. They need a system that works in the conditions they’re actually operating in.
How to Actually Do This Right
The current OPM actions are a real opportunity. Here’s what would make them work, stated as plainly as possible.
Lock in real demand before you launch. Not expressions of interest: actual hiring commitments with funded billets and named positions. The failure mode is OPM building a pool that agencies shop from slowly or not at all. Require agencies to submit hiring forecasts before they’re included in a pooled action, and hold them to those forecasts with visible accountability.
Build assessment infrastructure before the announcement goes up. Standardized PDs, validated assessments, and clear SME selection criteria that agencies trust need to exist before the action launches. Thecentralized position description library called for in M-24-16 is the right vehicle. Critically, assessments need to exist at every grade level included in the announcement.
Build the awareness and the system prompt together. Upgrade communication on pooled hiring announcements directly to hiring managers and HR specialists. But communication alone won’t fix this. The Agency Talent Portal and USA Staffing need to surface available shared certificates at the moment a hiring manager or HR specialist initiates a new action for a covered position series and grade. This should be a required check embedded in the workflow itself — before they proceed with drafting a new announcement. If you’re about to post a GS-12 data scientist announcement and an active government-wide cert exists for that series and grade, the system should tell you right then. The current design assumes awareness that doesn’t exist and motivation that isn’t reliable.
Pool the interviewing, not just the screening. Coordinated interviewing days. Same-day or 48-hour offer authority for hiring managers. Agencies competing for the same candidates simultaneously, not sequentially. Cross-agency onboarding cohorts that start together and build peer networks from day one. This is what actually compresses time-to-hire.
Fund and empower talent teams as implementation infrastructure. Every idea in this piece requires someone inside each major agency whose job it is to make that happen. That’s what a talent team is for. But talent teams need three things that they rarely get: a dedicated budget line, direct access to the hiring managers and HR leadership they’re supposed to influence, and metrics that hold them accountable for adoption rates and actual hiring outcomes rather than process activity. A talent team of one person with a shared budget and no senior sponsor is not an implementation strategy.
Give hiring managers direct access. Update the Agency Talent Portal permissions. Eliminate the intermediary layers between a hiring manager and a cert they’re authorized to use. Hold managers accountable for whether they hire. Culture change here is real but it follows structural change: when managers have direct access and clear authority, behavior shifts.
Make follow-through a metric with teeth. Agencies that opt in and don’t hire should have to explain why, publicly, to the President’s Management Council.The voluntary participation problem doesn’t get solved with please-and-thank-you memos.
Run continuous pooled actions for common roles. HR specialists, contracting officers, environmental specialists, IT managers — these aren’t surge needs, they’re permanent ones. A cert that’s always open, with agencies drawing from it as needs emerge, is far more useful than a prestige program that runs once a year and then goes quiet.
The Bigger Lens
(with thanks to Gabe Menchaca and Peter Bonner for making the stronger argument)
Pooled hiring is a microcosm of a question the federal government seesaws on constantly: what does it mean to govern as an enterprise rather than as several hundred agencies that happen to share a payroll source?
This requires admitting something those of us who have worked in the center don’t always say plainly: agencies and their leaders are protecting their turf for understandable reasons. They are accountable for their missions, their budgets, and their outcomes. When a pooled hiring action asks them to trust a cert they didn’t design, coordinate interviews around a shared calendar, and accept that they won’t get every single thing they want, and that’s a big ask! The trade may be worth making, but it doesn’t happen automatically, and the center has not historically done a good job making the case for why, or building the conditions under which agencies can actually say yes.
That’s a collective action problem, and it’s harder than it looks. It requires genuine leadership alignment across all the agencies involved, and a center that has made the benefit of cooperation concrete and visible rather than just asserting it in guidance. Too often the response to non-participation has been more documentation rather than an honest look at what the actual barrier was. That’s compounded by a structural problem worth naming: agencies are accountable for their HR outcomes but OPM holds much of the compliance authority over how hiring gets done. Accountability without authority produces exactly the behavior you’d expect.
The federal government has demonstrated it can operate differently. The BIL surge, the data scientist certs, USDA’s HR specialists (and maybe Tech Force) worked because the conditions were right: shared design, locked-in demand, leadership alignment, enough urgency to overcome the default toward agency autonomy. The question is whether we can build those conditions deliberately rather than stumbling into them during a crisis. That requires a solid theory of change about how cross-agency infrastructure actually gets adopted: one that takes agency self-interest seriously as a design constraint rather than an obstacle to be overcome by memo. Get that right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.
Get it right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.