Federal hiring managers have a new tech resource at their disposal, designed to streamline one early step in the government’s often burdensome and lengthy recruitment process.
The Office of Personnel Management on Monday rolled out a new AI tool, called USA Class, that can generate and fine-tune position descriptions for hiring managers to use in job announcements. OPM said the tool will help reduce time-to-hire and administrative work for HR employees.
USA Class will be available in early May on the USA Staffing platform, OPM said in a press release. It will be accessible, at no additional cost, to all agencies that are already using the federal hiring platform.
Although it’s an important early step in the federal hiring process, OPM Director Scott Kupor called the creation of position descriptions “one of the most stubborn bottlenecks standing between agencies and the talent they desperately need.”
“Hiring is still hard, and I don’t suspect AI will fully solve that problem in the near term,” Kupor wrote Monday in a blog post. “But we are using AI to streamline the tasks for which computers are very capable and free up time for HR professionals and hiring managers to focus on the people-facing aspects of recruiting and assessing candidates.”
In the federal workforce, a position description details the work a job will entail, and requires coordination between hiring managers and HR staff to define a job’s expectations. It describes the general duties and responsibilities of a role, as well as where a position falls within an agency’s larger organizational hierarchy. HR offices use position descriptions to determine a job’s title, occupational series, grade and level.
But historically, creating federal position descriptions can lead to confusion, duplication or otherwise wasted time and effort, according to some federal HR experts. One industry expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be able to speak candidly, said part of the challenge stems from agencies’ lack of “job architecture” — or, in other words, not having a clearly defined understanding of the different jobs required within an agency, the skills framework for those jobs at various levels, and where skills are either sufficient or missing.
“If you are a hiring manager, you would want to have a manageable library of position descriptions that you could go to and just pick the closest one — maybe you tweak it, and then you’re off to the races,” the industry expert told Federal News Network. “But because the government doesn’t have those things in place, every time you want to hire somebody, you have to start from scratch. That’s why it becomes so painful. You can end up with two million different position descriptions and that becomes completely unmanageable.”
OPM said the new AI software has been fed thousands of prior position descriptions that federal hiring managers have written manually. The tool will give hiring managers the option of either creating a position description based on existing language or generating one from scratch. The AI software will provide prompts for hiring managers, who can answer questions about the responsibilities and duties of a position, what skills will be required and more. Users will then be able to revise and edit the position descriptions, as needed, by requesting further changes from the AI tool.
“If OPM rolls it out the way that they’re talking about, and have it be a free part of USA Staffing, I expect that will be a pretty easy sell,” the industry expert said. “But we haven’t seen the user interface or how well it works. If it’s really clunky, that could frustrate users. I would rather assume that they’re going to do a good job, but the proof is in the pudding.”
In a video promoting the new AI tool, OPM said USA Class has the potential to generate a position description in half the time of a manually created description.
“USA Class is built on OPM’s federal classification standards from the ground up — so every factor level and position description it generates is accurate, compliant and ready to use,” Kupor wrote.
The rollout of USA Class is one part of the Trump administration’s “Federal HR 2.0” initiative, which involves broader goals of modernizing federal recruitment and shifting agencies to skills-based hiring practices.
One of OPM’s other efforts is to consolidate the government’s 119 HR IT systems into one governmentwide platform. The agency has also outlined plans to update and trim down the more than 600 occupational series across government.
The modernization initiative further entails a new HR shared service center at OPM, offering agencies access — for a fee — to a suite of “vetted” IT tools meant to streamline human capital management capabilities.
“We’re encouraging people to look at processes that they’ve been doing, and what they can do to actually just help technology make them more efficient,” Kupor said in an interview this week on The Federal Drive. “Part of our job as managers is to make sure we figure out ways in which we can take things off employees’ plates that are not value-added. We can use technology or organizational changes or process changes to enable them to actually be more productive and not do things that, quite frankly, might be rote activities that might very well be able to be done through the use of technology.”
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email drew.friedman@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at drewfriedman.11
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