Hiring for talent, not for a degree
A glimmer of good news from the Trump Administration this week
It’s been recently reported that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the human resources agency for the entire federal government — has begun removing degree requirements from federal technology jobs.
As a team pooling much of the expertise in government tech implementation from the last three presidential administrations, Searchlight’s Tech Viaduct has been frequently critical of the Trump Administration and DOGE’s brazen attacks on public workers and institutions. This move by OPM, however, is welcome news — and when you’re right, you’re right.
Getting the right talent into the right place at the right time is one of the hardest parts of any technology project. It’s hard even when you have an unlimited budget and a coveted brand, as I found when I helped manage hiring at Google. For the Feds, it’s worse.
The government hamstrings itself by offering little flexibility in compensation, slow and demeaning hiring processes, and a brand that has a mixed reputation in the best of times.
Hiring requirements that don’t have a direct bearing on selecting for competence make it even harder to staff critical functions that protect our country and keep it running. Four-year degree requirements for tech jobs needlessly lock out two-thirds of Americans from one of the best career opportunities on the market.
Selecting for skills is better than relying on credentials. Unfortunately, it’s also much more difficult than checking off a list of resume requirements. One-dimensional coding tests in the style of “LeetCode” won’t cut it. Actual experience programming a computer is important, but most government IT jobs require overseeing contractors and managing a large set of stakeholders with poorly defined needs.
Generalized problem-solving skills and the ability to coordinate and cooperate with diverse people are more valuable than any particular technical niche. And to whatever extent AI takes over coding tasks, the interpersonal skillsets will only grow more important.
Detecting these qualities in an interview process is difficult enough, and doing it in the form of a test — as OPM now plans — is probably impossible.1 Instead, OPM should create a process where the first stages accept a wide range of skills and aptitudes. Then, the final decisions should be made with input from hiring managers and peer evaluations. In short: people that currently do the job should interview the candidates. This is a best practice currently deployed across the industry.
This system is far from perfect. Those of us that have hired hundreds of engineers would say it’s the worst system except for all the others that have been tried. There is frankly no way to predict a person’s performance, advancement, or happiness decades into the future based on one snapshot at hiring time.
That’s why the best hiring process in the world will not solve the problems caused by bad management. Retention, promotion, compensation, and accountability in the federal system all need improvement.
In fact, better management will reduce the pressure on hiring to be unrealistically perfect. We have all known managers that tolerate subpar performance because they think it will be too hard to fill an open position, and Searchlight will be proposing major management reforms through its Tech Viaduct work in the coming months.
Finally, and importantly, we have to point out that Democrats were discussing degree requirements at least as far back as 2023. Once again, we knew what needed to be done and left the ball at the one-yard line, leaving an easy win to be picked up by the Trump Administration.
The next administration will have the herculean task to rebuild the mechanisms of good government, after years of mismanagement and, in some cases, outright destruction. Anyone seeking a way out of the current morass must demand that future administrations do better — even, and especially, when it’s your own team.
Despite what OPM said, “formal assessments” are hardly a new idea. Selection by examination was the basis of the entire 1883 Pendleton Act reform.
 |
|
Nice concept, but of course the key is to develop a real strategy for carrying it out, which involves a lot more than simply advocating that the government do so. In addition, as was briefly mentioned in the article, a couple of other details are also important. First, communication is perhaps the most important skill an employee can possess. I have worked with a number of brilliant engineers, who lack good communication skills and their careers suffered for it. And of course, this involves a lot more than simply being able to stand in front of decision makers and deliver a presentation. This skill is not typically acquired outside of an educational system, so how will a prospective employee who either did not attend college, or just "learned to code" compensate? Second, testing for particular skill sets is a possibility, but doing so goes well beyond a typical job application. In the age of AI and sophisticated cheating methods, developing this testing is a real challenge. Correspondingly, properly assessing and rewarding employees based on merit principles is another challenge, especially for managers who are not technically oriented. Again, the devil is in the details. Thus, the historical emphasis on college degrees. At least with a a degree, certain minimal standards are likely ensured. Perhaps the real solution involves (1) reforming college degrees to better reflect industry (and government) needs, and (2) making college more affordable?