Agencies look to AI to improve hiring and build workforce skills

Artificial intelligence and other technological advances are streamlining federal hiring and improving employee skills assessments, senior agency human capital officials said at an event on Wednesday sponsored by the software company SAP. The event was produced by GovExec, Government Executive’s parent company.

Arron Helm, the chief human capital officer for the General Services Administration, said that AI has helped whittle down the amount of time it takes HR officials and hiring managers to develop General Schedule job classifications. 

“As we're having our AI do the initial takes, draft the initial narrative and do an initial factor evaluation, our teams still need to go back in there, they still need to work it and massage it and come to agreement, but now we're averaging about two hours to do what was taking six to eight hours,” he said. 

Helm added that his agency does 500 to 600 job classifications annually, so the resulting time savings contribute significantly to GSA Administrator Ed Forst’s “million-hour moonshot” to identify one million work hours that can be eliminated, optimized or automated. The CHCO said that officials, so far, have found 600,000 hours. 

Colleen Heller-Stein, the executive director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council and former deputy Treasury CHCO, expressed optimism that a developing effort to consolidate more than 100 agency personnel systems into a single platform would enable the government to pinpoint employees across agencies who could best respond to various challenges. 

“I worked in an agency that dealt with financial crises when they popped up,” she said. “When we have something pop up and we've got to stand something up really quickly, thinking about the federal government as a whole, we might be able to more easily tap into talent that isn't right in front of us if we have a repository of [employees’] skills.” 

Both officials praised the Trump administration’s pivot away from applicants self-assessing their skills and move toward formal evaluations, particularly for roles related to AI. 

“This is seen as a return to merit, where people are showing what they know, not just saying, ‘Hey, I know all of this,’” Heller-Stein said. 

Helm added that the feedback from hiring managers about the changes is “phenomenal” and that “[candidate] quality is so much higher than what they’re accustomed to in the past.”  

Mid-career development 

While both the Trump and Biden administrations prioritized bringing early-career talent into government, Heller-Stein and Helm emphasized the need for agencies to develop mid-career employees, arguing that focusing on one group doesn’t have to come at the expense of the other. 

Heller-Stein said that, following the president’s cuts to the civil service, mid-career employees “are moving into leadership roles sometimes more quickly than may have been anticipated” and there’s a need to “build back that bench.”  

She noted that Tech Force, a new initiative to recruit early-career technologists into government, also involves bringing on private sector managers to serve temporarily at agencies. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said in May that hiring was lagging for the program with only three or four mid-career workers in the onboarding process. 

Helm touted a program called “GSA labs” through which early- and mid-career employees from different teams work together on agency-wide problems, such as developing a way to measure AI value and strengthening federal contract oversight. 

“Talent development is something that's often been underfunded and underfocused in the government, so we are really building out and investing in our internal talent development pipelines,” he said. “We talk a lot about talent acquisition, but just as important, if not more important, is continuing to grow our internal talent.”