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Federal hiring managers now have access to a new technology tool aimed at simplifying one of the initial stages in the government’s frequently cumbersome and drawn-out hiring process.
The Office of Personnel Management launched a new AI-powered tool called USA Class on Monday. It can create and refine position descriptions for hiring managers to include in job postings. According to OPM, the tool will help shorten the time-to-hire and reduce administrative workload for HR staff.
OPM announced in a press release that USA Class will be available in early May on the USA Staffing platform. All agencies already using the federal hiring platform will be able to access it at no extra charge.
Although drafting position descriptions is a crucial early step in the federal hiring process, OPM Director Scott Kupor described it as “one of the most persistent bottlenecks standing between agencies and the talent they urgently need.”
“Hiring remains difficult, and I don’t expect AI will completely resolve that issue anytime soon,” Kupor wrote in a blog post on Monday. “However, we’re leveraging AI to handle tasks that computers excel at, which frees up HR professionals and hiring managers to concentrate on the interpersonal elements of recruiting and evaluating candidates.”
Within the federal workforce, a position description outlines the work a job involves and requires collaboration between hiring managers and HR personnel to establish a job’s requirements. It covers the general duties and responsibilities of a role, as well as where a position fits within an agency’s broader organizational structure. HR offices rely on position descriptions to determine a job’s title, occupational series, grade, and level.
However, historically, developing federal position descriptions has often resulted in confusion, redundancy, or otherwise wasted time and effort, according to some federal HR specialists. One industry expert, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said part of the difficulty comes from agencies’ absence of “job architecture” — meaning they lack a well-defined understanding of the various roles needed within an agency, the skills framework for those roles at different levels, and where skills are adequate or lacking.
“If you’re a hiring manager, you’d want a manageable collection of position descriptions you could browse and simply select the closest match — perhaps make a few adjustments, and then you’re ready to go,” the industry expert told Federal News Network. “But since the government doesn’t have those structures in place, every time you need to hire someone, you have to begin from zero. That’s what makes it so painful. You can end up with two million different position descriptions, and that becomes entirely unmanageable.”
OPM stated that the new AI software has been trained on thousands of previously written position descriptions that federal hiring managers had created manually. The tool will offer hiring managers the choice of either building a position description using existing language or generating one entirely from scratch. The AI software will present prompts for hiring managers, who can respond to questions about the responsibilities and duties of a position, what skills will be needed, and more. Users will then be able to modify and adjust the position descriptions as necessary by requesting additional changes from the AI tool.
“If OPM introduces it the way they’ve described and makes it a free component of USA Staffing, I anticipate that will be a fairly easy adoption,” the industry expert said. “But we haven’t seen the user interface or how effectively it performs. If it’s truly cumbersome, that could frustrate users. I’d prefer to assume they’ll do a solid job, but the results will speak for themselves.”
In a video showcasing the new AI tool, OPM said USA Class has the potential to produce a position description in half the time it takes to create one manually.
“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 introduction of USA Class is one component of the Trump administration’s “Federal HR 2.0” initiative, which encompasses broader objectives of modernizing federal recruitment and transitioning agencies toward skills-based hiring practices.
Among OPM’s other initiatives is consolidating the government’s 119 HR IT systems into a single governmentwide platform. The agency has also laid out plans to update and reduce the more than 600 occupational series across government.
The modernization initiative also includes a new HR shared service center at OPM, providing agencies access — for a fee — to a collection of “vetted” IT tools designed to streamline human capital management capabilities.
“We’re encouraging people to examine the processes they’ve been carrying out and consider what they can do to let technology make them more efficient,” Kupor said in an interview this week on The Federal Drive. “Part of our responsibility as managers is to find ways to remove tasks from employees’ workloads that don’t add value. We can use technology, organizational changes, or process improvements to help them be more productive and avoid doing things that, frankly, might be repetitive tasks that could very well be handled through 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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