The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has issued guidance on adopting skills-based hiring practices to fill federal government jobs. Historically, the government has based a candidate’s hiring eligibility on formal education or candidates’ assessments of how their skills related to educational requirements.
Skills-based hiring broadens the labor pool, according to Kiran Ahuja, OPM director.
“By focusing on what an applicant can do—and not where they learned to do it—skills-based hiring will expand talent pools by making it easier for applicants without a bachelor’s degree to demonstrate their skills,” Ahuja said in a news release, “and will help remove barriers to employment for historically underrepresented groups.”
