Federal AI Chiefs Laud Hiring Authorities in Search for AI Talent

Artificial intelligence’s boon in government has prompted federal leaders to get creative in the search for AI talent as it competes with the private sector.

Office of Personnel Management Acting Chief AI Officer Guy Cavallo noted how the agency is using some of its new hiring authorities to acquire new talent, including direct hire authority,  speeding up the hiring process and improving the USAJobs site.

“I see AI changing the way government functions. Me being OPM, we’re looking at what HR functions can AI help. We definitely are looking at integrating it into USA Jobs, which I moved to the cloud this year. You’re no longer on premise. You’ll notice it runs faster and it’s never down. We can do a lot more to help our citizens by leveraging AI chatbots,” he said at the Chief AI Officer Summit in Washington, D.C. earlier this month.

OPM in April also released skills-based hiring guidance and competency model, which allows agencies to hire solely based on skills rather than prerequisites like a college degree.

The new hiring authority has been instrumental to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS AI Corps Director Michael Boyce said it’s been instrumental to his agency’s ability to find and retain AI talent.

Boyce said he hopes government improves how it advertises open positions and aligns the practice to the private sector.

“We need to stop posting positions for public job announcements under the title IT specialist,” Boyce said at the summit. “When we last posted, our last posting was artificial intelligence technology expert. Many of those folks do not even understand what an IT specialist is. I challenge the person to go to your major technology company and find an IT specialist listed under their career page. We need to use the same titles for jobs that the private sector does.”

White House Assistant Director for AI Policy Olivia Zhu said it has hired over 200 AI technologists since October 2023 as a result of the AI Talent Surge, with plans to hire even more.

“We’re talking about these programs within government, but we also want to empower pipelines like academia. We want to empower pipelines like fellowship programs outside of government to bring more people into government to really expand the pathways for the AI talent search,” Zhu said at the summit.

Zhu said the administration’s creation of the CAIO Council has empowered CAIOs to share strategies that have been successful in implementing AI into their agencies.

“Turns out, a lot of chief AI officers are looking at similar problems, which makes a lot of sense. Everyone gets a lot of comments from the public. There’s similar solutions in how every agency can solve that,” Zhu said.

Stephanie Hunter, deputy director of defense digital talent management, development and training at the DOD’s Chief Digital and AI Office, focused on the importance of supporting new talent once they are hired and onboarded into the federal government.

“We also have to support foundational understanding of data and AI in our existing workforce, as well as supporting their own career progression into new roles in the future as well,” Hunter said at the summit.

DOD has provided foundational and self-paced lessons to employees on topics like data literacy, digital literacy and AI literacy at no-cost in order to help develop a common understanding of data and AI across the department.

“It’s really inspiring to see folks move from a place of fear about over the risk of AI into a place of understanding the technology and wanting to know more about the problems that it can solve within our agency or their service,” Hunter said.