Artificial intelligence may become a more prominent part of the federal hiring process, following new guidance from the Office of Personnel Management.

In a memo Thursday, OPM encouraged agencies to more widely adopt AI tools in their recruitment efforts. Without increasing AI use, agencies may be compromising the effectiveness and efficiency of the federal hiring process, OPM said.

Despite 2025 guidance from the Office of Management and Budget defining “high-impact” standards for AI usage, agencies have been “overly cautious” about using the technology in hiring, said Adam Starr, OPM’s CIO and a senior advisor.

“Too often, agencies were defaulting to the view that any use of AI in hiring was subject to the high-impact standard. In reality, that is not the case,” Starr said Thursday in a blog post. “Instead, the inclusion of AI as a complement to human judgment is not only acceptable but leads to better outcomes.”

OPM’s latest guidance details which aspects of federal hiring do not generally need to be considered high-impact AI use cases. While setting some guardrails, the guidance also describes where and how agencies should consider implementing more AI tools in hiring.

As examples, OPM identified four elements of the hiring process that it views as generally appropriate for agencies to introduce AI — in a way that still keeps human review central and ensures AI is not the “principal basis” for a final hiring decision or action. Those four areas are:

• Drafting content for position descriptions and job announcements
• Screening resumes and supporting candidate qualification and eligibility reviews
• Conducting pre-offer quality-control reviews
• Analyzing post-hire outcomes, such as time-to-hire

In contrast, using AI in areas like final hiring decisions, promotions, performance management, discipline and reassignments would in most cases be considered high-impact, OPM said.

Even when AI use is not considered high-impact, agencies still need to regularly validate whether AI tools are working appropriately and providing correct outputs, OPM added.

Adopting AI tools in various aspects of the hiring process, with the correct guardrails, is meant to help expedite and improve federal recruitment overall. OPM’s memo this week builds on the Trump administration’s 2025 merit hiring plan, which outlined expectations for agencies to improve their hiring processes, including by reducing the average governmentwide time-to-hire to 80 days.

According to the memo, OPM is expected to soon roll out new AI features across its platforms including USAJobs, USA Staffing and USA Hire. Those tools will lead to “improved search capability, plain language job titles and job descriptions, and other tools to help job seekers connect with federal jobs,” Starr said.

But in the meantime, OPM said agencies should still move forward with increasing their use of AI in recruitment.

“We are not waiting. The path is clear. We are streamlining hiring to build a smoother experience for job seekers and a quicker, stronger hiring pipeline for managers,” Starr said. “The American people deserve an efficient hiring process that utilizes AI to make sure that we get the right talent in the right seats.”

Gabe Menchaca, a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, said the OPM guidance will likely help agencies feel more comfortable experimenting with AI in the federal hiring process.

“One big challenge we have in HR is that agencies are super risk-averse. A lot of the time, even when experimentation is possible, we’ve conditioned agencies to wait for OPM to say that something is OK,” Menchaca, formerly an OMB official during the Biden administration, said in an interview. “For OPM to help agencies sort out what doesn’t count as high-risk inside of the framework that the government has given itself is, in general, quite a good impulse.”

While acknowledging that AI poses a lot of promise for supporting areas of the hiring process such as drafting job announcements and position descriptions, Menchaca said agencies may have a harder time with one aspect of the OPM guidance: implementing AI in resume screening and candidate assessments.

“That one is going to be probably the most difficult for agencies to navigate. But I think that’s just an extension of the long-standing challenge we’ve had with getting subject-matter review into the process,” he said. “Anytime a subject-matter expert is not involved, you always run the risk — whether it’s a non-expert human or a non-expert AI — of missing something that an SME would know, but an HR person wouldn’t.”

Jenny Mattingley, vice president of public policy and stakeholder engagement at the Partnership for Public Service, said before moving forward with AI adoption, she sees a bigger question in the need for reform to the federal hiring process overall.

“AI is a tool in the toolbox, but you have to actually streamline and fix the hiring process first,” Mattingley said in an interview. “Are you using AI to automate an already broken process, rather than just making the process work better?”

There are opportunities for AI to enhance agencies’ hiring processes, Mattingley said. But at the same time, she said more training and development will be necessary before AI tools can be used effectively.

“HR needs to have a strategy and a process for how they’re going to deploy it before just deploying it at scale,” she said. “I do think there are places where AI can certainly be helpful, but I do think these are areas that need to be piloted and evaluated.”

Both Mattingley and Menchaca raised concerns about federal HR offices’ staffing and capacity to take on new tools and training, including with the push for more AI adoption.

“If we never got a chance to get HR people comfortable, they will default back to the standard way of doing things by hand — not because they don’t want to change, but because we’ve never given them the tools,” Menchaca said. “I think that just comes down to OPM and agencies really needing to continue to take seriously the health of the HR workforce and continual improvement and upskilling among that workforce.”

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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