OPM: Trump’s hiring questions ‘mandatory’ to ask, but optional to answer

By Jory Heckman

The Office of Personnel Management says new questions for federal job candidates, asking how they will advance the Trump administration’s policies, will appear on nearly all job applications, but candidates can still choose not to answer them without being penalized.

OPM is telling agencies it is “mandatory” to include the Trump administration’s four new essay questions on nearly all applications on USAJobs, as part of the federal hiring process.

Those questions, outlined under the administration’s Merit Hiring Plan, ask candidates how they would “advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities,” and to name “one or two executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you,” and how candidates will help implement them if hired.

The Trump administration released this plan in late May to ensure that “only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans are hired to the Federal service.”

In follow-up guidance, however, OPM downplayed the importance of the essays as just one piece of a candidate’s overall application. The HR agency said it’s optional for job candidates to answer the essays, and that candidates won’t be disqualified from consideration if they skip them.

Roseanna Ciarlante, director of OPM’s hiring experience group, told federal human resources officials in a training session Thursday that hiring managers and agency leaders will review the essay responses when finalizing candidates for a job offer, adding that “this is a very specific priority for this administration to have this information, prior to making a final offer.”

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“Us asking is mandatory. We have to include these questions, unless they’ve been specifically exempt. Applicants have the option to respond,” Ciarlante said in a recording of the session, obtained by Federal News Network. “I think some people thought when the guidance came out, it was optional. It’s not optional. We have to ask the questions, but it’s optional whether or not an applicant can choose to respond.”

Ciarlante said agencies are not required, but “encouraged to still use these questions,” when assessing candidates for promotions.

The four essay questions appear on many, but not all, job postings currently on USAJobs.com. Most agencies are still under a governmentwide hiring freeze, which President Donald Trump has extended twice since taking office. The freeze is scheduled to end Oct. 15. One analysis shows that the essay questions appear on 849 job postings on USAJobs — just over 4% of all questionnaires currently available on the site.

OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover told Federal News Network in a statement that the Merit Hiring Plan “requires the use of four short, free response essay questions for all job opportunity announcements.”

During the question-and-answer portion of the training session, Ciarlante said the audience of about 5,000 federal HR officials “had a lot of questions still” about the four new essay prompts.

OPM said in a press release earlier this month that all USAJobs postings will now include a statement that, “candidates should be committed to improving the efficiency of the federal government, passionate about the ideals of our American republic, and committed to upholding the rule of law and the United States Constitution.”

In June, OPM told agencies that officials should treat responses to these questions the same way they’d consider the inclusion of a cover letter.

“The questions give candidates an opportunity to provide additional information about themselves, their background, and dedication to public service, but must not be used as a means of determining whether the candidate fulfills the qualifications of a position,” OPM wrote in its June 23 guidance to federal HR officials.

OPM wrote that the questions “must not be used to impose an ideological litmus test on candidates,” and that a candidate “will not be disqualified or screened out” if they don’t answer the questions.

If applicants respond to the questions, they must certify that they answered them in their own words, and didn’t rely on large language models like ChatGPT to complete the essays.

The Merit Hiring Plan also directs agencies to make hires in 80 days or less, on average. OPM data shows the governmentwide time-to-hire average was 101 days in fiscal 2024, and remained relatively unchanged in recent years.

To help agencies make faster hiring decisions, OPM is developing standard position descriptions for the most common federal jobs associated with 135 job series and grades. It’s also urging agencies to rely on pooled hiring and shared certificates to expedite hiring decisions.

“We’re trying to balance the need for speed, but with the quality of the hire,” Ciarlante said.

The governmentwide hiring strategy directs agencies to cast a wider net to recruit the next generation of federal employees. Less than 9% of the federal workforce is age 30 or younger, according to the Pew Research Center.

OPM and the White House are calling on agencies to focus their recruitment efforts on state universities, religious colleges and universities, and community colleges — and reach out to students at high schools, trade and technical schools, homeschooling groups, faith-based groups and 4-H youth programs about careers in the federal workforce.

OPM is also eliminating self-assessments from federal job applications by the end of the fiscal year. Ciarlante said the agency has been phasing out these self-assessments since 2020, and that they often “create an opportunity for applicants to inflate their scores.”

“We recognized that not all occupational questionnaires are bad. But unfortunately, the majority use those default scale responses for applicants, when you’re selecting, ‘I know nothing about this task,’ or ‘I have had education or training in performing this task,’” she said. “It really leads to a list of candidates that may meet the qualifications, but not really have the specific experience that we need for them to be successful.”