Federal hiring has long tested even the most patient applicants. Ten months at the Government Accountability Office to get a job, nine months at the Office of Personnel Management.
“You can’t ask someone to put their life on hold waiting for an uncertain decision for 10 months,” said Taka Ariga, a former GAO and OPM official and a panelist at the Oct. 23 Federal Innovation Summit.
Now, artificial intelligence is beginning to change that.
Organized by Cornerstone, a learning technology company, the event brought together government and industry leaders to discuss how AI can modernize hiring, not by replacing people but by cutting friction from a system that often shuts qualified candidates out.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Ariga, whose most recent role was chief AI officer and chief data officer at OPM. “Not only can we use AI to accelerate and improve the process, but because of the prevalence of deepfake and misinformation, it also presents challenges for us to source through, especially with the volume of resumes that we get.”
He pointed to the 2210 job series, a catchall category for federal tech roles that includes everything from database administrators to AI engineers.
“That job series is so wide you can drive three school buses side by side and ram right through,” he said. “You use 2210 to hire a database administrator. You use 2210 to hire data engineers, and they’re categorically different skill sets. But if you read 10 position descriptions under 2210, you get 10 different ones. There’s no consistency.”
That’s where AI could help, he said. It can standardize job descriptions, match skills to roles, and help applicants see how their background fits without decoding federal jargon. It can format federal resumes, flag plagiarism or fake experience, and guide career paths so technical experts — like AI engineers or database administrators — aren’t lumped into one generic “IT” track.
But technology can only do so much. In the federal space, moving into a new career often means starting over, even for seasoned employees already performing at higher grade levels, said Matisha Montgomery, chief learning officer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“If I wanted tomorrow to become a data scientist or an AI engineer, I’m not going to qualify at the highest grade levels; I’m going to qualify at the entry level if I get the training,” she said.
She said the government must figure out how to help people “reinvent themselves” and move into the roles agencies need most.