Hiring: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

Even with all the chips stacked in your favor, federal hiring is still too hard.

For a government initiative, the CHIPS Program Office moved fast. We took an average of 67 days to bring on talent, besting the government benchmark of 80 days and an average exceeding 100. Early on, we had set an ambitious but necessary goal of hiring 135 people by September 2023; we ended up hiring 149 people in that period, exceeding our goal by more than 10%.¹

So imagine my surprise when, in the first Inspector General report on our program, the IG scolded us for not having written a “comprehensive workforce plan.” In the title, no less.

The IG report both praised and chastised us. On the one hand, the IG acknowledged that we had surpassed our hiring goals for both the CHIPS Program Office (CPO) and the CHIPS Research and Development Office (CRDO), and outlined how the Office of Human Resources Management increased staffing to support our hiring surge. But the report put greater emphasis on our failure to document our workforce plan. The expectation was that we should waste precious capacity on documentation, rather than on the work of actually hiring folks.

Why was oversight dinging us for moving fast? Congress clearly wanted us to act swiftly to address a massive national security risk. If we had paused to write the workforce think piece the IG wanted, we never could have delivered the program. We saw this time and time again: many systems in government are designed to move slowly. The fear of waste, fraud, and abuse (and, let’s be honest, headline risk) is embedded in nearly every process. This manifests in requirements like detailed, a priori planning documents, and a stringent division of duties that breaks down tasks into tiny sub-units, without overarching ownership. For fear of favoritism — or even the perception of it — government hiring processes tend to prize risk management over both efficiency and outcomes. But CHIPS benefitted from some unusual structural advantages that other programs would benefit from replicating. And we were glad to take the oversight hit to get the job done.

How we built for speed

Prior to my work on CHIPS, I had been through my share of federal hiring processes across multiple agencies. When I became the 7^th official CPO employee in January 2023, I was pumped to learn that we were playing with a strong hand that would let us hire quickly: (1) ample resources; (2) special hiring authorities; (3) the right organizational home; and (4) centralized tracking.

Resources

We had ample funding for hiring. While our administrative cap was the same 2% that many supplemental programs get, 2% of $39 billion goes quite far. Scale made all the difference. It meant we could hire as many staff as we actually needed without the usual tradeoffs between positions.

Funding made everything else possible. We could have done everything we list below and more, but without the money and headcount, it would be game over.

Authorities

We also had special hiring authorities, which let us move faster than most traditional hiring processes allow:

• CHIPS 25: Most significantly, the CHIPS Act designated an authority known as CHIPS 25, which allowed us to very quickly bring on 25 people at pay levels indexed to the Vice President’s salary — substantially higher than most federal pay bands.² That authority was critical to attracting candidates who made two to four times more in the private sector. They were still taking a pay cut, but CHIPS 25 let us offer something slightly more palatable.

• Direct hire authority: We also secured Direct Hire Authority (DHA), and used it to our advantage. The Office of Personnel Management can grant a DHA when an agency faces a critical hiring need or a severe shortage of candidates. In practice, a DHA lets you skip the most rigid parts of the traditional competitive hiring process, letting HR and hiring managers quickly evaluate and select more suitable candidates.³ But the efficiency gains depend on how the authority is implemented: different agencies interpret the rules based on accumulated lore and risk aversion (sometimes due to a single bad audit finding). For example, some colleagues pointed out that DHA’s public posting requirements don’t include posting to USAJobs. We couldn’t take that shortcut because NIST required we go the normal USAJobs route.
  
  Rather than fight it, we adapted: we used “soft postings” on other sites (such as LinkedIn) to generate interest and identify strong candidates early. We then published the formal posting for a short window once we knew we had a solid pool. This strategy was compliant but let us move quickly.
  
  DHA was ultimately invaluable to CHIPS, but organizational baggage can shape what’s possible within the same legal authority.

• Excepted service: Our final prized tool was excepted service authority, which creates new categories of positions outside Title 5.⁴ New excepted service positions require the agency to justify why standard hiring rules don’t work for the proposed positions, OPM to approve the exception, and notice in the Federal Register. This differs from DHA, which operates as a procedural modification to the standard competitive process.⁵
  
  Once established, hiring for excepted service positions is about as efficient as it gets: the hiring manager submits a resume that meets the requirements of the job and required paperwork, the HR team processes it, and quickly you have a new employee. We thought carefully about how to allocate our 50 excepted service slots, using them where speed mattered most. We gave every leadership team member at least a handful of slots, but otherwise we prioritized the investments and strategy teams. We knew we’d need them onboarded well before applications from companies started coming in.

Working with OPM to get both direct hire and excepted service authorities took way longer than it should have. It required formal memos, escalation to the agency leadership, and multiple follow-ups. And we had to justify which position series and grades we wanted each authority for up front. Sometimes we’d be quite far along in designing a position, only to realize it didn’t fit into the DHA or excepted service series we’d been granted. We’d have to start over.

We were initially granted 75 DHA slots and 50 excepted service slots. By the end of summer 2024, we came close to running out of DHA, so we went back to OPM and eventually got another 200 slots. Without CHIPS 25, direct hire, and excepted service, we would have been dead in the water.

It helped that Secretary Raimondo herself was focused on personnel. She helped to close many key recruits and encouraged a risk-taking mindset. That expectation from the top informed our approach and sent a strong message to our agency partners: we needed to do whatever it took to bring people on board for this critical mission.

Choosing the right organizational home

We also benefited from strategic organizational placement. We were embedded into NIST, rather than established as a new bureau. This granted us two crucial advantages:

• NIST had the most competent operations team in the Commerce Department. Its senior ops leaders were experienced and savvy government operators. They understood the priority of our mission and helped accelerate our processes.

• NIST’s pay structure gave us more control in designing pay packages. Unlike many other agencies, which operate under the General Schedule (GS) system, NIST uses pay bands. That system provides just a bit more flexibility in setting pay at the outset. NIST also had more latitude in defining bonuses. They were still small by private-sector standards, but the system was more modern and progressive than GS. This made a meaningful difference in recruiting and rewarding our staff.

Centralized hiring tracking

Every hire involves multiple teams (the program team, HR, security, drug testing vendors, ethics, onboarding, etc.), each with a bespoke system, its own priorities, and no visibility into the processes outside of its own. Each team treats a hire like a transaction that they are processing to get it out of a queue.

In most agencies, hiring is fragmented across disconnected systems, causing delays and errors. Luckily, one of the brilliant NIST leaders designed a unique centralized hiring tracker for us. This was a very simple Excel spreadsheet with some embedded macros, but it tracked the entire hiring process — from position conception to posting to badging and everything in between. Our tracker let us see, almost in real time, where each hire was in the process.

Lots of organizations make hiring trackers, but in my experience they are owned by a single team (like HR). In that model, the owning team becomes the adjudicator of truth (which they do to their own advantage), damaging trust in the tool. Having a source-of-truth with shared ownership that was transparent to all program leadership (not just the HR staff) was invaluable. Shockingly, I hadn’t seen anything like it in my 15 years in government.

This visibility let us do a couple of things differently:

• Better planning: Instead of waiting for a hiring cert from HR and cobbling together availability, each team could anticipate when hiring might begin and block time on the hiring panel’s calendars for interviews.

• Better process sequencing: Visibility helped us see where we could parallelize steps, or change the sequencing across teams. We found that rather than passing a hire from HR to security to legal, we could save a bit of time by starting legal and security reviews simultaneously.

• Prioritization: Tighter coordination let us set shared priorities across all of the functional areas. We could tell a team to slow down processing on one hire if we needed to urgently redirect focus to a different position.

• Focus on outcomes: Most importantly, end-to-end tracking shifted every participating team’s focus to the end game: was there a person in a seat, with a computer and a badge, ready to work?

Despite its simplicity, centralized hiring tracking is decidedly not the norm. Future initiatives that need to scale fast would do well to copy this approach — identify the key tasks of every team involved, track them in a central place (even if this means moving it outside of your official systems), and have senior folks run frequent meetings to talk through the details, prioritize, and to ensure that everyone in the process is focused on outcomes. It takes some elbow grease and some grit, but this is absolutely replicable.

At our first leadership retreat, we drafted headlines we’d like to see about CHIPS in five years, including “The Surprising Origins of Federal Government Hiring Reform.”

The IG comes to call

Given our efforts, we felt confident when the IG announced their first engagement on whether we’d met our hiring goals. They came in skeptical, dug through our data (made easier by the tracker), and couldn’t ignore the fact that we had exceeded our goals. But they still wrote us up — not for failing to hire, but for not following OPM’s best practices. Specifically: “NIST did not develop a comprehensive workforce plan to meet its human capital needs.”

The report went on to scold us, noting that,

“Although CHIPS leadership recognizes the importance of workforce planning, evidenced by the requirement for applicants to submit workforce plans for CHIPS funding, CHIPS officials did not hold themselves to the same standard by completing their own workforce plan for CPO and CRDO.”

This was a fundamental misunderstanding of the task at hand: staffing the construction and operation of semiconductor facilities — enormous, permanent, physical infrastructure requiring highly technical employees, of which there are demonstrable shortages in the US — is an entirely different matter than a start-up government financial assistance program. And their findings did not acknowledge that we were able to move quickly because we had the flexibility to change who we hired and what the roles looked like. It was a perfect reflection of a system more focused on documentation than results.

We tried to make all of these points in a meeting with the IG staff. The OPM guidance might make sense once you’re up and running, or for planning giant physical infrastructure that requires thousands of very specialized employees. In those cases, you need to think carefully about the evolution of your workforce so you don’t get caught flat-footed. But slowing down to produce a comprehensive plan for staffing CPO instead of actually hiring people would have been insane. At best, we’d be guessing, and would have invariably gotten it wrong and been dinged by oversight anyway. And given the priority of the CHIPS program, slowing down likely would have earned the ire of our congressional champions on both sides of the aisle.

The IG critique became something of an inside joke. We were happy to take the hit if it meant we actually got something done. And if writing that report made the IG feel like they’d delivered something for their $5 million annual budget, well then… fine?

Unfortunately, getting dinged for not following ridiculous rules comes with the territory in government. Jen Pahlka’s recent piece on reforming the overseers hit home. And I read the Department of Education’s response to the GAO’s report on FAFSA implementation with some envy — they detail all of the missed nuance and impossible expectations, offering revised recommendations to improve the GAO’s report. We had considered drafting a similar response, but ultimately decided to forego the argument and maintain our focus on the task at hand.

Master your toolkit

In early summer 2023, the significance of what we accomplished became clear to me. We had just crossed the hundred-person mark that June and held our first all-staff meeting at the Patent and Trademark Office complex in Alexandria. Mike and I had just wrapped a listening tour across every team, and we shared their feedback with the group. The upshot was that people were really excited to be there. They were inspired by both the mission and the talent around them.

The energy in the room was unmistakable, and memorable moments from that day set the tone for the year to come: Mary Alex Smith characterizing the vibe as “like summer camp,” Hassan Khan nearly hurling a chair during a particularly intense round of semiconductor trivia, and Ayodele Okeowo winning our very first Star Award, a tradition that would carry on for the next two years. That afternoon, as we started collecting input on what would become our cultural norms, the results of the hiring surge were clear. We’d built the team that would go on to build CPO — an exceptional group who would do the impossible, and who, in so doing, became evidence of what government can accomplish when it optimizes for outcomes.

Our experience staffing the CPO team shows what’s possible. With the right authorities, ample funding, operational excellence, and the right mindset, the government can hire people quickly. But this raises the question of whether we want success to require endless exceptions, or whether to make efficient hiring the norm. We need to get better at designing processes that manage risk without suffocating outcomes. Policymakers: I’m not suggesting that we eliminate competitive hiring rules. But when designing high-stakes programs, you’ll need modified rules to get the job done.

While risk aversion is indeed a government-wide pathology, we don’t need to wait for generational HR reform to give programs more flexibility. I hope to see systemic change soon. In the meanwhile, roll up your sleeves and find a way to mobilize the tools available.

1. These goals were set across both the CHIPS Program Office (CPO) and its sister organization, the CHIPS Research and Development Office (CRDO).

2. These positions were effectively excepted service — less paperwork, no job posting. We still chose to rigorously document these hires to justify their pay since we knew these positions were ripe for scrutiny.

3. DHA exempts agencies from requirements such as veterans’ preference (a policy that gives eligible military veterans an advantage in federal hiring), and procedures that require agencies to rate and rank all applicants based on their qualifications. In typical hiring processes, hiring managers must first consider the highest scoring or best-qualified applicants (including applying veterans’ preference). With a DHA, the hiring manager can just find a qualified applicant and offer them the job. The candidate must still be qualified for the job, but DHA allows agencies to cut through the red tape.

4. The section of the United States Code that governs most federal employment laws and personnel management.

5. Editor’s Note: This paragraph has been updated to clarify the conditions precedent for establishing Excepted Service positions.