This story was updated Monday evening with additional comments.
The Trump administration is expanding its pitch to recruit early-career job seekers, now attempting to connect agencies with much-needed talent in job fields beyond the tech sector.
The Office of Personnel Management on Monday launched a new “early-career talent network,” an online portal where individuals interested in public service can sign up to receive announcements of job openings and upcoming hiring events from federal recruiters. The job network pertains specifically to younger, less experienced workers — a demographic that agencies have struggled to recruit and retain for years.
OPM’s new talent website consolidates links to various sections of USAJOBS.gov, highlighting early-career job openings in “critical mission roles” across five job fields — human resources, finance, technology, project management and contracting — many of which have faced longstanding skills shortages in the federal sector.
Those five areas are “where we see current demand for early-career talent,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote Monday in a blog post. Through the new talent network, he explained that federal job seekers can stay informed of, express interest in, and apply for openings, while agencies can more easily connect with candidates at “the top of the funnel.”
“The ultimate goal here is very simple, but audacious: Make it really simple to match the best talent with the best opportunities,” Kupor said. “The single-user mode of the past — where a single applicant applied to a single job opportunity as a single agency — doesn’t accomplish that goal. But a network model will.”
The recruitment effort comes after a year of sweeping reductions across the federal workforce, which disproportionately affected younger employees. Less experienced workers were targeted as part of the governmentwide probationary terminations the Trump administration undertook last year.
“That sent almost all of the federal government’s recent employees heading for the doors and in turn made it hard for career advisors to recommend federal employment, if individuals could find themselves instantly jobless,” said Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland’s school of public policy.
Since President Donald Trump took office, the share of federal employees under age 30 has declined from about 9% in 2024 to about 8%, OPM’s workforce data shows. In part, that includes a loss of employees through probationary firings, as well as the shuttering of the Presidential Management Fellows program.
Kettl said the new early-career talent network is a positive and much-needed effort, but added that the outsized loss of younger employees over the last year means agencies will have a harder time attracting and retaining that talent going forward. Considering other workforce overhauls, such as the finalization of the Schedule Policy/Career employment classification, Kettl argued there is deep uncertainty in the long-term prospects of federal employment.
“It’s good to see OPM taking a strong role here,” Kettl said. “However, the federal government has a long, long way to go in making federal employment attractive to younger workers again. Kupor’s announcement isn’t likely to counter the tsunami of bad news that has surrounded recruitment for federal positions over the last 14 months.”
Three of the areas OPM is targeting in its new recruitment pitch — contracting, HR and IT — are among the federal job series hit the hardest by recent employee separations, according to data from OPM.
Nearly 7,600 federal HR managers in the 0201 job series have separated from their positions, either voluntarily or involuntarily, since January 2025. Just 928 employees were hired into a federal HR management role in that same time.
Contracting roles in the 1102 job series have faced the separation of more than 6,700 federal employees since January 2025, while agencies made just over 1,100 new hires.
And close to 20,200 federal employees left jobs in the tech fields OPM is now highlighting for early-career job candidates. The tech-related separations mostly stem from the 2210 job series for IT managers, with over 18,000 employee separations in that category. In that same time, agencies made about 2,300 new IT hires.
“The federal government has not proven itself in the last 14 months to be a reliable and trustworthy employer,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Monday. “I encourage the administration to think carefully about incentives and the message it sends to young people when it indiscriminately fires, maligns and maltreats its people, and what that means for the American people whom they would serve.”
During a House subcommittee hearing last week, Kupor pushed back against Democrats’ concerns of agencies’ abilities to send a positive message to early-career job seekers, considering the outsized impacts of the Trump administration’s pitch to reduce the size of the federal workforce.
Instead, the OPM director argued that that job stability is not “the most compelling message” for early-career employees.
“We may disagree on this, but I think what young people want is to build their careers. They want to learn. They want to be surrounded by smart people. They want to be in an environment where they can actually progress and be recognized for that,” Kupor said during the March 25 hearing. “That’s why the early-career push is exactly consistent with our push around performance management culture.”
Through other recruitment efforts such as the “Tech Force” initiative, OPM has been encouraging younger employees to join public service, at least temporarily. Kupor said Tech Force is already starting to pay off with “strong interest” from early-career job seekers.
“Building a strong pipeline of early-career talent is essential to the future of the federal workforce,” Kupor said Monday. “We are making it easier for talented individuals to connect with meaningful careers in public service while helping agencies efficiently identify the talent they need to deliver results for the American people.”
But Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, questioned whether OPM’s new early-career talent network will ultimately achieve the desired outcome.
“Our government will always need young, talented individuals to join the civil service, but this announcement runs headlong into problems of the current administration’s own making,” Stier said. “The firing of thousands of probationary period employees last year, canceled internships and ongoing attempts to politicize the civil service have left a lasting impression on exactly the young workers the government is trying to recruit.”
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