U.S. Office of Personnel Management - Recruiting, Retaining and Honoring a World-Class Workforce to Serve the American People

Feb 7, 2012

Mr. Hasbrouck thank you for the blog question, a good one.

Agencies can merge the highest quality category with the next lower quality category when there are fewer than three eligible candidates assigned to the highest quality category regardless of the number of vacancies to be filled.

In your example, the agency is allowed to merge the highest quality category of 35 eligibles only when there are 2 remaining elgibles available in the highest category and vacancies need to be filled.

I hope this is helpful

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Feb 6, 2012
The merging categories rules seems to imply that the intent of hiring reform is to have a minimum of 3 times as many candidates as open positions, where if less than 3 elgible candidates appear in the highest quality category, the next lower category may be merged. When a job announcement is posted for hiring multiple openings (i.e. Greater than 1 opening). Is the agency allowed to merge categories when they do not have greater than 3 times as many eligible candidates? Example: An agency posts an announcement to fill 20 positions under the same announcement. If the highest quality category only has 35 candidates, is the agency allowed to merge the categories to obtain a larger field of candidates? more