By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
March 31, 2026

In 1986 President Reagan’s adviser on Russian affairs, Suzanne Massie, was briefing the president for his upcoming meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. During the briefing, Massie suggested that Reagan learn a few Russian proverbs to help ingratiate himself with his upcoming audience. “Doveryai, no proveryai” – trust but verify – became so much a part of Reagan’s vernacular that Gorbachev reportedly said to Reagan at a later date: “You repeat that at every meeting.” Reagan’s retort, “I like it.”

While many people have since adopted this phrase as their own, the federal government modified it to be simply “trust.” That is, at least in the hiring process.

Beginning in 2010 in connection with President Obama’s Hiring Reform Initiative, a candidate’s self-attestation of their skills – via a questionnaire – became the default hiring practice for federal jobs. (Before this, candidates wrote long essays attesting to their skills and competencies, called “KSA narratives”). Candidates were asked to self-rate their experience on various job-related tasks – e.g., please rate your software development skills from “I have no experience” on one end to “I am an expert” on the other end. We “trusted” these questionnaires to be a fair and accurate representation of a candidate’s qualifications for the job, but we did not “verify.” And as you might guess, not everyone’s self-attested skills are mapped to their actual, real worlds!

As part of the Merit Hiring Plan implemented by the Trump Administration, we ended this practice. The Office of Personnel Management has been looking at all aspects of federal hiring to ensure we can get the right talent in the right seats. Key to achieving that goal is a number of reforms aimed at making the applicant experience and the hiring agency experience better and more efficient.

Use of assessments – On March 25, 2026, OPM reached a major milestone with the expansion of governmentwide standard assessments that measure applicant’s general skills and capabilities required for nearly all roles in the federal General Schedule. With this expansion, agencies will no longer rely on the flawed candidate self-assessment but instead will have a robust set of objective tools developed by industrial organizational psychologists to score applicants’ capabilities for the requisite skills of more than 400 federal roles. In simple terms, we will “verify” an applicant’s true skills

Measure twice, cut once – For the applicant, the use of standard assessments will dramatically improve the federal hiring experience. For too long, individual applicants have had to apply – and complete separate self-assessments – for each of the many jobs to which they sought to apply. This was an inefficient process and meant that many times we lost an applicant who might have been a good fit for a different agency, but who failed to know about or apply for that role because their entry point into the interview process came from a different agency. With the expansion of standard assessments, applicants now have “portability” of their results. The same assessments can be used across multiple agencies and multiple roles, making the process more seamless for both applicants and agencies.

In addition, we are also increasing the use of what we call “shared certificates” within government. Without getting into too much inside baseball, the concept of shared certificates enables us to expose qualified applicants to multiple agencies at once. We should not lose great talent because they might not have received a job offer from a particular agency if their skills better fit with a different agency. “Shared certificates” enable this practice – to the benefit of both applicants and the hiring agencies. Further, they increase the size of the candidate pool, allowing agencies to select from a broader range of qualified applicants. Our Tech Force program uses shared certificates, and our Early Career programs that we just launched will also use them. You will see others from us throughout the year.

More use of assessments – in addition to our expansion of standard assessments, we will also continue rolling out job-specific technical assessments. For example, our Tech Force hiring process already uses a third-party commercial assessment to test a candidate’s software coding and data science capabilities. We will be developing internally and partnering externally to continue to augment the set of technical roles for which these assessments may be utilized alongside our governmentwide standard assessments.

We have a lot of work to do to ensure the federal government can continue to attract all of the skills needed to deliver on our promises to the American people. While “In America we trust,” in federal hiring we will “trust, but verify.”