OPM Announces AI-Powered Hiring Tool ‘USA Class’

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced on Monday the launch of a new artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tool, USA Class, which is designed to automate the creation of federal job descriptions.

OPM said the tool will be available to all federal agencies through USA Staffing at no additional cost.

“Hiring great talent starts with clearly defining the job, but too often that step takes longer than it should,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a press release. “By bringing USA Class to USA Staffing users government-wide, we’re using AI to cut unnecessary delays, reduce administrative burden, and help agencies move faster to hire the people they need to deliver for the American public.”

USA Class uses AI trained on thousands of existing federal position descriptions to help managers generate draft duties and align those duties with OPM classification standards, according to the agency.

OPM said that the tool is designed to improve collaboration between hiring managers and human resources (HR) specialists, reduce rework, and shorten the time required to prepare position descriptions – an early step in the federal hiring process.

USA Class functionality, training, and implementation support will begin rolling out to USA Staffing users early this month.

In a May 4 blog post on the new tool, Kupor said that USA Class marks the first move in “OPM’s broader push to bring federal HR information technology into the modern era of artificial intelligence.”

“We’re just getting started,” he said.

Notably, OPM announced in October that it plans to launch a new, single governmentwide human capital management (HCM) system. The Core HCM system will ultimately result in a single platform to house information across agencies on job titles, salaries, benefits, and employment histories.

Implementing the new system will serve as a cornerstone for the administration’s broader “Federal HR 2.0” initiative to improve HR services across the government.