To improve hiring efficiency and reduce redundancy, the Office of Personnel Management is encouraging agencies to use shared hiring certificates.
What They Are
A “shared certificate” is a list of job candidates who have already applied to a federal job announcement, been assessed against the job’s qualifications, and been found eligible for hire but who were not selected by the original hiring agency. Agencies that ran the original hiring action can share that certificate of eligible candidates (known as a “cert”) with other federal agencies looking to fill a similar position without those agencies having to post their own announcement.
Agencies can also agree up front to hire off a single job posting, and to OPM’s “Talent Pools” portal on USAJOBS, launched in December 2023, where agency hiring managers can post or search for existing shared certificates.
How Federal Agencies Use Them
Instead of each agency issuing an announcement, assessing applicants, and putting together their own cert, an agency can request access to a certificate that another agency. Once approved, hiring managers there can make selections directly from that pool of applicants.
The current administration has set a goal of using shared certificates for 60% of all federal hiring actions within the next few years.
Five Things Employees and Applicants Should Know
- One application can lead to multiple opportunities. If you apply to a job announcement that results in a shared certificate, you may be considered by several agencies for similar positions without submitting a new application each time.
- You may hear from an agency you never applied to. Because certificates can be shared across agencies (and even within different components of the same department), you could be contacted about a position at an organization other than the one whose original announcement you responded to.
- Certificates expire. Eligibility on a shared certificate isn’t indefinite — it typically lasts up to 240 days for certs in the competitive service, or up to a year for certain OPM-run cross-government actions.
- Veterans’ preference and pass-over rules still apply. Merit system protections, including preference for veterans remain in effect.
- The original agency gets first pick. When a certificate is shared, the agency that ran the original recruitment generally has first claim to select candidates before the certificate becomes available to other, “receiving” agencies.
