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Customer Story
How OPM is replacing self-reported skills with technical skill assessments
Challenge
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sets hiring policy for the entire federal civilian workforce. When OPM launched TechForce, a cross-government initiative to recruit software engineers, data engineers, product managers, and cybersecurity professionals, they faced a fundamental problem: the existing system didn’t have an objective way to measure whether candidates could actually perform the technical aspects of the job. Agencies relied on proxies like degrees, tenure, and self-reported skills. Hiring managers spent time on unqualified candidates while talented individuals were often passed over. OPM needed a way to objectively measure technical skills early in the hiring process to get the right people into the right roles.
Solution
OPM partnered with CodeSignal to implement standardized technical skill assessments across the TechForce hiring process, covering software engineering, data engineering, product management, and cybersecurity roles. CodeSignal’s Certified Evaluations replaced candidate self-reporting with objective, online, skill-based measures of candidate ability. Hiring teams had a reliable signal of quality before a single interview took place.
Results
Of candidates who passed the CodeSignal evaluation, roughly 80% passed a subsequent screening interview. Of these, about 55% passed a technical skills interview before being referred to hiring managers. With the new process hiring teams are spending less time with unqualified candidates and more time with people who have already demonstrated the skills to do the job. TechForce is one part of a much broader shift toward merit-based federal hiring, and CodeSignal is proud to support that effort.
Objective
online measures of technical skills
online measures of technical skills
Reduction in manual screening efforts
0
%
Hours saved for hiring managers across government
0
s
Customer overview
Products used
Technical Skill Assessments
Organization size
Oversees 2.2M civilian employees
Customer since
2025