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United Kingdom
The US Office of Personnel Management, in partnership with the White House, has launched a new Early Career Talent Network designed to connect emerging professionals with full-time opportunities across the federal government.
It sits at the center of broader efforts to modernize federal hiring and build a stronger pipeline into so-called mission-critical roles, including finance, human resources, engineering, project management, and procurement.
It comes, however, only a year after the department fired nearly 400,000 workers. From January 2025 to January 2026, the federal workforce lost 386,826 workers, including approximately 17,000 from reductions in force. Thousands of those employees were probationary, meaning they had been in post for less than a year. The majority of individuals who left the federal workforce either resigned or retired.
About 122,000 employees also joined - a 55% decrease from 2024, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. As a result, the federal workforce has seen a net reduction of 264,000.
“We’ve got close to half of our population that’s within 10 years of retirement age,” Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), told Fortune. “So if you just did nothing else, you’ve got this major demographic challenge of a large number of people who will likely either retire or certainly be retirement-eligible over the near term, without us actually replenishing the pipeline of early-career people coming in.”
“Building a strong pipeline of early-career talent is essential to the future of the federal workforce,” Kupor added. “We are making it easier for talented individuals to connect with meaningful careers in public service while helping agencies efficiently identify the talent they need to deliver results for the American people.”
Early Career Talent Network reshapes hiring model
At its core, the network is designed to simplify how candidates and agencies connect, replacing fragmented hiring processes with a shared pipeline approach.
The ECTN allows individuals to express interest in roles across multiple federal agencies, helping streamline hiring and expand access to opportunities across government. Agencies benefit from a shared pipeline of qualified candidates, improving efficiency and strengthening workforce readiness.
Instead of agencies operating as separate hiring entities, the model creates a collective system where talent is surfaced once and accessed many times. The idea is to reduce duplication while increasing the visibility of candidates across the system.
The new network builds upon the Tech Force Program that OPM recently launched by creating permanent government opportunities across a broader array of job skills.
Tech Force focuses on specialist early career roles, while the new network extends that thinking across multiple disciplines, effectively widening the funnel.
Network effects and the early career talent gap
The logic behind the model borrows from technology sector thinking, particularly the concept of scale-driven value creation.
“For technology companies – and for many other organizations – network effects are the ultimate way to sustain long-term business value,” wrote Kupor in a recent blog post.
Applied to hiring, it creates a system that improves with participation. More candidates attract more roles, and more roles attract more candidates, creating a virtuous circle.
“We at OPM are now trying to build a network of our own to address a critical skills gap that we see in the federal government – namely, early career talent.”
The scale of that gap is the central driver behind the strategy.
“Roughly 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, compared with about 22% in the non-government workforce.
“The ultimate goal here is very simple, but audacious,” added Kupor. “Make it really simple to match the best talent with the best opportunities.”
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But access alone does not solve the problem. Kupor acknowledged that retention remains a challenge, and requires changes to how performance and progression are managed.
“Recruiting great early career talent is one thing; getting them to stay is another.
“Individuals are hired based on demonstrated talent, not one based on where/whether they went to college or how long they have been in a job”.
“We are creating a system that differentiates good performers from outstanding ones and rewards and recognizes behavior that meaningfully goes above and beyond, not one in which everyone is ranked the same and bonuses are “peanut-buttered” throughout the organization.”
The program addresses access and scale, while aiming to ensure that talent not only enters the organization but remains and contributes effectively.
It may be the solution to a self-inflicted problem, but it is a coordinated attempt to close the early career talent gap through both hiring reform and internal workforce changes.
