Representatives from more than 50 government agencies signed up for a virtual job fair co-led by the Office of Personnel Management with other organizations in the public sector, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.
OPM intends to use the Tech to Gov job fair on Wednesday, Jan. 18, as an opportunity to bring into public service information technology professionals who were affected by layoffs at technology companies, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter.
The office has established a Hiring Experience Group that seeks to reinvent the federal hiring experience and is helping agencies come up with a recruitment pitch to motivate the migration of tech talent from the private sector.
“We’re also looking at this as an opportunity fair; so not just a job fair in the traditional sense, but as an opportunity open house, that we can talk about what it means to be a federal employee — what it means to serve — to think about how can we bring in some of this talent now,” Kyleigh Russ, a senior adviser for OPM’s HX Group, told Federal News Network.
Agencies looking to hire through the job fair to support their IT modernization initiatives include the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA and the State Department.
The HX Group at OPM also plans to ramp up the use of shared hiring certificates to help agencies quickly onboard tech hires.