Hiring Reform—Connecting Mission With Outcomes: Recommendations from a Human Capital Roundtable

Few management challenges have proven as durable as federal human capital reform. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has included strategic human capital management on its High-Risk List continuously since 2001, and successive iterations of the President’s Management Agenda under presidents from both parties have focused on the theme. The stakes have grown sharper over the past year, given reductions across the federal workforce. As agencies hire for the future, they face a clear choice between taking deliberate steps sooner or reactive ones later. Effective hiring and onboarding will enable government to build the talent that can deliver on critical missions, serve the public well, and earn the trust of the people.

This report addresses how government can build that capacity in practice. The authors bring deep practitioner experience to the topic, having served as leaders on performance and workforce issues across multiple agencies. They reframe hiring reform as part of a connected talent lifecycle rather than a single process to fix. The authors drew these ideas from a February 2026 roundtable that the IBM Center convened with the Partnership for Public Service and the Niskanen Center. The roundtable brought together federal leaders, congressional staff, data experts, state representatives, and policy experts.

The report examines three interrelated focus areas: recruiting and hiring, onboarding, and linking individual performance to organizational accomplishment. For each area, the report identifies challenges and opportunities across structural, operational, and cultural dimensions.

The authors outline several key issues. First, the talent lifecycle represents a connected system in which weaknesses at each stage compound those that follow. Slow hiring delays onboarding, uneven onboarding affects performance, and workplaces where employees feel disconnected from the mission struggle to recruit and retain top talent.

Second, the report identifies six system-wide challenges that cut across all three areas. These include human resources (HR) roles organized in silos, cultural biases that reward compliance over innovation, the need to professionalize the HR workforce, and reform horizons that extend beyond any single administration.

Third, the report offers practical ideas based on insights from the convening participants. Many actions can begin now under current law, such as cross-posting federal jobs to mainstream job boards, guaranteeing day-one equipment for new hires, standardizing badging access across agencies, and connecting performance plans directly to Agency Priority Goals. Other longer-term actions call for legislation and sustained bipartisan support, including classification and pay reform, as well as civil service reform that streamlines performance management while preserving due process. Leaders involved with ongoing efforts to build state capacity and reform the federal government can further consider and pressure-test these ideas.

This report represents the second in a series of current contributions to the IBM Center’s body of work on the federal workforce and public service, including Donald F. Kettl’s The Urgent Race: Learning from the Challenges of the Public Service—Toward a Pathway for Reform. The authors also build on research from the Niskanen Center on job classification and skills-based hiring, and from the Partnership for Public Service on the state of the federal workforce and Government for a New Era. The report complements and deepens this work by offering tangible steps that connect the people who serve in government with the outcomes government delivers.

We hope this report will offer value to a broad audience, including agency leaders and chief human capital officers seeking to strengthen their workforces, HR professionals and hiring managers working to modernize everyday practice, Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget officials setting governmentwide policy, and members of Congress and their staff considering civil service reform. The authors have brought clarity and practical insight to support the people who drive how government serves the public.