Agencies are getting more information on how to implement the recently finalized “rule of many.” The federal hiring strategy, several years in the making, aims to create broader pools of qualified job candidates while adding flexibility for federal hiring managers.
A series of guidance documents the Office of Personnel Management published earlier this month outlined the steps agencies should take to begin using the “rule of many” when hiring. OPM’s new resources also detail how the “rule of many” intersects with other aspects of the federal hiring process, such as shared certificates, skills-based assessments and veterans’ preference.
Under the “rule of many,” federal hiring managers score job candidates on their relevant job skills, then rank the candidates based on those scores. From there, hiring managers can choose one of several options — a cut-off number, score or percentage — to pare down the applicant pool and reach a list of qualified finalists to select from.
OPM’s new guidance comes after the agency finalized regulations last September to officially launch the “rule of many.” The concept was initially included in the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, and OPM during the Biden administration proposed regulations on the “rule of many” in 2023.
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“Coupled with the use of functional skills assessments … the [rule of many] gives hiring managers the much-needed flexibility to distinguish candidates based on their demonstrated functional merit-based qualifications for the role in question,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote in a Sept. 8 blog post, the same day OPM issued the final rule.
The “rule of many” aligns with some aspects of the Trump administration’s merit hiring plan, OPM said, such as using technical assessments and shared certificates. OPM said the “rule of many” in particular aligns with skills-based hiring, since it can expand candidate pools with applicants who have more fitting skillsets.
The “rule of many” also encourages agencies to use more “comprehensive” assessments, like structured interviews or job simulations, OPM said in its new guidance. And it can “support improved hiring outcomes, particularly for nontraditional candidates, veterans and those with varied career paths,” OPM added.
But for many agencies, the actual adoption of the “rule of many” may be put on the back burner, according to Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service. She said without enough funding or staffing, agencies are not likely to overhaul their current and already well-established hiring practices in the short term.
“The ‘rule of many’ is a good tool, but until those ingredients are all put together, I don’t think that you’ll see it rolled out immediately,” Mattingley said in an interview.
OPM’s finalization of the “rule of many” last September officially ended agencies’ ability to use the past “rule of three” hiring practice. The older candidate assessment technique already had been largely phased out, but previously restricted agencies to only selecting from the top three ranked applicants.
The “rule of many” also differs from most agencies’ current candidate-vetting technique, called “category rating,” which lets federal hiring managers assort job applicants into categories such as “qualified,” “better qualified,” and “best qualified,” then select a candidate for the job from the highest category.
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When “category rating” was introduced years ago, it was an improvement over the “rule of three,” but Kupor said “category rating” created other challenges — namely, that all candidates within a single category would be considered equally qualified.
“In other words, the categories are minimum hurdles for consideration, but they don’t distinguish between applicants within a category,” Kupor said in September. “For example, if a score of 80% is the minimum hurdle to qualify into the ‘best qualified’ category, an applicant who scores 100% is treated no differently than one who scores 80%.”
OPM said in its new guidance that the “rule of many” uses the strengths of “category rating,” while adding flexibility to the process. It also allows for “finer distinctions” between candidates and broadens the range of applicants available for selection.
In most cases, OPM said the “rule of many” is preferable over “category rating.” But there are also best use cases for each hiring mechanism. Higher-level positions with more robust assessments will usually require the finer distinctions between candidates that the “rule of many” provides. But for more entry-level positions that don’t require highly technical qualifications, the “category rating” system may be just as effective.
Adopting the “rule of many” will also require a significant cultural shift at agencies, which the Partnership’s Mattingley said can be difficult. Existing strategies like skills-based hiring have not yet been fully adopted at agencies, which may indicate that the uptake of the “rule of many” will also be slow, she explained.
“Until agencies crack the nut on really leveraging skills-based hiring, I don’t think it’s going to be this big change in the immediate future,” Mattingley said. “You need skills-based hiring in order to leverage the rule of many, because you have to be able to make much finer technical assessments on the skills between candidates if you’re going to rank them in the way rule of many does.”
OPM’s “rule of many” guidance comes a few months after President Donald Trump officially lifted the governmentwide hiring freeze. But the White House has emphasized that when hiring, agencies should still focus on maintaining their now-smaller staffing sizes.
“Hiring is still a big question this year,” Mattingley said. “It does look like the administration is going to encourage agencies to hire, except at the same time, agencies are still facing budget uncertainty. They’re facing downward pressure on headcount.”
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