The Office of Personnel Management on Monday finalized regulations more than a half decade in the making aimed at giving federal hiring managers greater flexibility in selecting applicants for federal jobs.
The “rule of many” in federal hiring was first enacted as part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act and looks to meld the positive aspects of two other federal hiring formats: the “rule of three” and category rating.
Under the “rule of three” selection process, hiring managers would receive a list of the three most qualified candidates for a job opening. But with the growing complexity of federal jobs—and federal resumes—hiring managers frequently passed on all three candidates in favor of posting a new hiring solicitation.
Category rating, introduced by OPM in 2004, would place qualified applicants into three categories, such as good, better and best. This gave hiring managers a broader array of job seekers to choose from and allowed them to better target specific skillsets, but made it difficult to differentiate between applicants in the same category.
The “rule of many,” combines the granular ranking system of the rule of three with the flexibility to sift through many qualified applicants. Regulations implementing the 2019 NDAA provision were first proposed by the Biden administration in 2023, and the initiative dovetails with other recent hiring reforms, like the ability for multiple agencies to hire from the same group of applicants—called shared certifications—for similar jobs and the move to skills assessments in consultation with subject matter experts as part of skills-based hiring.
“Simply put, the ROM allows a hiring manager to effectively stack rank the full slate of candidates—without regard to the Rule of Three and the categorization buckets that previously governed federal hiring,” said OPM Director Scott Kupor in a blog post Monday. “Coupled with the use of functional skills assessments . . . the ROM gives hiring managers the much-needed flexibility to distinguish candidates based on their demonstrated functional merit-based qualifications for the role in question.”
In a final rule published in the Federal Register Monday, OPM said it was making some technical changes to how agencies can weed out applications, known as the three considerations rule, in response to feedback from public commenters. Essentially, once three selections have been made, a hiring manager can remove more than one applicant from consideration if they wish, provided that they do not remove a majority of the remaining applicants.
“This method allows an agency to remove more than one candidate at a time so long as the number removed does not exceed the number of selections remaining,” OPM wrote. For example, an agency that is making 10 selections from a certificate of 30 eligibles may use the three considerations rule to remove up to a total of 7 eligibles from the certificate.”
The rule will take effect on Nov. 7, and agencies are expected to be in compliance with the new hiring regulations by March 9, 2026.
