Promoting Internships and Other Student and Early Career Programs in the Federal Government (Guidance from OPM & OMB)

The number of interns in the Federal Government has decreased significantly over the past 10 years. One of the most impactful ways to rebuild the Federal Government’s lagging early career talent pipeline is to revive federal internship programs.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released guidance on increasing opportunities for internships, fellowships, apprenticeships, and other student and early career programs. The guidance advances the goals of the “Strengthening and Empowering the Federal Workforce” priority in the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) and is issued pursuant to Executive Order 14035, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce (the DEIA Executive Order).

In the President’s FY 2023 Budget, agencies committed to hiring over 35,000 interns in the coming year.

Agencies should:

Increase the number of interns, fellows, apprentices, and early career hires across the Federal Government, with an emphasis on increasing paid internship opportunities and decreasing reliance on unpaid internships.
Better coordinate and fund strategic federal internship, fellowship, and early career hiring programs.
Focus on the strategic development and implementation of federal internship, fellowship, and early career hiring programs – while holding senior leaders accountable to using these programs to build an inclusive and diverse federal workforce talent pipeline.

The goals for recruiting, hiring, and retaining early career talent include:

Increasing the availability of paid internships, fellowships, and apprenticeships.
Enhancing hiring assessment processes to improve hiring outcomes.
Increasing activities to recruit early career talent to meet agencies’ needs, to build a talent pipeline and address longstanding skills gaps.
Improving outreach to individuals from underserved communities so the Federal Workforce draws on the richness and diversity of our country.
Reinvigorating the Pathways Programs by updating the regulations to help agencies better recruit and retain early career talent.

How do agencies achieve the goals established by OPM & OMB? Yello is here to assist.

Yello, the leader in early talent recruitment operations and in-person recruiting events, and WayUp, now called Yello Sourcing, is the number #1 DEI sourcing platform and a leader in virtual recruiting and events, have merged. Together, we are bringing a powerful combined solution aimed to address the challenges recruiters face and create a seamless experience for candidates.

With unparalleled expertise in early talent and DEI recruitment, Yello’s vision is to empower recruiters to find and hire diverse candidates — on their terms. You’ll be able to discover and engage target candidates continuously, no longer limited by campus, seasonality, expensive events, or the shifting recruiting landscape. A partnership with Yello means a completely integrated recruiting workflow. Engage candidates, interview, and hire for your roles all in one place.

Yello is designed to help agencies hire early talent while remaining secure and compliant. Yello’s FedRAMP authorization makes it faster and easier to leverage security authorizations, start recruiting top talent, and ensure your data is always protected.

The Yello government recruiting solution is specifically tailored to support our Federal Government customer’s ability to hire early talent with three key objectives:

To provide an in-person and virtual recruitment event service offering to boost the number of successful candidate engagements while enhancing the overall user experience.
To deliver a platform to customize, organize, and automate a robust talent acquisition pipeline to enable federal government agencies to achieve/exceed the 80 day hiring goals established by OPM.
To capture key metrics and visualize data analytics on applicants with our application management service offering real-time progress updates so agencies can determine return on investment.