Merit Hiring Plan Clarification on Workforce & Applicant Flow Data

This Office of Personnel Management (OPM) GovDelivery bulletin, issued two weeks after the Merit Hiring Plan's release, clarifies how agencies should handle workforce demographic data, given the directive to stop using race, sex, ethnicity, and national origin statistics in hiring, recruiting, retention, and promotion decisions. The bulletin confirms that agencies must continue collecting and reporting this data to OPM to meet statutory reporting requirements, and that the SF-181 Ethnicity and Race Identification form must still be administered during onboarding. OPM will continue collecting demographic data on USAJOBS but will restrict its provision to agencies unless a justified use case exists. The bulletin explains that the data will remain available for EEO investigations and litigation defense. The restriction is that workforce data may not be used in workforce planning, recruitment efforts, or hiring decisions.