According to an official, the VA’s initiative to hire laid-off tech workers is succeeding.

Numerous positions in the department that are related to technology are being filled as a result of ongoing efforts to hire highly skilled workers who have been laid off across the tech sector.

The Veterans Affairs Department is using the start of 2023 to further develop its talent acquisition initiative in an effort to fill a number of openings within its Office of Information and Technology. The plan, which was implemented late last year, called for recruiting highly skilled workers who had been laid off across the technology sector.

Officials from the VA previously discussed the department’s initiatives to actively target tech industry professionals laid off amid a downturn in the sector during a media roundtable in December. They noted that the sudden influx of talented workers on the job market coincides with the VA’s focus on modernizing and transforming its IT systems. Widespread layoffs have affected both large tech behemoths and small startups, with Amazon announcing earlier this month that it intends to lay off 18,000 employees.

The VA’s tech worker-oriented hiring initiative has concentrated on streamlining the application process for professionals unaccustomed to the federal government’s hiring process, highlighting the department’s remote-friendly positions, and working to raise salaries and incentives as a way to attract talent from the private sector to the VA.

VA Chief People Officer Nathan Tierney said in a statement sent via email that the department is stepping up its efforts to hire tech workers in the coming year “by optimizing our offer, sharing our stories and leveraging our strong competitive position as a leader in technology.”

In addition, he said, “we rely on a feedback loop and monitor metrics to continuously improve. In 2023 and beyond, we will be very intentional about using the right techniques to promote VA’s Office of Information and Technology and its mission to attract the right talent.

The number of tech-related job openings at VA was estimated to be around 1,000 during the media roundtable in December, but Tierney claimed the department’s hiring initiative has already helped to close that gap—a reduction of about 25% so far. VA anticipates that number to keep falling as it works to hire more highly skilled personnel throughout 2023. These job openings cover a wide range of tech-related positions, from engineering leads to cybersecurity experts to user experience designers.

He continued, saying, “We have been successful over the past month in our talent acquisition approach and as a result have reduced our vacancies to 744, and another 178 are pending onboard to the [Office of Information and Technology].” He also said, “There are also 361 more candidates in the pre-selection stage.”

In some of these efforts, skilled tech workers have been specifically targeted. Tierney stated in a previous interview with Nextgov in November that VA was using “some backend analytics tools, through LinkedIn and some other platforms” to help identify approximately “4,900 employees at Amazon, Meta, and Twitter” for the talent acquisition team to get in touch with.

The VA is attempting to draw attention to the ongoing contraction of the tech industry as well as the department’s current need for talented workers at a time when the U.S. labor force is still expanding after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.

In December, the U.S. economy added 223,000 jobs, bringing the unemployment rate down to 3.5%, according to the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report, which was released on Friday. Although overall hiring rates are still high, VA Chief Information Officer Kurt DelBene noted in a statement that “the tech industry is still shedding jobs” and that VA is still attempting to contact laid-off tech workers to fill a variety of openings throughout the department.

DelBene advised tech experts who wanted to advance to join them as they lead VA’s digital transformation.