Change management remains central to local government modernization
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A Missouri city has seen financial and staff capacity gains after modernizing its hiring system. One expert says the key to their success was prioritizing change management among staff.
As the public sector strives to innovate local government systems and services, it needs an adequate workforce to do so. That means many local governments’ hiring systems are in need of a makeover to streamline and expedite the time it takes to fill vacant positions.
Indeed, it takes about 130 days for local governments to hire someone, and many candidates end up abandoning their applications before completing the process, according to a report released last week from the nonprofit Work for America dedicated to addressing the public sector’s staffing crisis.
Such lags in the local government hiring process can ultimately lead to delays in service delivery to residents as current staff struggle to make ends meet amid growing demands, the report stated. To help close the hiring gap, adopting a modernized applicant tracking system is a critical step to streamline job postings, review applications and track candidates as they move through the hiring process.
But a large-scale modernization project like that requires a human-centered approach to ensure local governments “better consider where to begin fixing their hiring process and lead change effectively,” the report stated.
“Sometimes just getting the momentum and getting everyone on board is a challenge in itself,” said Krizia Lopez, vice president of government innovation at Work for America.
Take, for example, St. Louis, Missouri. In 2023, the city launched a mission to modernize its outdated, paper-based hiring system. The city’s original process relied on typewritten forms, physical mail and manual data entry to intake and manage new job applications, creating time and administrative burdens for staff, according to the report.
To support the city’s modernization effort, Lopez partnered with St. Louis as the lead of people and process innovation through her participation in the Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellowship. The first step was for staff across 52 city departments to work with Lopez to identify challenges in the hiring process during interviews and listening sessions.
Staff feedback suggested that the city’s employees “were really burdened with … compensating for missing workers, and therefore, it was impossible for [the] city to have full-time dedicated people running such a large-scale project,” Lopez said.
They also expressed concern that moving to an automated applicant tracking system would create more resource demands just to maintain the modernized infrastructure, and many employees appeared worried that it could replace their skills and impact their job security, she added.
Collecting feedback from city staff helped Lopez map the hiring process, which turned out to be a 96-step operation that would require interagency collaboration to streamline, according to the report.
Lopez worked with city staff to define clear roles and responsibilities across city agencies involved with the hiring process to reduce bottlenecks and confusion as the new system was developed. City agencies also held regular meetings and maintained a shared folder where staff could store notes, which helped keep stakeholders engaged and aware of how the project was coming together, according to the report.
They also developed a project plan that included specific steps and deadlines to keep city staff on track with the initiative and avoid delays that could further burden or dissuade workers from the end goal, Lopez said.
“We never let ourselves be overwhelmed by the scale of the task at hand. I think that is very important,” she said. “We took a bite-size approach when we were scoping this whole thing out … to do it in an interactive way.”
A critical part of the process was to train city workers on the new product, a cloud-based recruiting system called Taleo from tech company Oracle, to ensure they were comfortable with it ahead of its official launch in 2024, according to the report. Lopez helped ensure more than 400 staff received training on how to use the software solution for six months as part of the transition from the city’s legacy system.
“I can’t overstate how useful this step is … to have a training [and] rollout plan internally,” Lopez said, adding that this step helps reduce staff confusion and questions on the go-live day.
With employees leveraging Taleo, vacant positions started to be filled in two months to three months instead of up to a year, and 881 jobs were filled from May 2024 to May 2025, according to the report. Previously, an average of 510 positions were filled annually.
The system also reduced the city’s need for paperwork and postage and enabled the digitization of more than 20,000 applications, saving the city more than $250,000 annually, Lopez said.
Beyond technical and financial improvements, the automated system has enabled people who previously worked as clerk typists move into recruiter roles, helping fill staffing gaps, Lopez explained.
The HR team “was no longer as swamped as they had been,” she said. “They are able to now spend time on data analysis and process improvement … so now they can spend time doing things that are even more value adding.”
Focusing on change management among staff and collecting their feedback on adopting the new applicant tracking system, “helped us set us up for a very long-term kind of track record of success and improvement,” Lopez said.