Cities get a helping hand to attract more workers to the public sector
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Work for America is accepting applications through March 20 for a program aimed at helping cities reinvigorate their hiring processes.
State and local governments have made strides in recent years to plug vacant or hard to fill job positions, but persistent staffing shortages still threaten the quality of government service delivery.
Indeed, research shows that fewer state and local workers consider certain government jobs, including IT positions, as hard to fill today as they were in 2022. Public sector workers also reported that hiring reforms, like implementing applicant tracking systems, have helped improve the process and, ultimately, fill empty roles successfully.
To further strengthen the public sector’s hiring efforts, the nonprofit Work for America is launching its Talent Accelerator workshop for municipal human resources and operations staff to learn about and implement hiring process improvements.
“City governments know that their hiring timelines are too long; a common stat that's thrown around is that it takes about 130 days to hire,” said Shifra Goldenberg, chief programs officer of Work for America. “As you can imagine, lots of candidates just drop out [to] find something else to do [or] get confused because they think they're not in the process anymore, and it's just not comparable with the private sector that works on a much faster timeline.”
Competition with the private sector is particularly steep when it comes to tech and IT jobs in municipal government, she said, which is why “in order to hire tech talent, you need to give people a good experience.”
But for cities that are often grappling with competing priorities that stretch already thin staffs and even thinner budgets, reforming their hiring models “is work in and of itself … It’s hard to step back and do the strategic work to understand what’s happening,” Shifra said.
The workshop aims to support cities’ efforts to expedite the hiring process by reducing hiring times and streamlining workflows. Participants will engage in weekly virtual sessions with other cohort members and three individualized coaching sessions for eight weeks from April to June.
Through the workshop, human resources and operations staff will review their systems and processes for attracting and retaining job candidates to identify pain points, such as unclear roles among staff or redundant tasks among several departments. Cities will, for instance, map out their current hiring practices and identity priorities for process improvements based on coaching and peer-based learning.
As an example, Shifra said a common issue cities face is having a central HR team that handles one aspect of the hiring process, such as screening resumes, but expecting individual departments to manage other steps, like scheduling interviews. That’s where document or task handoffs are often dropped, creating a disruption that cities can better streamline, she said.
Applications to participate in the Work for America program are due March 20, and selected cities will be notified April 1.
Work for America also plans to launch an additional workshop this fall to help cities leverage data to improve hiring. Participants will receive assistance to develop a hiring data inventory to inform improvement targets and metrics.
“A lot of HR teams just don’t have visibility into data, even if the data already exists,” Shifra said. That’s why the fall cohort will focus on helping HR teams better leverage data and application tracking systems to develop, for example, dashboards or other data analysis tools to inform their hiring decision-making.