How Boston modernized its hiring infrastructure to attract talent

CHICAGO — Over the last two years, Boston has revamped its applicant tracking and onboarding systems in a bid to attract more people to work for its government and make hiring them easier and less expensive for city staff. 

While cities like Boston may not have a severe shortage of workers or applicants, making the government hiring process easier is “both good for our employer brand” and helps ensure “that you're going to be able to compete for top talent,” Alex Lawrence, the city’s chief people officer, told Route Fifty in an interview at Code for America’s 2026 Summit last week in Chicago. 

Boston’s efforts to modernize and enhance its hiring infrastructure come as data from The Pew Charitable Trusts showed that 1 in 5 new jobs have been in state and local government or public education since 2023. In fact, a 2025 report from government HR software company NEOGOV found that state and local agencies saw 15% more applications per job that year than in 2024. 

The NEOGOV report said leveraging modernized and automated hiring tech can result “in enhanced operational efficiency, compliance, and a most engaged workforce — ensuring you not only attract top employees, but also retain them.” 

But increasing applications does not equate to more hires, said Krizia Lopez, vice president of government innovation at the nonprofit Work for America, in a session during the Code for America conference. 

“It’s not really a pipeline problem, it’s a system performance problem, [which] shows that there’s something wrong with how candidates are being processed,” she said.

Indeed, speaking during a breakout session in Chicago about the city’s hiring modernization project, Abigail Milewski, Boston’s director of operational improvement, said the city implemented key strategies that helped enhance its approach to building and designed a modernized hiring system with ServiceNow that will launch in coming months. 

The first strategy was to conduct user research to gain insights from job seekers, new city employees, human resources staff and teams central to support hiring in Boston, she said. Feedback suggested that Boston’s previous system approach to hiring could be confusing and lacking transparency for applicants, Milewski explained. 

For instance, job seekers reported that unclear job descriptions could deter candidates from spending the time to submit an application. Milewski pointed to city jobs like commercial driver’s license operators and internship positions that are typically paid by the hour, something candidates said would benefit from hiring managers disclosing if such positions were competitive. 

City staff also reported that while the city’s decentralized HR model enabled flexibility among agencies to manage hiring and onboarding according to their individual needs and requirements, it could create barriers to tracking an application throughout the entire process, Milewski said. 

For instance, the decentralized approach meant staff members and agencies used different tools to manage applications, ranging from spreadsheets to services like AirTable, and so increased the risk of losing applications or introducing errors during the process. 

Another hiring modernization strategy officials introduced was auditing compliance requirements for city employment, said Sarah Ballinger, chief of staff for Boston’s people operations cabinet . By reviewing compliance requirements across the entire hiring process, officials could better bake those rules into the application and onboarding systems that applicants interact with to enable more streamlined workflows. 

As an example, Ballinger pointed to the work authorization process. Previously, new staff would receive I-9 forms just days before starting their work, forcing candidates and HR staff to go back and forth to ensure the form was signed and verified on a time-sensitive deadline. 

The new system addresses this problem by letting officials embed document requirements and instructions into the hiring and onboarding platform so that candidates could prepare their I-9 forms before their first day, helping to expedite and streamline the overall process, Ballinger said. 

“One of the things that we quickly realized as we were doing this work is that we did not need to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “We have a bunch of tech that we've already procured and have teams with support at our fingertips that can do some of the work that we need to to replace in the system that we're decommissioning.” 

That realization helped the city implement a new procurement strategy, which saw officials divide the hiring infrastructure initiative into four smaller contracts as they increasingly worked with vendors to facilitate user research, applicant tracking system design, onboarding system design and onboarding system development, Milewski said. 

While vendors “bring a level of expertise, and we cannot do this work without them … we need to really be aligned with what we're trying to get out of this [project],” she said. 

This approach helped the city more clearly communicate to vendors what specific services and solutions they were looking for and could base those contract requirements on their findings from user research and audits, Milewski said. Officials could also better determine what existing resources they could leverage and identify areas of the hiring and onboarding systems where external solutions would be effective, she added. 

“Building that capacity for our internal team to be able to think about the technology and marry the product, design and business needs [is] going to set us up for future improvements where we can actually change things down the road and … not be overly reliant [on] and outsource all of our knowledge [to vendors],” Milewski said.  

Ultimately, the strategies Boston took to enhance its hiring process for applicants and city staff made the process “improves people’s faith in government,” Lawrence said. 

“Being able to build a system that meets [our] specific use cases is the difference between us being able to fill those really hard-to-fill positions,” she added.