New toolkit aims to chip away at government hiring snags

Nonprofit Work for America released a new toolkit earlier this month that aims to help state and local government hiring leaders identify and address challenges within their hiring systems to ultimately improve workforce capacity and broader government service delivery. 

The resource offers insights and templates for creating process maps, facilitating stakeholder meetings and action plans aimed at optimizing the public sector hiring process. Its findings are largely based on results from the organization’s recent workshop that assisted city officials with enhancing their hiring procedures. 

The guide’s release comes as thousands of former federal employees and private-sector professionals have become unemployed in the last year. Nearly 20,000 IT workers in the federal government left their jobs after President Donald Trump took office in 2025. Layoffs in private tech companies have also excelled amid rapid widespread AI adoption, with more than 73,000 layoffs in California alone last year. 

As cuts to tech positions continue to occur, “I feel like there's an opportunity for state and local governments to kind of uptake that talent,” Sophie McGrath, communications manager at Work for America, told Route Fifty. 

But a critical part of gaining such talent, particularly as governments are creating new roles like chief artificial intelligence officers or chief data officers, is implementing a hiring system that efficiently attracts and retains prospective candidates, she said. 

The toolkit recommends beginning with drafting a map of the government or agency’s approach to hiring, from the reason why a role needs to be filled to the procedures in place to prepare a candidate for their first day on the job. 

“Hiring processes may loop, restart, branch or vary across departments or positions …. By making the process visible, organizations can better identify challenges, align around opportunities for improvement and create a more transparent experience for candidates and staff alike,” the toolkit states. 

The process mapping phase can begin after hiring leaders and other stakeholders create a project charter — documentation that clarifies specific hiring objectives, such as reducing candidate drop-off rates — and determines which staff will be a part of the process, including human resources managers, agency leaders involved with hiring decisions and administrative staff with firsthand experience of current hiring processes, among others. 

A project charter can also include agreed upon meeting dates and lengths to foster effective collaboration among staff and agencies, which could be a timeline of weeks or months, according to the toolkit. 

Once the scope of a project charter is determined, organizations can move forward with process mapping to identify where there may be gaps, duplicative work, communication or capacity strains and other disruptions to the hiring system. By documenting how agency staff intake, review and manage applications, hiring leaders can better spot factors that delay, hinder or otherwise impede the hiring process, according to the toolkit. 

For instance, officials could determine that there are bottlenecks in their hiring process that delay application reviews or approvals. By documenting that procedure, officials can further learn that such bottlenecks are caused by insufficient communication or information sharing among agencies when it comes to creating and posting new job descriptions, the toolkit states. 

Government organizations should also unpack potential solutions to such friction points in the hiring process by prioritizing current and ongoing issues, according to the toolkit. 

“[I]mprovement efforts typically focus on a small set of issues that most significantly affect the hiring process while also focusing on realistic opportunities for near-term improvement,” the toolkit reads, further stating that “prioritizing achievable improvements can create early momentum that builds skills to address more complex process improvements over time.” 

Earlier this year, officials in Green Bay, Wisconsin were able to determine that unclear expectations and timelines for application review and candidate outreach often resulted in application withdrawals from prospective employees, the toolkit states. City officials are implementing more stringent procedures for application reviews, proactively blocking off staff time for interviews prior to publishing job postings and deploying automated reminders for hiring staff to stay on track with their roles and responsibilities. 

Such interventions are aimed at helping the city achieve its goal of reducing time-to-hire by 20% and decrease candidate withdrawal rates by 15%, according to the toolkit. 

Leaders in Pompano Beach, Florida, have faced similar friction points when it comes to hiring delays, McGrath said. Process mapping has helped the city’s Parks and Recreation Department identify and start exploring solutions like digitizing certain hiring processes and deploying automated applicant screening tools to expedite the process, according to the toolkit. 

Similarly, in St. Louis, Missouri, officials in 2024 dedicated six months to develop and evaluate a map of its hiring process, which previously took nine to 12 months between application and hiring. During that six months, officials were able to identify and resolve challenges like digitizing paper-based workflows that caused delays and eliminating duplicate data entries to ultimately reduce the time-to-hire to up to three months, McGrath explained. 

The city also nearly doubled its job fill rates and created more than $250,000 in annual cost savings, the toolkit states. 

Realizing solutions also comes from developing a specific action plan based on the challenges and potential resolutions during the project charter and process mapping stages, according to the toolkit. 

An action plan clearly documents a proposed solution to hiring challenges, the administrative or policy steps being taken to realize it and metrics for measuring the plan’s progress, according to the toolkit. The plan should include details like which staff are responsible for implementing different parts of the plan, how progress and success will be measured and pathways for refining or redesigning the plan as needed. 

McGrath added that creating an action plan can be crucial for agencies and staff presenting hiring reform proposals to policymakers and other leaders with the authority to approve and support such efforts. 

“It is buy-in from government leadership at the end of the [day] to implement these fixes … for HR and operations teams to go about this massive task [of hiring reform],” she said.