Editorial: Fix government hiring procedures

As taxpayers, we all expect, and deserve, a certain level of civil service and core operations from our local government. But ongoing staff shortages have magnified dysfunction at many agencies: At the state, these include a chronic teacher shortage that causes each school year to open with hundreds of vacancies and temps; at the city, the Honolulu Police Department has 350 vacancies; lifeguard and emergency medical technician (EMT) openings go unfilled; Parks and Recreation shortages force pool closures and leave public grounds unkempt.

And there’s the staffing crisis at the city Department of Planning and Permitting, where corruption has surfaced and the backlog of permit applications has actually worsened, not improved. DPP still has 80 vacancies, with another 80 new jobs created to meet a host of new responsibilities.

Finally, a clarion call is being sounded by Mayor Rick Blangiardi, armed with a diagnostic analysis into the city’s recruitment timelines. The dismal bottom line: The city takes an average of 181 days, or six months, to make an offer to a qualified candidate through open recruitment.

The analysis, which includes recommendations to improve things, is a welcome, albeit overdue, peel-back on hiring practices that have grown duplicative and inefficient over many years. Blangiardi has directed his leaders to cut those times in half, and department heads must meet that goal over the next several months.

It’s a serious situation for the city: Of some 3,000 current vacancies, Blangiardi called 2,000-plus of them “key” to city operations; and of the 8,600 current employee base, some 15% is already past retirement age.

At the state level, agencies reportedly have about 2,000 vacancies, but that’s not counting systems such as the Department of Education and the University of Hawaii.

All this is occurring amid a tight Hawaii labor market, as the economy rebounds from pandemic lows and competition is vigorous for good workers.

“The city’s current staffing challenges have been years — if not decades — in the making,” found Abdurrehman Naveed, the Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative fellow who conducted the diagnostic study. “As a deep-rooted, structural issue that is as much a labyrinth to insiders as to outsiders and involves a myriad of actors and moving parts, there are unsurprisingly few ‘quick fixes’ here.”

But fix them we must, if government hopes to make headway against recruiting and retention problems, which only stand to get worse given the relatively high number of retirement-age workers.

The report gave this glance into the city’s sluggish, 181-day-average hiring process, broken down to three stages:

>> Stage 1, processing/approvals within the initiating department and from the Budget and Human Resources departments: 62 days.

>> Stage 2, requisition to referral, including job advertising and initial screenings: 49 days.

>> Stage 3, interview and selection: 70 days.

Imagine such a lengthy process for candidates — many of whom are no longer available for the job after six long months.

Among the actions needed to slash hiring times by half: Many existing processes are redundant and repetitive, so compressing or streamlining is crucial. Exacerbating the problem of inefficient processes is a shortage of staffers in key, mission-critical roles of recruitment — so this needs addressing.

The job application is long, cumbersome and not designed with applicants’ ease in mind; that needs to get fixed.

The analysis found that departments “take their time (some more than others)” in processing job-opening requests, some of which are not sharply done and are error-prone, which delays the process further. Further, departments take “an inordinate amount of time” to conduct interviews and make selections.

As noted by Blangiardi, who had a career in private- sector management, there had been little active recruitment done by the city for its many openings. It was good to hear him say, then, that a recent recruitment push yielded 385 applicants for Board of Water Supply jobs and 465 for EMT openings.

Another avenue ripe for expansion would be more city apprenticeships and internships, such as the Po‘okela Fellows program (see honolulu.gov/hr).

These workforce issues should drive discussions on modernization and better alignment of vacancies with actual needs, to recalibrate jobs beyond “business as usual.” Still, it’s clear that streamlining of the hiring process is overdue and essential — to fill key openings to do the public’s business, not slow or shut services.