San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. tries to repair its hiring process
Amanda Ford counts herself among the lucky: She made it through San Francisco’s byzantine hiring process and ended up getting a job with the city as a data scientist.
But she hadn’t been expecting some of the bumps along the way.
The astrophysicist has a doctorate in astronomy and experience teaching data science at UC Berkeley’s graduate school, but the city said her bachelor’s degree didn’t meet the minimum requirements of the job.
That was just one hiccup in a monthslong process.
“I was able to get through various barriers, but I felt that was more like luck than anything,” she said. “The process can take a very long time, and not everyone can wait that period of time.”
City officials say it spends a median of 255 days to hire a permanent city worker. That ninemonth span is more than twice as long as it was back in 2015.
The lengthy process is a major reason why San Francisco has approximately 4,600 unfilled job positions, experts and officials say. The city’s open positions represent about 14% of its labor pool — more than double the number of openings before the pandemic.
Officials are now working hard to fix the city’s “broken” system, which includes weekslong application reviews, lengthy interview periods, extensive background checks and employment verification.
The current process “does not necessarily achieve our collective goals,” Carol Isen, San Francisco’s human resources director told the Civil Service Commission in December, “but simply adds complications, and delay, to our day-to-day operations.”
On Wednesday, the commission voted unanimously to accept a series of changes to San Francisco’s hiring rules, which
Mayor London Breed’s administration says could help reduce the time it takes to hire new employees by about 100 days — or 40%. Before the changes can be formally adopted, however, the the city must get employee labor unions to sign off on the proposed changes.
In a news release Wednesday, Breed said a city team tasked with streamlining the hiring process found 120 years of regulations accumulated since the civil service system was created have worsened the city’s lengthy hiring process.
“(I)t takes way too long to hire workers to deliver the services our residents deserve and rely on,” Breed said, in the news release. “One of the fundamental goals of good government is modernizing how our city works, including filling City positions faster so we can be more responsive to the needs of the people of this City.”
The commission previously considered the matter a month ago, but kicked the vote to January over concerns that the proposed changes might be “regressive” and exclude some applicants from certain work opportunities. The commission’s pushback also watered down the proposed reforms from the original 125-day reduction the city had first wanted.
Broadly speaking, the changes are meant to remove barriers to hiring, speed up civil service exams, give departments more flexibility to recruit, modernize hiring rules to align with tech advancements, and make hiring requirements more consistent across the city.
At some departments, the empty chairs have made it tougher to carry out the city’s core functions — leaving bus routes without drivers, empty fire trucks and hundreds of unfilled jobs at the department of public health.
Some departments struggle more than others. The airport’s vacancy rate is 20% — or almost 400 employees. At the Department of Public Works, 260 seats are unfilled, or 22%. And the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which runs Muni and has an average time to hire nonoperators of seven months, has more than 700 openings — 11% of its total workforce.
“It’s just, you know, incredibly slow,” Isen said, “and people who need a job aren’t going to wait for us.” She added that a 255-day process to hire an employee is “excessive.”
San Francisco is not alone. In Oakland, city leaders are trying to whittle down the time it takes to create eligible “lists” of applicants to 120 days, down from a current average of about 160 days, according to the city’s director of human services, Ian Appleyard. The department interview process then takes an additional one to three months, he said.
Like San Francisco, Oakland is also evaluating its civil service hiring process, he said, “in an effort to reduce the time to hire and eliminate unnecessary steps.”
Alicia John-Baptiste, who runs the San Francisco think tank SPUR, said that the city originally adopted a civil service system to limit patronage or nepotism.
“Putting a set of rules in place to safeguard against political favoritism, in the abstract, that’s a good thing,” she said.
In practice, however, a long hiring timeline leaves city services unfilled.
At the same time, it forces governments to rely on overtime or overload employees with unreasonable job duties, which is expensive and can lead to burnout.
The city is contemplating changes such as no longer requiring agencies to post opportunities on an actual bulletin board, and instead post them on the city’s employment website or other online platforms.
Also among the changes: shortening required notice periods before exams or reviewing or appealing exam scores, and lengthening the amount of time the city may pull candidates from lists of eligible job candidates.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Commissioner Elizabeth Salveson said she was concerned job seekers might not see shortened posting periods. Others who opposed some of the changes said they were concerned that the changes to posting rules might lead to allegations of favoritism or excluding some job seekers.
SEIU 1021 shop steward Jesse Stanton said he agreed with the need to speed up the hiring process but said the city’s past reform efforts had failed to have the desired effect.
The city’s new hiring website, he said, was less functional than its predecessor, making users fill out new applications for each job opportunity.
Another change, the threeday notice for job postings, for example, “is a really short time period,” he said. Similarly, under the new rules, after a job seeker makes it through the lengthy process, they would only have a few days to accept an offer or appeal a failing score.
“It shortens it beyond what’s reasonable,” he said.
The present time to hire stunned city insiders and other municipal experts.
“It’s unconscionable,” Civil Service Commissioner F.X. Crowley said of the wait time at last month’s commission meeting.
Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin went so far as to call the system “broken,” and said he was pleased Isen was “laser focused” on fixing it.
“It is high time they be fixed,” he said of the rules. “I certainly understand we want employees and prospective employees to be treated fairly and right, but (we) have to make sure the employer, the city, is treated fairly as well. Right now, San Francisco government is not (a competitive employer). This is reflected by the fact we have scores of vacancies across the government. Part of that is because of our antiquated hiring policies.”
“Absolutely insane,” said Annise Parker, former mayor of Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city.
Such a lengthy hiring process, she said, all but guarantees many job applicants will end up not making it through.
“No one can sit six months, nine months or a year waiting for a response,” she said. “They can’t put lives on hold, so they will go to the next offer.”
The lengthy wait comes amid a tight job market with an unemployment rate of 2% in the city and as area job seekers must contend with crushing rent and other high costs of living in San Francisco.
The hiring system is emblematic of a broader problem within the city, said PJ Johnston, former press secretary of Mayor Willie Brown: The city’s rules and regulations are so cumbersome and inefficient that they drive up costs; slow down progress; and create headaches for city officials, residents and business owners.
“Across city government, everything from trying to build housing to trying to hire workers, we have accumulated rules and mandates that have loaded all these processes over time,” he said. “And the rulemaking gets to the point where it makes things burdensome and inefficient, and sometimes we look at ourselves and say, ‘Why does it take so long to do something?’ when, in fact, years of rulemaking led to exactly that.”
Ford, the city’s new data scientist, is happy in her new job. She’s learned a lot, she said, working on meaningful projects she hopes will help the city.
But the hiring process was so difficult that she’s not sure she’d urge friends to apply for similar jobs.
“It took a long time, and it was frustrating,” she said.