It takes an average of six months for the city to hire employees as city officials try to fill over 3,000 vacant positions, according to the first study of its kind.
However, Mayor Rick Blangiardi is giving the city 90 days to cut that time in half. Solutions won’t come easily with different city departments operating on different time frames.
The city was selected to take part in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, in which the city decided to focus its efforts on examining its complex hiring process.
Bloomberg-Harvard Fellow Abdurrehman Naveed conducted the report and wrote that inefficiencies in the city’s hiring practices have been decades in the making, and that little has been done to address the situation.
“In my very first week, it became evident that no data-driven, comprehensive study had previously been undertaken by the City to assess the true nature of the bottle necks impacting its civil service recruitment,” Naveed wrote in a letter to Blangiardi.
“There are unsurprisingly few ‘quick fixes’ here,” Naveed wrote. “Ultimately, it is going to take a ‘whole-of-government’ concerted effort that is sustained over time to make tangible progress on this front.”
The city’s hiring process is broken into three parts: The first step is getting approval to fill the position, which on average takes the city about 62 days. The second step is screening eligible candidates, which takes on average about 49 days. The third step is interviewing and selection, which takes about 70 days.
On average, it takes the city 31 days to even post a new job.
The delays in hiring often are the result of differences between individual departments.
The report found that, on average, delays within individual departments add 94 days to hiring.
For example, it takes the Department of Parks and Recreation 69 days to complete an “approval to fill” request, but the Honolulu Fire Department takes only one day.
Department of Human Services Director Nola Miyasaki said that departments with larger staffs with varying types of positions that need filling often take longer than others.
“Even though (the Honolulu Police Department) is really huge and the fire department’s really huge, they are first responders,” she said. “But in a place like Parks… you have all these groundskeepers, and people that have to do the plants, and then have maintenance crews that have to do the buildings, then they have event people.
“Some of the larger departments are so complicated.”
Further delays are caused when departments turn in incorrect “approval to fill” requests and the Department of Budget and Fiscal Services or the Department of Human Resources needs to return the forms to the department.
HPD, Parks and Recreation and the Department of Planning and Permitting submitted the most “noncompliant” requests. However, Parks and Recreation, the Department of Information Technology and the Department of Environmental Services took the longest to correct errors, an average 10 days.
The departments that take the longest to interview and select candidates are the Department of the Prosecuting Attorney, which takes 102 days; the Department of Design and Construction, which takes 93 days; and the Department of Environmental Services, which takes 83 days.
In comparison, the Department of Emergency Management, which is the fastest, takes 40 days.
High vacancy rates also can slow a department’s internal hiring process, Miyasaki said.
According to a workforce report presented in May to the Honolulu City Council by the Department of Human Services, the departments with the most vacancies are HPD, HFD, the Department of Environmental Resources and the Department of Facilities Maintenance.
HPD had 951 unfilled positions and a 29% vacancy rate; HFD, 305 unfilled positions and a 22% vacancy rate; Environmental Services, 416 unfilled positions and a 34% vacancy rate.; and Facilities Maintenance, 268 unfilled positions and a 33% vacancy rate.
A key position that affects the hiring process is the administrative services officer within each department, who often handles most of the hiring paperwork, among other duties such as workplace grievances and labor negotiations, Miyasaki said.
Although all the departments are supposed to have one or more administrative services officers, some of those positions also remain unfilled.
“One of the things that I’ve discussed with the mayor at length is just really how do we create consistency across the city in terms of our administrative officers, and how do we support them better,” Miyasaki said.
Better training is one of the main initiatives that Miyasaki is implementing.
The city is starting a two- to three-year training ramp-up for the administrative officers. Miyasaki is also planning to train staff to use current technology properly, especially in the hiring process, because it is being applied inconsistently.
However, her focus is also on retention, such as leadership training for blue-collar workers.
“If we spend so much effort hiring people, we don’t want to lose them,” she said. “It’s kind of a multipronged effort to try to keep our workforce filled and vibrant and at the right level.”
Blangiardi said vacancies is one of the most important issues his administration wants to address.
“Internal operations, we’ve worked against ourselves,” Blangiardi told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
“The first challenge is, let’s eliminate all this other stuff that’s getting away,” he said. “I can’t even imagine how many people we lost because it took six months to hire somebody who might have had all the right stuff that can work here, and just got lost.”
Blangiardi inherited his first budget in 2021 and had 60 days in office to finalize it. His main priorities then, because of the pandemic, were to prevent furloughs, property tax increases and reductions in core city services.
“That’s how we had to live for all of last year, was with that budget, which gave us very little wiggle room,” Blangiardi said. “We didn’t really get to put our stamp on our direction on where we want to go, and the appropriation of monies and where our priorities are.
“It hit us right in the face on the staffing numbers and everything else that went with it,” he said. “But we were precluded from really doing anything about it, and even beginning to talk about that.”
Meanwhile, the city Department of Human Resources is being audited by the city Auditor due to a resolution passed by the City Council in July to examine the hiring and selection process of city employees.
Council Chair Tommy Waters introduced the resolution for the audit and said that although the Bloomberg-Harvard report was good, he hoped that the audit would take it a step further.
“I think the report points out these very general problems,” Waters said. “And my hope is that the resolution will take a deeper dive and actually make actionable recommendations. In other words, how to cut down the time for posting the job openings, how to cut down the time … to refer the qualified job applicants to the department, and so on and so forth. Actionable recommendations is what I’m hoping for.”
Waters already has seen the impact of the lack of city workers.
“I needed a street sign that said, ‘don’t block the intersection’ in Aina Hina. It took 18 months … because we don’t have enough people to make the signs and we don’t have enough people to install,” he said. “Our streams aren’t getting cleaned and maintained because we only have five people cleaning the streams islandwide.”
Both the city administration and Waters want more data about retention. Miyasaki said that every year about 13% of the city’s workforce leaves, but it’s not clear how many of them are retiring or leaving for other reasons.
“We were going to find out,” she said.
To make matters worse, the city is also grappling with the age of its workforce, with 15% currently eligible for retirement.
Ultimately, Blangiardi said, the lack of workers means a breakdown of city services, something he is trying to avoid.
“I just was surprised coming in here that this has been neglected for such a long period of time that … especially in a large organization, that you wouldn’t have had all that in place, that people would just understand that there needs to be ongoing recruiting,” he said.
“What we don’t want to be is an administration that makes excuses on why things can’t get done,” Blangiardi said. “When you look at something like this, taking this on, above and beyond all the other major things, is no small undertaking.”
