Will Rogers delivered what is my favorite wry comment about government: “Thank God we don’t get all the government we pay for.” Certainly such is the case deep within our 13 story San Diego city hall.
The SAN DIEGO U-T reports that the city needs an average of 280 days to fill a vacancy. That’s just over nine months to hire someone to do a job.
With the exception of police and a few niche high skill slots, this makes no sense at all. No private sector company would take two months to fill most slots. Often not two WEEKS. Yet San Diego needs over nine months. Awesome!
It’s not as though they can’t find qualified applicants. Even with San Diego’s reformed 401k-type pensions — such government positions would draw crowds of eager applicants if anyone at the city bothered to post a CraigsList want ad for $25. So it’s not that the city can’t find good applicants — it’s just the “city way” of doing business.
Here’s the irony. We’re told by government labor union bosses that we need to pay top dollar to entice “the best and the brightest” to be government workers. While this goal is wrong from the get-go (imagine the waste if Steve Jobs had worked in some govt bureaucracy), this prolonged hiring process causes the best and the brightest of the applicants to find employment elsewhere. We’re often left with the applicants who have no other opportunities (outside McDonalds) while waiting for a city job to come through.
I must add that police slots are more difficult to fill, even though we pay the lucrative public safety defined pensions to remain competitive with the other cities. You don’t want a psychotic cop running loose with a gun. And for applicants, it’s often not always rewarding work, as cops sometime face abuse by the public (the opposite of firefighters — firefighters don’t give out tickets).
But I digress. As the article points out, our intrepid city auditors have suggested a host of reforms to cut the hiring process of city employees in half — to as low as “only” 140 days. 4.5 months. Big Whoop.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/dec/07/slow-hiring-at-san-diego-city-hall/
Slow crawl to City Hall jobs
By Craig Gustafson 6 a.m.Dec. 7, 2013
If you applied for a job with the city of San Diego and haven’t heard back, there may be an explanation.
A new audit shows the city’s hiring process takes an average of 280 days and suggests several ways to slice that time frame in half.
The lengthy process is particularly troubling because there will soon be a lot more vacancies at City Hall. More than 3,000 employees are eligible to retire over the next five years.
The city currently has a nine-step process for hiring employees which includes a department requesting to fill a vacancy, analyzing the vacancy, publicizing the job, referring candidates for consideration, ranking candidates, reviewing applications, interviewing candidates, conducting a background check and then hiring.
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To read the rest of the article, you’ll need to go to the link:
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/dec/07/slow-hiring-at-san-diego-city-hall/