San Diego under fire for drawn-out city worker hiring process

As with San Jose, San Diego's high vacancy rates for city employees can be traced to marathon-long onboarding processes, finds a 64-page audit published in July. The San Diego Tribune lays out the audit's recs for clear, efficient hiring operations (hint: it doesn't involve more union strikes).

San Diego can’t hire city workers quickly enough to provide quality customer service partly because its hiring process is bureaucratic, inefficient and unnecessarily long, a new audit says.

Key reasons why more than 1,000 of the city’s roughly 12,000 jobs are typically vacant include a 60-step hiring process that takes an average of nine months, the audit says. And nearly 20 percent of vacant jobs take more than 14 months to fill.

The audit says San Diego’s hiring process takes 42 percent longer than the average for government organizations, based on a 2018 survey by governmentjobs.com.

The large number of city vacancies has been blamed for long wait times getting broken streetlights repaired, incorrect water bills fixed, illegally parked cars towed and many other customer service complaints addressed.

The 64-page audit, which was released last week by City Auditor Andy Hanau, recommends some fundamental changes to the city’s hiring process.

They include significant streamlining, including elimination of some redundancies, and new efforts to monitor how long hiring is taking place and to set goals for speeding up the process.

For example, the audit recommends the city’s Personnel Department reduce the number of forms applicants must fill out sharply below the more than 90 that are now required of new hires.

This article originally appeared in the San Diego Tribune. Read the whole thing here.

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