Nearly a quarter of Philly city jobs are still vacant, but Parker’s team believes it’s ‘turning a corner’

A yearslong understaffing crisis across Philadelphia government continues to impact how the city delivers basic services and the amount of money it spends on overtime costs, but officials said Tuesday that hiring is beginning to rebound from pandemic-era lows.

Last year was the first in four years that hiring outpaced the rate of people leaving city government work, a trend that Michael Zaccagni, director of the Office of Human Resources, described as “turning a corner.”

“We got hit big time during the pandemic,” Zaccagni told City Council members during a hearing about his office’s budget Tuesday. “We kind of got behind. But last year we had significantly more employees hired than left.”

Still, officials testified that nearly a quarter of jobs across the municipal government — 23% — are vacant. That’s left more than 6,200 positions in the city, from 911 dispatchers to building inspectors, unfilled. The most acute shortages are in public safety agencies, including the Police Department and prisons, while the Fire Department is short hundreds of paramedics.

Officials with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration testified to Council on Tuesday that they’re taking a variety of steps to improve employee recruitment and retention in order to stem the problem, one of the biggest issues that Parker inherited when she took office in January. The shortages have cascading effects, including that the city has spent record amounts on overtime pay.

Some members of Council expressed concern Tuesday that the Parker administration’s approach to in-office work — the mayor has said she wants employees working in-person five days a week — could reverse the positive gains in hiring. At-large Councilmember Kendra Brooks, of the Working Families Party, asked administration officials if they’d considered whether the policy could result in an exodus of parents and caregivers.

Camille Duchaussee, the city’s chief administrative officer, said the city intends to negotiate its policy with the unions that represent municipal workers this year and that “nothing is off the table” in terms of potential benefits.

“We want to make sure that we are supporting our employees across the board,” she said.

» READ MORE: 5 ways Philadelphia can address its short-staffing problem

While Philadelphia’s labor problem has been persistent, it is not unique. Following the changed labor market and worker shortage brought on by the pandemic, the private sector largely rebounded, attracting government employees by offering remote work, flexible hours, and signing bonuses. Municipal governments across the country bled workers at a fast clip and have not been able to replace them.

It’s left the city, one of the largest employers in the region, grappling with how to make city work more attractive. The city is in the process of conducting a wide-ranging study of its pay scale, but the review has not yet been finalized — even though it was supposed to be completed by the middle of last year.

Zaccagni said the city has also launched an aggressive marketing campaign to describe city jobs as stable and having good benefits. He said his office has dramatically scaled up its recruitment efforts, going from interacting with about 800 applicants at recruitment events in 2022 to 2,800 last year.

The Police Department has spent millions to advertise its recruitment opportunities and job openings, and it’s worked with state officials to relax some fitness requirements and allow more applicants into the police academy.

And Duchaussee said the city is also exploring streamlining its application process, and she credited Parker for committing to removing college degree requirements for some city jobs.

But other barriers to city employment, especially the time it takes to hire, are more systemic in nature.

Councilmember Jim Harrity, a Democrat, said the city needs to be more mindful of “how much time we’re taking in the process.” He said a family member recently applied to be paramedic, but by the time he heard back months later, he’d already found a job elsewhere.

Most of Philadelphia’s workforce is made up of “civil service” jobs, meaning applicants take a standardized test and the candidates who score highest can advance in the hiring process. When a department needs to hire a new employee, hiring managers request a list of applicants they can interview from the Office of Human Resources.

Merely transmitting that list takes more than a month on average, and the entire process from application to hire typically takes about three months or more.

At-large Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, also a Democrat, asked Zaccagni what it would take for the city to reduce its average time-to-hire from three months to one.

Zaccagni paused, then said: “We would have to completely rethink what civil service looks like in the city of Philadelphia.”