What it will take to deliver for New Yorkers: modernize the civil service and hiring process

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Over 25,000 people submitted their resumes to Mamdani’s resume portal in the 24 hours. But the reality is that very few are likely going to be able to make it through New York City’s old-school civil service hiring process. The majority of city jobs require you to take an exam, offered only once every four or more years in most cases, get a score many months or years later, and then wait for up to four years to get called for a job interview. If you haven’t taken a civil service exam for the city in the past four years, you’re out of luck in many cases.

Everybody working a city job needs a civil service title and in the majority of these titles are “competitive”, requiring some type of exam to get put on a list in order of your score. Hiring managers can only select from the top three available people on the list. If you think, “oh, I’ll go take an exam then”, you can see the list of open exams (in PDF form, of course) for fiscal year 2026 - there are likely few jobs that align with what you are thinking you want in your next role. Want to know what civil service title a job you might be interested in would be offered under? Good luck - even a hiring manager might be hard pressed to tell you.

Achieving Mamdani’s affordability and quality of life goals will require filling existing vacancies - 11% or over 7,000 positions for non-uniformed roles. This includes critical roles like housing inspectors, vital for ensuring safe and quality housing, 911 call center agents and more.

In addition, improving how city services are delivered in a technological age requires people who can build and maintain modern technology. Almost every service requires digital content, web forms, data management, digital tools and more, but there are no titles for “user researcher”, “data scientist”, “content designer”, “UX designer”, “product manager” or a myriad of other common tech roles in the system. Recent job posts for these roles have been in civil service titles including “Graphic Designer”, “Computer Specialist (Software)”, “IT Project Specialist”, “Research Projects Coordinator”, “Community Coordinator”, “City Research Scientist” and more.

It also can take months to fill a role. Anecdotally (the city does not publish time to hire data), it can take up to 9 months for a candidate to receive full approval and start, even from the time of receiving an offer letter. Candidates receive little information during this process, and must choose if they wish to wait for approval, or if they need to move on and accept another role.

Mamdani must commit to speeding up the hiring process within the existing civil service system to fill roles quickly, and commit to modernizing the civil service system to make it easier to understand and engage in to improve the quality of life in NYC.

What can the City do starting on January 1 to improve how the city hires?

1. Commit to plain language in all materials and communications. Information about civil service is incredibly opaque if you aren’t already fluent in NYC bureaucracy. City employees have shared that they have gotten different answers from HR staff at different, or even from different staff at the same agency. Hiring managers experience expectations for collaboration with HR at different agencies, often based on independent interpretation of confusing rules. Mamdani’s administration can commit to creating plain language materials for applicants, employees, hiring managers and HR staff to increase common understanding of the system, consistency in rule application and to ensure that all New Yorkers can access City jobs.

2. Redesign city hiring and civil service webpages using principles of user experience design. NYC’s civil service and jobs websites can be challenging to navigate and find the necessary information to understand open roles, if you qualify and when exams may take place. Committing to improving city websites, based on the needs of the users, about civil service and hiring will increase fairness in the process and improve understanding inside the city and beyond.

3. Introduce transparency and proactive touchpoints in the exam and hiring process. The City has the data and ability to improve the information available to candidates about time to hire and where they are in the process, but has historically chosen to not to make it available. There is little information available about how long the process will take for potential employees to decide whether to accept a role and make reasonable decisions about how to proceed. While it may not be quite the numbers we would want to see, providing transparency allows people to make the right decision for themselves and their families, and can point to where attention needs to be put first.

4. Create hiring manager specific training and information. At many agencies, hiring managers are responsible for significant decisions in the hiring process like the title, job description and recruitment plan but receive little existing guidance on navigating the civil service system. Many also don’t trust that hiring from an “eligible list” will provide them a candidate with the desired skills, whether technical or soft skills. Acknowledging the key role hiring managers play and meeting their needs will have a massive impact across the City.

5. Develop modern marketing and recruiting strategies for civil service exams and non-competitive hires. The City’s recruiting strategy for exams is very centralized in DCAS and relies heavily on in-person events. Agencies are not heavily involved, even for titles, like city planner or housing specialist, that are primarily used by a small set of agencies. The City can make use of Mamdani’s digital presence to drive information citywide about civil service, open exams and how to become a civil servant, democratizing the process. In addition, recruitment functions of “hard-to-recruit” roles should follow modern recruitment practices, including proactively finding candidates and encouraging them to apply. This takes expertise and skill that is not typically prioritized within the city.

What can the administration do to drive longer-term change to ensure the hiring process supports the administration’s goals and provides an improved experience?

• Restructure job series and titles to allow for more clarity in how roles relate to modern jobs (i.e. create data, design or software engineering classifications). Clarifying the available civil service titles, creating necessary job series and right sizing the number of titles will reduce administrative burden on the City and allow for flexibility as jobs change and evolve in today’s economy. This will require collaboration with stakeholders, including union’s, but can significantly change how the City manages work in the 21st century.

• Review pay scales for City jobs and benchmark on similar organizations and governments in large cities. NYC government jobs pay less than governments in large cities, such as Seattle and San Francisco, particularly for tech and other in demand roles. The low salaries and complex hiring process give many pause on entering into public service, and make it harder for folks who don’t have another source of income in their household to feel secure in their career choice.

• Advocate for the state to allow for continuous recruitment to allow for more eligible lists in order to allow for regular entrance of New Yorkers into the City hiring process. Today most exams are offered only once every 4 years, leaving minimal opportunities for new New Yorkers or those who come into an interest in public service late, to join the civil service, and leading to stale lists that increase administrative burden for hiring managers and HR staff.

The City and the DCAS Commissioner are empowered to set policy, rules and processes governing the civil service process, within the bounds of state law. There is a tremendous opportunity to make the system easier to understand, streamline processes so they are less burdensome on everyone involved, and ensure that it is supportive of the City and administration’s goals. Let’s make sure the way we hire helps us create a safe and affordable New York.

I don’t often talk about myself on this substack, but I am a former New York City public servant who has had three civil service titles and remains on several civil service lists. While at the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) from 2018-2020, I led the Citywide Hiring Assessment, a 10-month, user-centered assessment of NYC’s hiring and civil service system in partnership with the agency’s Human Capital team. No public report was ever published. We analyzed existing data in new ways, did 1:1 interviews and group design workshops, and surveyed over 10,000 New Yorkers, current and potential public servants to identify bottlenecks, pain points and opportunities for impact. The work led to concrete steps the City planned to take, but follow-up phases were unfortunately paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic and continued recovery efforts.