How Philly lawmakers are trying to solve the city’s workforce problem

With nearly one in five municipal jobs in Philadelphia sitting vacant, City Council is investing millions in recruiting, signing bonuses, and better parental leave and workforce development programs. The city is also looking at ways to make job hunters more aware of what jobs are available.

In the 2024 budget, expected to pass Thursday, Council set aside more than $20 million focused on recruiting and retaining workers across departments. Some Council members have additional ideas about how the city should be focusing its recruitment efforts, arguing that additional low-cost changes could help accelerate hiring.

Some of the budget items came directly from suggestions by Council’s Special Committee on Retention and Recruitment of Municipal Workers, which released a report in April detailing the extent of the current workforce shortage, and spelling out specific recommendations for how the city should address it. Council President Darrell Clarke and Councilmembers Brian O’Neill, Katherine Gilmore Richardson, and Mark Squilla are on the special committee.

Workforce-focused items in the budget include $10 million in hiring bonuses for public safety jobs and other “hard-to-fill” city positions, $3 million for recruiting police officers as well as $1.5 million for the police cadet program, and $5 million for a workforce development program in the Streets Department.

The expansion of parental leave for city jobs from four weeks to six will cost $2.1 million. Some positions will have other parental leave policies in place dependent on union contracts, Gilmore Richardson noted.

“Parental leave was important,” said Gilmore Richardson, who gave birth to two children while working as a city employee, and adding two weeks was “a big improvement.”

Philadelphia’s understaffing issue is not new. Resignations from city jobs doubled from 2020 to 2021, while the city was already working to recover workers lost early in the COVID-19 pandemic. An Inquirer report last year found that the workforce shortage was affecting delivery of services across city government, from police, prosecutors, and firefighters to library and recreation center staff.

According to the special committee, things are already looking up, with the number of people leaving jobs decreasing by nearly a third from 2021 to 2022. But the vacancy rate is still at 18% as of April, the committee reported, and it’s higher in certain critical roles.

“It’s not limited to a handful of departments,” said Councilmember Isaiah Thomas. It’s “one of the more urgent issues we have as it relates to where we are as a city.”

Across the U.S., state and local governments, including New York, saw more people quitting municipal jobs after COVID-19 hit, and they’ve struggled to fill those roles. A survey by consulting firm McKinsey found that pay, lack of career development, and dissatisfaction with leadership were top reasons for people considering leaving local government jobs.

The vacancies in Philadelphia came up repeatedly in budget hearings, Council members said. It also became apparent in hearings that filling those jobs has become more difficult because existing staff are struggling to find time to hire while completing the duties of their department, Thomas said.

“We’re asking for a full-court blitz,” Thomas said. “If you prioritize hiring HR first, you will hopefully see a ripple effect.”

Another topic that arose during the budget process was how the city is advertising available jobs. Thomas, during one of the early weeks of hearings in March, remarked on the city’s use of LinkedIn to disseminate job listings and said that’s not enough to reach the people who would want to apply to those jobs.

“The same way you were constantly having someone tell you to vote for mayor … we should have some direct outreach to tell people to apply for jobs,” said Thomas, reflecting on the recent primary election. Social media efforts should include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, he said, where posts are more likely to be shared among friends and family members.

Thomas also pointed to use of text messaging, which has expanded to alert city residents in emergency situations. “One of those texts would go a long way to getting people to apply to jobs,” Thomas said. “We have to be a lot more aggressive.”

Thomas and Gilmore Richardson both pointed to advertising on streaming services as a strategy that would allow the city to target geographic areas and demographics that most likely include qualified, interested jobseekers.

Thomas said he’s received feedback about Philadelphia’s job postings as more people apply, and some have said the online descriptions are confusing and difficult to parse.

Thomas’ communications director, Max Weisman, noted that their office had an opportunity to create a job description from scratch last year, with the creation of the director of nighttime economy role. Because it was a new position, they took time to write the description so it would attract the right applicants, looking at examples from other cities that had implemented similar roles. The result from that work, Weisman said, was “a robust pool of candidates.”

According to the special committee’s report, the city has already modified 100 job descriptions so they are clearly open to applicants without a four-year college degree. They’re also reducing the number of civil service jobs that require a standardized test, instead using applicants’ training and experience to rank them.

Gilmore Richardson noted that city departments are advertising Philadelphia jobs to people in other locations — countering recruitment efforts other states and municipalities are making in Philadelphia. They’re also investing more in pre-apprenticeship programs that help young people get needed skills to enter trades, as well as providing opportunities for current city employees to upskill and become qualified for more senior, hard-to-fill positions. Some of those efforts were motivated by the special committee’s work, she noted.

“I’ve learned a lot more about recruiting but also retention,” she said. “For me it has really opened a myriad of opportunities for us to work to retain our employees.”