CM Aldebol on mental health headcount reductions and recruitment

Thank you, Chairs, and thank you, Commissioner.

I do have a question about headcount, your reduction of 33 vacant positions,

and how long have these positions been vacant, and are they tied to specific mental health programs?

Thank you for that question, Councilmember.

All of the headcount targets that we identified were targets that were not highly

necessary, were not necessary for executing the functions that we have across our agency.

And so those headcount reductions

are not affecting any of our ability to do the work that we do in the Division of Mental Hygiene.

I'll hand it to Aaron to share more.

Yeah, thank you for the question.

I mean, as I've said before, these are always difficult exercises to do when you're trying to find savings, as we, as every other city agency, was asked to do.

But our guiding principle was really that certainly it not impact services, but also that we look at the longest, you know, vacancies that have been out there the longest, vacancies that do not impact direct services.

And, you know, it's hard to do, but, you know, the...

the types of positions we ended up looking at for this were things like more back office functions, right?

Like a data analyst or an office manager.

So it's spread across.

There's not a single area where they're sort of clustered, but we looked across the whole agency, including within mental hygiene, across the division.

Were any of the positions like hard to fill positions and what has been your strategy or what is your strategy moving forward to fill

positions that have been historically hard to fill or where there's high turnover?

I can speak a little bit to that.

So we're doing many different things to try and get folks through the door and also to retain them once they're part of the health department team.

A couple of things that we're doing are really targeted interventions on social media, believe it or not, to really get some of these job postings in front of individuals.

I, in fact, recently was part of a social media push to help people come into the health department to fill some of the hardest to fill roles.

I'll tell you another example.

We're currently exploring partnerships with academic institutions, with universities, to be able to provide a sort of a foot in the door for some of these

hard-to-fill roles so that a student can come into the health department as an intern and then potentially be brought on as a full-time staffer.

So we are...

We're trying to be creative about this.

We also want to continue to shout it from the rooftops.

We're hiring, and we want folks to apply.

And how often do you look at your vacancies and your turnover rates?

You know, how is that impacting the services that you're providing?

I'm going to hand it to Aaron.

Yeah, I mean, I think we're continually looking at them is the short answer.

We have, you know, really re-upped recruitment efforts.

I mean, I think all these creative ways, in addition to the usual ways, you know, partnering with DCAS, hosting career fairs, things like that.

I think one positive statistic is that I think it was two years ago, starting in 2024, we actually was the first time since the height of the pandemic where we actually saw more people coming to the agency than leaving.

And that trend has continued for the last couple of years.

So I think we're making headway for sure.

That's good to hear.

And we're additionally applying these creative ways.

See the Instagram campaigns, right?

I think that there's long been sort of a reluctance for young folks to apply for or work in city government.

I think we're beginning to see a change.

People are understanding that city services and city government can work for people and make an impact in their lives.

And we're hoping to see that the hiring patterns change in accordance with that.

Thank you.

Okay, great.

I keep saying Commissioner Kavanaugh, sorry.

Chair Kavanaugh.