Catherine Vaughn testifies on removing bottlenecks

Good morning, Chair Aldebar.

My name is Catherine Vaughn, and I'm the co-founder and co-executive director of Abundance New York.

We believe the city can and should make it easier, faster, cheaper, and fairer to build and deliver what New Yorkers want.

And so we push for housing, for more vibrant public transit and public space, for renewable energy, and for more effective government delivery of all of the above.

We applaud the work the administration and DCAS are doing to expand access to public sector job opportunities from the Ambassadors Program to youth apprenticeships and internships to the recent decision to waive civil service exam fees for high school students and first-time test takers.

We also believe that these measures must be paired with additional reforms to remove bottlenecks and barriers from the entire recruitment and application experience.

Free civil service exams keep money in applicants'pockets, but the largest cost they face is time.

The months between when exams are offered, or years, the year it takes to get exam results, the months required as hiring managers offer interviews one by one to exam scorers who might no longer be looking for jobs,

the nine months of unpaid onboarding time between when a provisional offer is made and when an offeree is actually able to start work.

In addition to significant time costs, prospective civil servants face additional barriers to finding meaningful careers within the city.

Titles and jobs descriptions are outdated and opaque, information on the hiring process is scattered across different websites, and data on different agencies'time to hire is unavailable.

As you review the city's work to recruit,

diverse talent to its workforce, we urge you to consider the entire application process from soup to nuts and to set ambitious goals around reducing agencies' time to hire and vacancy rates.

We propose a variety of categories, which you can, I'll share my written testimony with you afterward, but

first ensure that job titles and descriptions reflect the actual work employees are doing and that these roles, along with hiring process details and exam schedules, are posted in plain language.

Many roles have not had updated descriptions in years or even decades, resulting in such outdated titles as computer associate.

Information about which roles require exams is hard to find.

And then I'll just quickly go over.

I think the second is working aggressively to cut evaluation and hiring timelines as you're questioning really pushed into.

This could include rethinking when exams are needed, such as for licensed positions where there's already state, you know, stringent state-run licensing processes.

And then also, you know, where civil service exams are still appropriate, thinking about how to speed up through continuous recruitment and exam schedules, choosing to deliver exams via structured interview, and moving from the rule of three to banded scoring.

And then I'll finally underscore the role of transparency in terms of publishing time to hire across agencies,

which could both help applicants as they try to get a sense of what they should expect from the process and also identify areas for improvement within and across agencies.

Thank you very much.