Michael Hickey testifies on hiring manager challenges

I can go first.

You can go first?

Okay, perfect.

Thank you, Committee Chair.

I'm Michael Hickey, Chief of Strategy and Operations for Citizens NYC, but I'm actually here to talk to you about my work as a former leader at the New York City Public Schools, where I helped to start up the community schools team and led the students in temporary housing team.

Yeah, so this is more of my direct experience, lived experience with civil service.

I wanted to start by saying that as a hiring manager overseeing hundreds of personnel, operating with dozens of vacancies at any given moment, I was never trained on how civil service works.

I was never offered an explainer or a tutorial, never invited to a webinar or an onboarding session, was never given a clear point of contact in my own agency or at DCAS or any other city entity.

Thank you.

And everything I learned about civil service, I learned by reverse engineering and crowdsourcing and understanding of this Byzantine and Kafkaesque process.

My team worked with homeless families, helping families get access to food, counseling, school supplies.

It was very complex, specialized, trauma-informed work.

The way a hiring process for our team went was like this.

We would identify a vacancy, a title.

We would assign headcount and budget.

And then we'd wait, in my case, a year or more for a list to open up.

We'd wait several more months before the hiring pool began.

We would sit all day in a room with dozens of other hiring managers.

We would all get to ask one question of an employee, and then we would have to make a decision then and there about whether or not we're going to make an offer to that candidate.

We would be, you know, obviously this rule of three applies.

So either take the warm body that's in front of you, whether they're qualified or not, or you wait until hopefully someone comes along.

So obviously this is a really difficult, traumatizing process for someone that's trying to work with vulnerable families and feeling constantly like you're unable to meet the needs of those families because you don't have the trained personnel to do so.

Those are limitations that were clearly set by the process of civil service itself rather than the ability to find candidates.

Thank you.

I'm sorry?

Yes, it includes recommendations.

You're welcome.