Capitol Fax.com - Your Illinois News Radar

Some good news on the state hiring front, but procurement reform still awaits

Posted in:

Illinois

* I encourage you to read the entire SJ-R piece on the state worker contract negotiations because there’s more to it. But I did want to highlight Anders Lindall’s comments on the state’s hiring system…

Currently, [AFSCME Council 31] represents 35,000 state workers ranging from departments such as the Department of Children and Family Services and Department of Human Services. Yet, when accounting for open positions, that number would grow to 43,000.

A large reason for the high number of vacancies is due to a “very arcane” hiring process, [Council 31 spokesperson Anders Lindall] said, one that can take months to fill a position.

“If you are a person who is looking for a job and there’s a position available with state government, but you don’t hear back for six or nine months, you have probably found something else,” he said.

Perhaps alleviating some of the state’s hiring struggles, this year’s budget includes a $750 million increase for DCFS going towards the hire of 192 new workers and expanded training programs. The department has also hosted several on-the-spot hiring events throughout the state, which Lindall supports.

Convincing someone to wait nearly a year for word about a state job has to be nearly impossible in this job market. More info on one of those DCFS “On-the-Spot Hiring” events is here.

However, there’s some good news. The governor’s office says the state will be able to expand the streamlined DCFS hiring porocess to other agencies after SB2228 is signed. AFSCME initially opposed a version of the bill in veto session, but went to neutral this spring.

That won’t solve all the hiring issues, of course, but it’s a key component.

* And while they’re fixing the hiring process, revamping the state’s procurement code needs to be accomplished as well. The state has set up a ton of new programs in the past four years which have had difficulty getting off the ground because small business owners and not-for-profit leaders just aren’t equipped to deal with the state’s Byzantine contract/grant application process.

Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days. But it just takes too long to get anything done. Plus, the system rewards people with an aptitude for applying for contracts and grants (or hiring people with that knack), but that doesn’t mean those same folks will be as great when it comes to actually performing the work.

posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 10:50 am

Comments

The blocking and tackling of running a state and governing within the parameters (like contracts and hiring) are not the most glamorous parts of governing, but they usually are part of the most critical to good governance

Comment by Oswego Willy Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 10:57 am
DCFS gets most of the heat for the open positions, but how much of the hiring process is managed through CMS? Does DCFS have to wait for candidates to jump through the difficult and lengthy hoops at CMS before even speaking to an hiring manager at their agency?

Comment by NIU Grad Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 11:14 am
There’s a connection here within some offices of the lawyers we often see in public agencies are not the best and the brightest. There are great ones to be sure, but man, the level of navel gazing for already solved problems…

Comment by ArchPundit Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 11:15 am
If your hiring process only hires people who are looking for a job today, and who are still looking for a job months later, that seems like a disaster.

Comment by Ebenezer Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 11:20 am
Get CMS out of the hiring process. Let the agencies determine their procedures to hire new employees.

Comment by Huh? Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 11:22 am
NIU Grad - CMS is very much a factor.

I won’t go into too much detail, but I’ve seen it go from bad to worse to near rock-bottom within DCFS. As a supervisor, I have never had a full crew, and for one entry-level job, it took almost a year to schedule candidate interviews.

Also factor in that many of the open jobs simply do not pay enough, IMO.

Comment by Anony Anony Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 11:24 am
I retired from State government 11 years ago. At that time, hiring was a joke. CMS conducted the interviews. I could suggest interview questions and sit in on the interviews, but had to stay out of it. Often a union member with job rights would bid on a position and show up sight unseen. The Governor’s Office would sit on positions for months because there were always some version of a hiring freeze. It was difficult to say the least, to find good qualified people outside of State government and get them through the hiring process. One of the reasons I retired 11 years ago.

Comment by Sir Reel Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 11:34 am
The Bureaucracy of State Government is one of the primary reasons I left State Government. I held a C-Suite job at an agency and when one of my top lieutenants left, I was told we couldn’t even post the position for four months, let alone start the rest of the hiring process. Procurements are convoluted and some take in excess of a year to complete, when I could have them done in the private sector in days.

Yes, some rules need to exist, but the overreaction to Blago and other recent issues have complicated both processes where it makes it impossible to get anything done if staff leave.

Comment by AD Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 12:15 pm
The hiring system continues to be a joke. It takes months for CMS to hire people, and the actually agency (DHS, DSFS, etc) have no say on who they hire. It is a tiny bit better in the past three months; in part due to the state attempting to show they are hiring staff at Choate, and other centers; but it really hasn’t changed a lot. Still takes months just to hire mental health technicians. When it takes months to get called to start work, most people have taken other jobs. I have known people who have applied four times for a mental health techncian position, and were told they were qualified, but were never called back to start. They finally took a job elsewhere. If the state were really serious about hiring they would listen to the actually people running the agencies, and change their hiring system. A belief among many of us is that the state is setting up the state centers to fail by not hiring. If they really wanted to improve things they would change the system.

Comment by Grateful Gail Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 12:15 pm
IMO, whenever there’s a scandal with hiring, procurement or other activity, the typical response from State government is to layer on more red tape, review, etc. Another response would be to punish those responsible. I remember 2 guys traveled to Canada for a conference and blew a bundle. Instead of canning them, all out-of-state travel had to be approved by the Governor’s Office. And I’m sure out-of-state junkets continued.

Comment by Sir Reel Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 12:49 pm
CMS is THE bureaucratic red tape by which all government agencies, state or federal, are measured by.

…and most of that began with the George Ryan Knucklehead Relief Act of 2002.

Comment by Flyin'Elvis'-Utah Chapter Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 12:50 pm
Well qualified staff for some very technical positions are refusing job offers because CMS/Agencies only will offer step 1C (the very lowest salary) for union positions, and tiny pay bumps for any internal employees that apply for a management position. This allows for only hiring inexperienced staff who often find positions in the private sector after spending a lot of time training with the state. Brain drain is real and very concerning. There also needs to be regional salary differential for the Chicago metro area where the cost of living is substantially more than downstate. Hiring in our agency takes over 1 year at the soonest. Paperwork has to be resubmitted over and over, it is a deliberate effort to slow the process down. Agencies need more autonomy from CMS for hiring.

Comment by Johnnie F. Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 1:10 pm
Excluding posted positions where no qualified applicants made it to the interview process (more and more common), the average fir our Agency is 282 days to hire. That is an improvement btw.

Comment by Lurker Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 1:35 pm
Hiring-be careful on returning all functions to state agencies. You get IDOT shenanigans all over and a new special master.

Procurement-the delays really started with the creation of the chief procurement officers. They are more concerned with form over substance. It’s fine if they just reviewed to see if following the law, but they make policy decisions for agencies they have no business being involved with. Throw them out-the value add is limited to the costs agencies incur because of their interference.

Comment by Just saying Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 1:41 pm
Its not uncommon at DOIT for lets say a person retires..for them to be brought back and “train” their replacement. When a job posting is finally approved(which who knows how long that takes)…qualified persons are scheduled for an interview…but wait HR comes and says “hey we need to redo this entire process from the beginning. It really seems that management is doing this on purpose in order to get more contractors. My question is what happened to the union agreed-upon hiring practices…itlooks like those arent being followed.

Comment by RetiredWorker Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 1:55 pm
===the average fir our Agency is 282 days to hire===

It is not much better at the U of I. One of the positions on my team recently took 466 days to fill from the date the outgoing person announced their retirement, 388 days from the date they retired, 266 days from the date the search first opened, 123 days from the search closed, and 92 days from the date interviews, and 77 days from the date the new person accepted.

In an ideal world, the new person would be onboarded before the old person left for cross-training purposes, but that would require hiring to take no more than 2 months in this case. What a wonderful world that would be.

Don’t get me started on procurement…

Comment by thechampaignlife Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 2:45 pm
===the value add is limited===

That is what gets me. How much did the corruption cost us, and how much do the poorly designed anti-corruption measures cost us. Are we paying more and/or failing to deliver because of overreaction to scandals? If Ryan and Blago cost us $20M/year in bogus hiring, and the measures put in place to prevent those activities costs us $40M/year in administrative bloat, which is worse? The answer is somewhere in the middle: well-designed systems to catch most crooks with the least disruption.

Put another way, if someone were starting from scratch to design a hiring or procurement system, would it look anything like the train wreck built upon the carcasses of the last 20 train wrecks that we currently have? If not, how would it look, and how can we get from here to there?

Comment by thechampaignlife Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 2:58 pm
===Are we paying more and/or failing to deliver because of overreaction to scandals?===

It is an excellent question.

Comment by Rich Miller Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 3:03 pm
=There also needs to be regional salary differential for the Chicago metro area where the cost of living is substantially more than downstate.==

Can’t love and agree with this enough (banned punctuation)

Comment by West Sub Ladi Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 6:33 pm
Word on tbe Street is that CMS only has one person working on grading applicants to see if they meet the minimum requirements. They keep it as a an entry level job, so people leave every 6 months for better jobs. This is a huge bottleneck. If you can’t get people qualified, then there’s no movement in the rest of the system. They need to get more staff on the frontend to keep the backend moving.

The new SuccessFactors electronic hiring program seems promising, but still a lot of bugs to work out. We recently had a routine lateral for a bargaining unit position with only a couple of applicants, both in the union. Still took over 3 months.

Comment by NoMoreMC Thursday, Jun 22, 23 @ 8:55 pm