San Diego is On-Track to Cutting Time-to-Hire in Half
- Darren Keenaghan
- Aug 8
- 4 min read
How San Diego employed no-cost changes to reduce time-to-hire
Today's post comes from guest writer Darren Keenaghan, Deputy Personnel Director, from the City of San Diego's Personnel Department.
With a high vacancy rate of 12.5% and a 9-month timeline to fill a vacant classified position, the City of San Diego knew something needed to change. With such a high vacancy rate, the Mayor and City Council were concerned about the City’s ability to provide public services, and lengthy hiring processes likely contributed to the 19% vacant positions remaining vacant for more than 14 months. Despite being understaffed and overworked, Personnel remained committed to doing what we could to reduce timelines.
The City Council added a number of positions Personnel to aid in efforts to shorten timelines, and to address concerns flagged in a recent audit that were potentially contributing to delays in hiring. With the additional positions, Personnel was able to provide more direct assistance to City departments that were facing the highest vacancy rates, and having issues filling positions. Personnel staff were beginning to implement improvements, but these efforts-- even with additional positions-- weren’t moving the needle. We needed to look at the process as a whole to identify areas that were blocking staff and candidates from moving forward efficiently and remove those hurdles.
Reframing with PPI
That's where Partners in Public Innovation (PPI) came in. We partnered with PPI with the goal to shorten our long hiring timeline, improve the applicant and hiring manager experience, and improve data collection and reporting in our Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
One of the first things PPI did was reframe the issues we were having, and give staff a new perspective. We took a step back and worked with PPI to document all of the steps in the current process, reviewing areas where we could leverage existing technology or systems, where we could reduce any duplicative or unnecessary steps that were causing delays, and areas where role clarification may be warranted.
We tracked metrics like the time it took to request an eligible list when a vacancy occurs, how effectively hiring managers are utilizing our Applicant Tracking system, how many questions we ask and how many approved applicants we get.
Our goal was not just to reduce time to hire, but also to improve our stakeholders' experience (candidates, hiring managers), and to make the City the employer of choice.
Using Root Cause Analysis
Breaking our process down to this level was instrumental in developing the right solutions. One of the biggest delays identified by the audit in our process turned out to be one of the most straight forward to resolve. Our current state metric for the first step in our hiring process-- the step where City departments simply initiated the process to fill a vacancy-- was 109 days! But we didn't understand why it was taking them that long until we did some root cause analysis.
We discovered that the process alone was not always the issue. Because hiring managers from other City departments were not and did not have a lot of experience with hiring processes, yet were responsible for many steps within it, we needed to re-evaluate the various roles within the hiring process itself. Despite numerous guides and instructions provided by Personnel, they simply were not enough to facilitate hiring processes for those not experts in hiring. The City's various managers are instead experts in park maintenance, electrical engineering, wastewater, accounting... the experts in hiring rightfully are Personnel staff.
PPI: How has piloting these changes been for you and the Improvement Team?
DK: After we started our pilot work with PPI, we were able to identify the hurdles that were making an always tough hiring process even more burdensome. One thing we kept in mind when looking to make substantial change is that people may take change personally. A solution to this is to work from the mindset that it is the process and not the people being evaluated.
The results were better than we hoped. Due to a hiring slow down we were somewhat limited in our piloting of the changes but even so, we were able to see faster processing times, fewer errors, improved satisfaction, and increased approved applicants.
PPI: What's one thing that surprised you and your team during this process?
DK: One thing that really surprised us, and PPI did a great job in focusing on, was that small efforts could make a large impact in the overall process. Working on the little changes showed us there are no issues too small and that every improvement builds upon the next.
PPI: What was the most impactful takeaway from working with PPI?
DK: The biggest impact of this process has been to our perspective shift and communication with our client Departments. Sharing information in a timely manner and listening to feedback from our customers was prioritized as a result of this work. We are now working with the City departments more closely and it has allowed for direct and timely feedback from the hiring managers. This small change has made a real difference in how we work.
If you're thinking about making a change, I'd say: take the time to map out your process and be open minded. Take a minute and flip your perspective to your customer experience, whether that be applicants, client departments or staff in other departments working on hiring.
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