A much needed modernization of the way the City hires and promotes its employees could be key to addressing persistent labor shortages
Every day, often without even realizing it, the average New Yorker relies on the work of a civil servant. From turning on a tap and trusting that clean water will flow, to commuting on public transit, attending school, or simply walking down a safely maintained street, the city’s workforce of more than 280,000 employees keeps life in New York running smoothly (or, as smooth as life in New York can be.)
What happens when the City can’t maintain that workforce? Persistently high vacancies and rising attrition rates are making the answer clear – delayed services, unmet needs, and increasingly noticeable impacts on quality of life.
Since the pandemic, the City has faced ongoing challenges recruiting and retaining its municipal workforce, with the City’s job vacancy rate surging from 1.3% in October 2019 up to a peak of 8.4% in November 2022. Vacancies have since trended downward (reaching 4.9% in February 2025), but they remain more than double pre-pandemic levels. Closing this gap will require filling more than 15,000 vacant roles, many of them essential positions in law enforcement, education, and infrastructure management. High vacancy rates are making it harder for city agencies to administer services across the board – delivering meals to older adults, providing health services and immunizations to children, completing capital work in city parks and roads, and conducting emergency preparedness exercises – just to name a few examples.
Source: NYC Agency Staffing Dashboard, NYC Comptroller’s Office
Perhaps most critically, difficulty filling vacancies threatens to undermine the City’s ability to address major quality of life issues like housing affordability. With a 15% agency vacancy rate, the Department of City Planning faces delays in reviewing and approving permits for new affordable housing, slowing much-needed new development. Meanwhile, a 13% agency vacancy rate at the Department of Buildings slows the deployment of inspectors essential for bringing new buildings online and ensuring they are safe to occupy. Without the workers to staff these roles, the City will not be able to support the production of new housing at the scale needed to improve affordability.
While there is no single factor to blame for the City’s shortage of workers – broader labor market trends and shifting attitudes towards public service certainly play a part – the Civil Service system that the City relies on to hire workers is playing a significant role in making the problem worse. Outdated job classifications, infrequent exam schedules, and a slow, bureaucratic hiring process have created unnecessary obstacles for job seekers, discouraging potential applicants and delaying much-needed hires.
When it was first established in the 1880s, the Civil Service system was a groundbreaking workforce reform championed by progressive leaders of the era. Designed to dismantle the corruption and patronage of Tammany Hall, the Civil Service system was intended to create a merit-based workforce composed of civic-minded staffers, where hiring and promotions were determined by competitive exam scores instead of political connections. The system truly took hold in the 1930s, as Tammany Hall’s influence waned and Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia sought to reform and expand the system. During Mayor LaGuardia’s tenure, civil service applications rose from 6,327 in 1933, to over 250,000 by 1939. While successive mayors have made incremental changes over the years, the core structure of the Civil Service system has remained largely unchanged.
Fiorella H. La Guardia served as NYC’s mayor from 1934-1946; frequently regarded as one of New York’s greatest mayors, he sought to address corruption by expanding the Civil Service system
There is no question that the Civil Service system played a crucial role in combating corruption, building public trust in city government, and shaping the modern municipal workforce that serves New York City. But like any institution that goes decades without undergoing meaningful reform, the system is becoming out of step with the needs of the City and its workforce.
Today, the Civil Service system is badly in need of reform and modernization. Its outdated and overly-rigid approaches towards hiring and promoting employees are driving away talented workers by making it needlessly difficult to secure a job and advance within the municipal workforce. Extremely long hiring times, infrequent test administrations, narrowly defined job qualifications, and limited opportunities for merit-based promotions or salary increases – all of these factors are serving as obstacles that deter people from applying for roles with the City.
And who can blame them? The road to obtaining a civil service title and being selected for a role can be long, confusing, and frustrating, even for workers who have navigated the system before. Here’s how the process might go for someone looking to enter the Civil Service system:
First, a prospective candidate needs to research what titles will allow them to hold the types of roles they are interested in – an often complex process, as job classifications can be outdated, overly specific, or misaligned with actual on-the-job responsibilities. Exams for certain titles are administered only once every few years, further restricting opportunities for candidates to apply.
Once a candidate identifies a relevant title with an upcoming exam, they must register and pay a processing fee ranging from $40 to $100 before sitting for the test. After the exam is administered, scoring and ranking can take anywhere from several months to over a year. Once finalized, candidates are placed on an eligibility list from which agencies can select hires. Should they be selected from the list, onboarding can take additional weeks or months due to the various bureaucratic hurdles required as part of the hiring and onboarding processes.
When all is said and done, it’s not uncommon for a year or more to have passed since the candidate first started the process. Some candidates may see the whole process through, but for many, the long timeline may be enough to deter them from launching their career with the City. With 15,000 roles to fill, the City should be focused on making it as easy as possible to bring on qualified candidates and ensure that New Yorkers continue to receive the critical services they rely on.
Streamlining the hiring process and reforming the system is possible, but it will require major changes to the way the Civil Service system is administered, as well as significant buy-in from decision makers both at the city and state levels. If New York City is serious about fixing its workforce shortage, it must address the structural issues preventing it from hiring.
One of the biggest obstacles to streamlining and modernizing the City’s Civil Service system is that the system is largely controlled by New York State, leaving the City with little flexibility to meaningfully alter the system. Oversight from the state is meant to protect against patronage, however it also has the effect of adding additional regulatory hurdles to any changes to the system. Under the current system, even when agencies urgently need workers, they must wait for state approval before implementing hiring reforms. This creates unnecessary bottlenecks, preventing the City from adapting to workforce needs in real-time. Expanding local control would allow New York City to update job classifications, streamline hiring processes, and better compete for talent – without waiting for Albany’s approval at every step.
As a more short-term measure, the City should expand its use of non-competitive titles for positions that require specialized expertise but are difficult to recruit through traditional Civil Service pathways. Non-competitive titles are exempt from testing requirements, allowing agencies to make permanent hires more quickly. Expanding their use – particularly for hard-to-fill roles in areas like IT, engineering, and social services – could provide immediate staffing relief while the City works toward broader Civil Service reforms.
Additionally, the City should work with the state to modernize the Civil Service exam process with a focus on increasing testing frequencies and streamlining the grading process. Increasing the frequency of exams for high-demand positions would ensure that qualified candidates aren’t forced to wait years for an opportunity to apply, and implementing on-demand or rolling exams through digital testing platforms would further streamline the process, allowing applicants to take tests when they are ready rather than being restricted by an infrequent schedule. Accelerating grading and ranking times through automation and process improvements would reduce hiring delays, enabling agencies to fill critical roles more quickly and prevent prolonged vacancies that disrupt city services. Given the digital technologies we have today, there is no reason why it should take months or even years to grade and post exam scores for civil service tests. Prospective law and medical students receive their LSAT and MCAT scores within 30 days – yet Civil Service exam results, which are far less complex, often take months or even years. There’s no reason public sector hiring shouldn’t move with the same urgency.
If New York City is going to solve its municipal workforce crisis, it cannot rely on a hiring system designed for a different era. The Civil Service framework that once protected against corruption and patronage is now doing more harm than good by hobbling the City’s ability to recruit and retain the talent it desperately needs. Without action, critical city services will continue to suffer, and issues like housing affordability, infrastructure maintenance, and public safety will become even harder to manage.
Reforming the system will not be easy, but it will be necessary. The City cannot afford to keep losing talented workers to bureaucratic red tape, nor can it allow vacancies to undermine essential services. A modernized Civil Service system – one that prioritizes efficiency while maintaining fairness – will not only strengthen the City’s workforce but also improve the quality of life for every New Yorker.
The author of this piece, Joey Smith, can be reached at jts512@nyu.edu
The editor of this piece, Deaunte Johnson can be reached at dj2428@nyu.ede