Audit of Department of Human Resources and Office of Budget Management Hiring Timeliness

Executive Summary

The City’s hiring process requires a coordinated effort by the Department of Human Resources (DHR), which works with departments to conduct the hiring process, and the Office of Budget Management (OBM), which approves a department’s request to start the hiring process. In addition, each year OBM estimates an expected employee turnover amount (i.e., the time that the position is vacant and thus no salary or wages are paid) for each department. OBM reduces each department’s personnel budget by the turnover amount and works with the department on an annual plan to fill vacancies.

The City generally required departments to achieve OBM’s estimated annual turnover amount early in the year, rather than spreading it out over the course of the entire year. Specifically, budgetary hiring plans approved by OBM at the beginning of the year as a safeguard against departments exceeding their personnel budgets led departments to delay hiring by an average of 100 days.

Further analysis revealed that:

• hires occurred on average 78 days after the scheduled hire date set in budgetary hiring plans. Although departments submitted hiring requests an average of 33 days before the scheduled hire date, the average hiring process took approximately 101 days; and
• nearly one-third of new hires started work more than 120 days after departments initiated the hiring process. DHR’s lack of formal standards and processes to track actual hiring times rendered it unable to identify specific points and causes of delay.