Government employees provide many of the day-to-day services that cities offer residents, including stocking and caring for the books they check out of libraries, collecting their trash and recyclables, and inspecting the restaurants where they gather with family and friends. While the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the nature of work for many, this largely manifested for public sector employees as high vacancy rates, fewer staff members to handle a growing workload, and increased overtime demands. These disruptions accelerated the rate of retirements and consequently slowed the delivery of key services.
In recent years, municipal agencies have taken steps to address staffing shortages and other pandemic-related effects through hiring and recruitment. In Philadelphia, the size of the public workforce is roughly the same as it was before COVID. However, vacancies increased from 6.6% to 16.5% in the city due to staffing declines in some departments, coinciding with a spike in unfilled budgeted positions from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal 2025. Meanwhile, other major U.S. cities such as San Diego, Phoenix, and Dallas have expanded the ranks of their public personnel since the pandemic to improve service delivery. As cities navigate the post-pandemic era, continued vacancies mean the services that communities depend on may be stalled, compromised, or outright reduced.
The Pew Charitable Trusts spoke with Caitlin Lewis, executive director and founder of the national nonprofit Work for America, to better understand paths forward in staffing government positions and bolstering Philadelphia’s and other cities’ ability to deliver important services. Work for America helps over 300 state and local governments recruit, hire, and retain the people who keep their communities running.
What can you tell us about the current state of municipal government hiring?
(Courtesy of Caitlin Lewis)
Two years ago, when we started Work for America, the problem was really that too few people were applying [to the public sector]. A wave of early retirements had started during the COVID-19 pandemic, and far fewer young people were coming in to replace those retirees.
The landscape has radically shifted. Municipal governments are now, on average, drowning in applications. Over 300,000 people lost their federal jobs in 2025, which has hugely impacted local- and state-level public sector labor markets. We are also now living in a reality where you can use AI tools to apply for 50 jobs in an afternoon, and that means that governments are getting more applications than ever. This influx of applications, paired with government agencies’ limited ability to review them, is creating a bottleneck—even extending time to hire, in some cases.
How does the state of municipal government hiring affect service delivery?
When government works, it’s invisible, and people have the privilege of not thinking about it. And when it breaks, it becomes highly visible. Not having people in the jobs to deliver services effectively causes all kinds of issues: your permit not getting reviewed when you try to open your small business or build affordable housing; inspections being slowed down or skipped; 911 calls going unanswered. Vacancies also have compounding effects—if there aren’t enough people to absorb the work, burnout can become more prevalent and can further motivate public servants to leave their roles. And that ultimately has service delivery impacts that erode communities’ trust in their governments’ ability to provide for them.
How can cities modernize their hiring practices?
Every HR [human resources] leader I speak to has a hundred ideas for how to improve hiring processes. It’s been rewarding supporting those leaders. Three places we encourage cities to start are their process, their data, and their brand.
Most cities have never mapped their hiring process end to end. They know that it takes a long time, and they may even know the exact number of days that it takes, but they don’t actually have a clear picture of where the real bottlenecks are and where candidates are dropping out of the process and why. Cities need to measure how they’re improving with their data and existing resources.
Then there’s a government’s “brand”—its reputation and its connection to the community it serves. We know that governments do some of the most meaningful work in the country, so we encourage them to critically evaluate how they communicate and reflect that to the public.
Additionally, there isn’t really a shared definition of excellence when it comes to government hiring. No city is the gold standard, even though there are a ton of examples of cities getting something right. There’s a suite of 50 different things that need to be happening all at the same time, so we provide an infrastructure, peer learning, and other resources so each local government can focus on what’s achievable with the resources they have, while they make the case for broader modernization.
Are there any best practices or promising strategies you’ve seen cities use to fill positions?
Baltimore has done really great work. The city rebuilt its skilled trades hiring program by implementing simple, meaningful fixes that didn’t require additional funds or staffing. These fixes include things like scheduling weekly interview days so that hiring managers have time blocked on their calendars, so it doesn’t take 60 days to schedule an interview once the hiring process has started.
Similarly, Columbus has done great work filling vacancies in its skilled trades. In partnership with the Ohio Reformatory for Women, the city has trained women during incarceration so they reenter [society] with the training and credentials to step into a job immediately.
Are there gaps in the research that you would like to see filled? What, if anything, is missing in our collective understanding of the state of public hiring?
Learning about who makes up state and local government workforces is at the top of our wish list. We know the total number of employees. We know that the government is probably the largest local employer in the country. But there are things we don’t know, like the breakdown of role types by gender, or how many young people are working in local government right now. A big open question is: How do we actually aggregate, standardize, and analyze the information we have about who works in local government so that we can make data-driven decisions about the future workforce?
Another thing we’re working on is mapping and understanding career pathways. As of today, we can’t definitively say how many true entry-level jobs exist in state and local government nationally—or which jobs have upward mobility, which jobs people stay in for their whole careers, and so on.
Why should someone seek a career in their local government?
Because working in government rocks. People often think of the government as slow, bureaucratic, and boring. The tech sector spent decades framing the narrative around tech as aspirational, world-changing, and mission-driven. But, actually, all those things can be said about my time in government. It’s a place where, if you have an entrepreneurial drive, if you hustle, if you’re creative, you can be a part of managing, even overseeing, some of the most complex projects that are happening in your community.
I don’t personally ever advocate for people choosing one career for their entire lives. I think that bouncing between sectors is extremely important and that being able to go to government with the perspective of the private sector and the nonprofit sector will make you a better public sector operator.
But, generally, I think the world would be a much better place if everybody had the experience of working in a city agency or a state department.
This story first appeared in the Pew Charitable Trusts. Read the original here.