HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Honolulu’s Mayor Rick Blangiardi has directed city leaders to slash what he calls a “staggering” amount time it takes to hire people at the city and he’s budgeting millions of dollars to hire more workers.
A look at the city’s job listings shows just over 60 openings, but the actual figure is 3,000 vacancies. Blangiardi says it takes an average six months to hire someone at the city.
It’s a problem that’s been years in the making, but he calls it ‘unacceptable.’
“It was staggering. It really was,” he told Hawaii News Now.
It’s hindered recruiting and made worse by the labor shortage so the city is working with the Bloomberg-Harvard Cities Initiative to diagnose the problem and try cut through layers of hiring bureaucracy.
“It just was a labyrinth. It was just way way too complicated,” said Blangiardi.
“When you apply to the city, we want that application process to be a little more friendlier and simpler than it has been in the past,” said Nola Miyasaki, director of Department of Human Resources.
The departments with the biggest vacancies are Parks and Recreation, Environmental Services, Facility Maintenance, Board of Water Supply and Honolulu Police Department.
Blangiardi has directed city leaders to cut the six month average hiring time down to three months and they’ve got three months to do it.
“I’ve said this openly to our cabinet, their leadership gets compromised when you don’t have enough manpower to get the job done,” he said.
The city has budgeted roughly $59 million dollars to hire more people.
Blangiardi hopes to hire a thousand people in the next two years, but says it’ll take much longer to reach 2,000 and for the first time publicly, he’s hinting at a 2nd term.
“I don’t think we could get it done in the next 2 1/2 years I’ll tell you now,” said Blangiardi.
“It’s hard to do this job in four years so I’m looking beyond that to be very candid with you,” he added.
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