San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced last week that Room 110 in city hall will serve as the city’s new hub for career development and hiring for city employees.

During the global pandemic in 2020, the city shut down its hiring completely. Getting it back up and running was exceedingly slow, prompting a review by San Francisco’s Civil Grand Jury, a government oversight panel of volunteers who serve for one year.

The jury’s 2023 report compared citywide vacancy rates by year. In 2019, there were 2,230 vacant jobs, a vacancy rate of 6.8 percent. By 2023, the city had 4,793 vacancies, a rate of 13.7 percent.

Muni was running fewer buses, increasing passenger wait times, the report said. Emergency 911 call center answering times had increased, slowing police response times. The city’s Department of Public Health had the highest number of vacancies, and hospital capacity consistently exceeded limits, resulting in diverted ambulances and reduced levels of care.  

The report’s conclusion was that the city takes too long to hire. The recruiting and retention process was too complex and opaque. The cost of living in San Francisco was too high, and the demand for critical city services outpaced the city’s hiring.

In a January statement, the city announced a 25 percent increase in hires and nearly a 30 percent decrease in time to fill vacant positions compared to last year. The mayor credited the increase with a 2022 Government Operations Recovery Initiative, which was launched by the offices of the City Administrator, Controller and Department of Human Resources. It was aimed at addressing staff shortages and backlogs with changes such as a careers website, outreach campaigns, online testing and automated reference checks. 

Some jobs require background and medical checks, including those in public health. Staff at the new career center will help candidates navigate the city’s hiring process and help them prepare for civil service examinations.  

“For far too long, it’s felt like job seekers in our communities needed to know someone who already worked for the City & County in order to gain access to inform them of the unique hiring process and insider terminology — no longer,” said Dion-Jay Brookter of the Young Community Developers, a nonprofit organization that advocates for communities of color.

The new city hall extension will also serve as a drop-in center for one-on-one career counseling, for both applicants and city employees to receive tips on how to write a resume and interview.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.