New York’s Civil Service System vs. Public Sector Progress

Two days after his election, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani smartly sought to seize his supporters’ extraordinary enthusiasm by opening up an application portal to “identify candidates for roles across City agencies and offices.” It worked. Within 24 hours, 25,000 people had submitted their resumes.

There’s plenty for them to do. Per Comptroller Brad Lander’s excellent dashboard, New York city government’s vacancy rate today is more than twice its level before the pandemic, with more than 13,000 positions vacant. 

Some of those jobs are empty because of efficient operations or budget constraints, but many should be filled. Some of the City’s highest vacancy rates — and more than 1,000 openings — are in housing-related agencies. If the mayor is going to bring down rents and make the city more livable, he probably wants more people to grant housing permits, inspect buildings, help the homeless and repair public housing. And whether or not he succeeds in raising taxes on the wealthiest, he also ought to collect levies already due. That is hard with 265 openings and a 13% vacancy rate at the city’s Department of Finance. “Money is being left on the table,” says one city assessor. 

But if the new mayor wants to use the surge of interest in joining his mayoralty to get his administration up and running fast, he will face an ugly obstacle: the City’s civil service system. 

To call the system “byzantine” would be an insult to Byzantium. First created by Governor Grover Cleveland in 1883, New York State’s civil service system aspired to award jobs based on “merit” and “fitness” rather than connections or patronage. But the system has since become an obstructive barrier keeping many of the city’s most civically engaged residents out of public service.

Even in a country rife with bureaucratic government processes, New York State’s system stands apart. Governing magazine once wrote: “For decades, the king of the calcified and recalcitrant beasts has been the New York state civil service system, a monster off whose chest comprehensive reports on reform bounded like Wiffle balls.” And New York City operates under the state’s rules, with a special sauce layered on.

In a reform agenda released during his own mayoral campaign, Lander laid out the painful experience of applying for a city government job:

A noncity employee with appropriate qualifications must first wait for an exam period (which sometimes do not exist at all) to be advertised, qualify to take the exam, wait several weeks for their examination date and then again wait for a ranked list of test takers to be certified, which includes a time for a mandatory appeals process. Once the list is certified, only then can agencies begin assembling applicant pools, and they must start at the top of the list and call at least one in every three candidates, in order. The median time for releasing scores from an exam is 290 days. Including time for test development and hiring, city agencies must often wait well over a year to onboard qualified employees. 

Lander only scratched the surface. Job postings in New York City must fit into official job titles. But existing job titles — and there are more than 3,000 of them — often bear no relationship to existing jobs as normal people understand them. 

Here is the list of civil service exams on offer in the next year. There are 16 “administrative jobs,” including “administrative horticulturalist” (!), and 13 kinds of associates. 

Many of these classifications have no particular subject matter. If your life goal is to work on transportation or the environment, and you don’t know exactly what job title you would need to hold, you’re in trouble. For these types of “competitive” City jobs, you can’t apply for a specific agency. You may need to apply for generic and often murky job descriptions (“administrative staff analyst,” “associate job opportunity specialist,” “legal coordinator,” “special officer”) that may (or may not) qualify you for the job where you want to work. 

Under the standard rules, hiring managers with vacant roles are only allowed to hire the top three scorers on the exam for the job they’re hiring for. Under this “Rule of Three,” managers must regularly call individuals about tests they took years ago, often for jobs they never wanted. And then hiring managers can take weeks continuing one by one down the list until they find an interested candidate.

These problems are particularly bad for technology jobs. As others have noted, city government is in dire need of a digital upgrade, and a surge of tech talent will be critical to the Mamdani administration’s ability to achieve its policy vision.

But among 3,000-plus standard titles in city government today, not one is for a technology job recognizable to ordinary technologists —no “software engineer,” no “web designer.”

The city is, however, presently offering exams for three kinds of “computer associate,” covering everything from allocating desktop computers to coding.To learn more about the “computer associate” role, “YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR READING THIS ENTIRE NOTICE BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION.” In that seven-page PDF, most of which is consumed with describing educational qualifications and relevant certifications, here is the entire description of what the job is:

Computer Associates (Operations), under general supervision, with very considerable latitude for independent initiative and judgment: supervise the activities of subordinates in one or more computer operations units of considerable size; or serve as a technical resource person in the performance of networked, multi-tiered, or mainframe computer operations; or perform as a technical resource person in the diagnosis of and, when feasible, the correction of telecommunications hardware problems in order to maintain efficient functioning of telecommunication operations and to minimize downtime in the case of system failure. All Computer Associates (Operations) perform related work. 

That must have been written at least 10 years ago. Or so one hopes.

Hiring strong talent for technology roles now requires all kinds of creative maneuvering and workarounds – like using a precious few positions exempt from this whole rigamarole. These constraints also incentivize agencies to outsource critical technology work to more costly contractors, a boon to vendors at public expense.

What makes this especially painful is that so many talented technologists are eager to work in government. In recent years, a series of federal “Tech to Gov” virtual job fairs attracted thousands of experienced tech workers, prompting Wired Magazine to label the U.S. government “the hottest tech employer in town.” People will accept a pay cut for meaningful work, but forcing them to parse jargon-filled forms, sit for a written exam, and wait a year for a job offer is a surefire way to extinguish their enthusiasm. 

What’s more, for many vacant mid-level and senior tech positions within the civil service system, preference is given to existing employees rather than outside applicants, who often get lower pay for the same work too. So if you’re a senior software engineer at Google who is ready to jump ship, take a pay cut, and go help New Yorkers access their benefits… well, you’re out of luck.

The great irony of the status quo is that a system built to honor merit now favors insiders — those who either have city jobs or know those who can negotiate the alien job titles, erratic exam schedules, and vague interview calls needed to get those jobs. It is not the welcoming city that Zohran Mamdani campaigned on creating.

Mamdani is nothing if not a man in a hurry, and he ought to bring change. The question is how. 

The traditional approach, even for effective leaders, is to look for workarounds. So Mamdani can max out on using existing exempt positions, and use more “non-competitive” titles exempted from testing requirements. 

But the trouble with workarounds is they only go so far. The number of exempt positions is capped, to name one example. Mamdani may be able to use exemptions to drive his affordability agenda, but what about hiring challenges in corrections? For 911 operators? Public health? A mayor can drive his priorities by exception, but he cannot govern an entire city that way.

Mamdani should seek to reform the antiquated examination system codified in the state’s Civil Service Law. A better system could replace old-school exams with adaptive ones that provide real-time, situational tests of skills. It could allow candidates to be recruited even when an exam isn’t offered by the city’s overmatched Department of Citywide Administrative Services (vacancy rate: 15%). And it could provide more flexibility than the Rule of Three. 

For far more jobs, New York could hire the way most employers do, flexibly assessing employees abilities based on job experience, references, and interviews. Many cities — Charlotte, Denver, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Austin — limit exams to a few departments, mostly police and fire. There’s little evidence these cities are more corrupt than New York. The best check on abuse is holding hiring managers accountable for their own delivery. You’re less likely to hire a hack if the hack’s incompetence will cost you your own job. Reforms to hiring should come with reforms to firing.

These changes will be hard, requiring changes in both city and state law. Mamdani will need to use his political capital to create a broad statewide coalition — lobbying his former colleagues in the State Legislature and seeking strong support from Governor Kathy Hochul. To her credit, Hochul temporarily suspended exams for many of the state’s hard-to-fill titles through the recent NY HELPS program, which has cleared the path for over 30,000 state hires over the past two years. In this context, Mamdani will need to tussle with his allies in the public employee unions, which opposed the extension of HELPS and are already rallying opposition against rumored state-level reforms that would reduce reliance on exams and extend the flexibility granted by the HELPS program beyond its June 2026 expiration date. 

In Lander’s admirable campaign white paper dedicated to hiring, his ultimate proposal was to “Convene a World Class City Workforce Blue-Ribbon Panel of Civil Service Experts,” stacked with “experts from unions, academia, the private and public sectors, and key partners in Albany.” That could be fine here. Listening is good, and Mamdani excels at it. But if unanimity among “experts” is what is required for change, civil service reform will fail. 

In her recent interview with Vital City, Maria Torres-Springer, former first deputy mayor and now the Mamdani Transition’s co-chair, acknowledged the problem directly: “The process for becoming a City employee is not for the faint of heart. At a time when a new mayor is coming in with a huge coalition of people who want to help and want to be public servants, the stumbling block cannot be that it takes too long to get hired. You commit to fixing it. That allows you to bring in the talent you need and retain them. Maybe government can finally be an employer of choice.”

We hope the new mayor will heed this advice and lay the groundwork for a New York City government that can attract the best talent the city has to offer.