Hiring Challenges in Local Government: How to Do More with Less

Employees in the public sector—particularly in local government—can have an incredible impact on the communities they serve. The essential services and local programs they keep running can be the lifeblood of their neighborhoods and municipalities.

That being said, finding an exceptional public servant is rarely easy. Though once seen as a stable and secure profession, local government employment trends have vacillated significantly over the last several years. Some of these trends have begun to rebound, but volatility has left some government entities looking for new talent and struggling to find the right candidates. The results of these local government hiring challenges can be devastating, especially when they involve reduced services for citizens.

Implementing the right hiring tools for local municipalities can make a difference in closing those gaps. The demand for faster time-to-hire, less heavy lifting for hiring teams, and more innovative recruiting strategies is growing.

Here’s a look at how—and why—modernized government hiring practices are non-negotiable in the face of the current public sector workforce shortage.

Challenges Faced in Local Government Hiring

While public sector employers are eager to place top talent in their agencies and enable new hires to have a meaningful impact on their communities quickly, their abilities to do so often feel limited. The pressure is on as a few key challenges shroud local government hiring:

• Limited Budgets: Purse strings are tight, and constraints in offering competitive salaries and benefits to their employees—especially compared to the private sector—can make attracting exceptional candidates difficult.
• Staffing Shortages: With fewer candidates in the pipeline, job postings can remain open for longer. This struggle to fill critical positions quickly contributes to burnout for existing employees, who are often asked to stretch their workload to accommodate vacant roles.
• Outdated Processes: Old-school hiring practices that hinge upon manual workflows and a lot of paper can significantly slow down hiring for public sector agencies.
• Candidate Experience: A significant cohort of government employees are scheduled to retire in the coming years, and many agencies must turn to early-career candidates to backfill those positions. In the process, they face difficulty attracting younger, tech-savvy talent partially due to dated recruitment strategies.

All of these challenges combined make for a pretty significant hurdle for recruiters in local government who want to keep operations running smoothly for the people they serve.

Solutions to Overcome Hiring Challenges in Local Government

Overcoming staffing shortages in local government will take a concerted effort, but investing in the right technology can help significantly. By reducing the time hiring teams must spend on manual tasks, extending the reach of local agencies to broader talent pools, and helping recruiters stay organized, modern recruiting software will be the ticket to greater success for many agencies.

This and several other techniques are already delivering straightforward, significant results for local government bodies with workforce vacancies to fill:

• Adopting Modern Hiring Tools: It’s difficult to understate the value current technologies can provide in government hiring processes. For example:
• Video interviewing tools offer both on-demand interviews for initial screening and live interviews for later conversations in the recruiting process. Both help eliminate logistics headaches that often plague recruiters trying to schedule multiple conversations with busy candidates and hiring managers.
• Automated scheduling can further streamline interview logistics, so recruiters can sync calendars and allow candidates to self-select available windows. No more back-and-forth emails to find that one golden timeslot.
• Leveraging AI in Recruitment: AI recruitment for government hiring can accelerate already-strained teams’ efforts and free up their time for more substantive work and decision-making. A few use cases for AI include:
  
• AI-powered interview summaries to help quickly evaluate candidates and facilitate better team collaboration, while retaining human decision-making.
• AI recruiting assistants that can help you craft thoughtful interview questions, job descriptions, emails, and more.
• Emphasizing Employer Branding: Today’s candidates aren’t just looking at the confines of each job description—they’re looking closely at the mission and teams they’d be joining and whether they’d align. Recruiters should emphasize this strength, and their own passion for it, throughout the recruiting process.
• Optimizing Processes with Technology: Bringing new technologies on board can make a huge difference in government recruiting strategies, and integrating them with existing HR and applicant tracking systems (ATS) simplifies adoption. Together, these tools and platforms like interviewstream can enhance efficiency, capture essential data in secure places, and facilitate better teamwork across agencies.

Start Exploring interviewstream’s Value for the Public Sector

At interviewstream, our software helps public servants who are meeting the needs of their communities, and local governments need modern technologies to operate at maximum efficiency.

We’d love to help your agency. Please reach out for a demo and a friendly conversation about how video interviewing, automated scheduling, and more of our tools can help you make a difference in your community.

About The Author

Monique Mahler is the CEO of interviewstream. She is an avid researcher of facts, a self proclaimed marketing geek, and an equestrian in her spare time.