California city taps AI to streamline government hiring
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High vacancy rates have prompted Long Beach, California, to leverage artificial intelligence to give its hiring process a boost.
The public sector has made moderate gains in filling vacant jobs and easing workforce gaps that have persisted for years, and a pilot program in Long Beach, California, aims to explore how tech can help further advance that progress.
More than 20% of government positions in Long Beach are empty, with some agencies experiencing vacancy rates as high as 35%, the Los Angeles Times reported. Exacerbating the city’s workforce shortage is the fact it can take seven to nine months to fill a role — a waiting period that often causes people to accept private sector jobs instead.
The California city isn’t alone. Across the U.S., it can take upwards of 100 days to fill a public sector position, leading to application backlogs, delayed hires and often overtime work for the existing staff.
That’s why Long Beach is embarking on a pilot program to leverage the AI platform Holly to innovate and streamline its recruitment and hiring process. The platform is designed to generate AI-enabled drafts of job descriptions and leverage a database of more than 45,000 local jobs to help determine position salaries.
Using the platform, city staff can query Holly to generate a novel job description or enhance an existing one, said Cherie Chung, co-CEO and cofounder of Holly. The platform can also prompt users to consider incorporating equitable hiring practices, such as removing degree requirements for certain jobs, based on hiring data from neighboring communities.
The AI-enabled job descriptions can be configured to include agency-specific requirements, such as minimum years of experience or preferred language, to ensure job postings are consistent in tone and voice across governments, she explained.
Closing workforce gaps “is a big issue, and we're excited to pilot with Holly to accelerate our class and compensation process," said Joe Ambrosini, former HR director for Long Beach, in a statement. "Outdated systems can add months to hiring and drive away top candidates."
Long Beach launched the pilot program in October 2024 and is slated to continue through April. The pilot’s impact on the city’s hiring progress is still being measured, but results of the initial program could lead to a longer contract with the city, said Brendan Hellweg, co-CEO and cofounder of Holly.
Hiring inefficiencies are “a major drain on local government budgets and [it’s] making operations harder to fulfill,” he said. One major obstacle to filling vacant public sector positions, he said, is adequately developing the job description.
When determining a job’s compensation and classification, public sector human resource managers must consider the salaries and job specifications of nearby communities also looking to fill empty seats, Hellweg said. Roles in IT, for instance, are particularly vulnerable to changing descriptions as agencies embark on digital modernization and transformation initiatives that alter what skills are needed from prospective hirees.
The platform’s AI tool and data insights can help agencies better align their job postings with industry standards to attract and retain talent while reducing staff’s administrative burden of manually drafting and editing job classifications and descriptions.
Officials can also leverage the platform to stay informed about evolving hiring practices. A number of agencies have turned to skills-based hiring, for instance, as a way to appeal to potential job candidates that do not have a degree, Chung said.
As government agencies continue to struggle with declining labor participation rates and increased retirements from the pandemic, Hellweg said, innovating their hiring systems is one way to meet the growing demands of today’s workforce.
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