The city of Dallas is facing a talent shortage crisis, with only 20% of job openings (3,400 vacancies) are not filled.
“Current staff vacancy rates appear to be the new normal post-pandemic,” Dallas Human Resources Director Nina Arias said in a statement.
“The long-term impact of the current vacancy crisis is unknown. However, it is clear that businesses and organizations like the City of Dallas will need to find creative ways to attract and retain qualified workers. That is clear,” Arias said in a statement.
Meanwhile, data shows most other Texas cities have significantly lower vacancy rates than Dallas. dallas morning news, He said he expected staffing levels to improve.
In Austin, 14% of city employees are missing. In San Antonio, that rate is about 10%. Additionally, in nearby Plano and Arlington, the staff vacancy rate is 6.5%. 9.0% each. Among the state's largest cities, only Houston has a higher vacancy rate than Dallas, at 22%.
“Despite these difficult times, our vacancy rates are approaching pre-pandemic levels,” said Brandis Davis, a spokesperson for the City of San Antonio's Human Resources Department.
Arias couldn't say the same about Dallas' 17,088 total positions, of which 13,617 were filled as of July 31.
The human resources department said it was doing “everything possible” to attract and retain workers, including fighting for higher wages, increasing benefits and launching campaigns to raise public awareness of the city's jobs. Arias said a new talent shortage is the new reality, despite the current situation.
The city blamed the shortage on a number of obstacles, including a declining number of applicants, outdated onboarding software, a lack of candidates with technical skills and a rapidly growing private sector.
“When you get to a high number of 20%, you have a significant inefficiency,” said Lee Adler, a professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
That would mean fewer garbage truck drivers and landfill workers, potentially straining the city's ability to collect and properly dispose of trash. Fewer parks and recreation workers and fewer in-person fitness classes. The city will have fewer communications staff. And there have been cuts across the board to city services, leading to “considerable dissatisfaction from residents who don't feel like they're getting their money's worth,” Adler said.
In June, the city announced that many calls related to minor crimes would have to be made online due to increased police response times and worsening staffing shortages. Currently, the Dallas Police Department has the most job openings of any police department in the city, with 932 unfilled positions. In July, news Five months after the city's attorney retired, Dallas still has not interviewed candidates or selected a recruiting firm for one of the city's top positions. The paper also reported that it does not post job information.
inside the numbers
Staff numbers vary from month to month and may be skewed by seasonal workers, interns, and grant-funded positions. For example, city data from January shows there are more vacant positions than filled positions in some departments in Dallas. In the human resources department, in early January he was short of 69 employees and his 53% of staff. According to the same January data set, Dallas Parks and Recreation is short 904 employees with a vacancy rate of 58%, and the Dallas Department of Cultural Arts has 46 unfilled jobs, or 49% of the department. It was shown that
City data provider news As of July 31, the Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Water Works, and Fire and Police Department each had more than 400 vacancies, the data showed. The Department of Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization has the highest vacancy rate, with 46% of job openings unfilled.
before offering news Regarding data, the city has repeatedly denied requests for current citywide and departmental staffing data. A lack of staff was a contributing factor.
“In recent weeks, my department has not been performing optimally due to illness and turnover,” said Catherine Cuellar, the city's communications director.
Cuellar declined a request to interview department heads about how the shortage is affecting their departments. She again claimed this was due to a shortage.
“You asked for an interview and you were denied an interview because it was not convenient for them who run the department to talk to you,” Cuellar said. news. “This shows their staffing levels. They're running their own departments, so they're not doing interviews.”
Some of these sectors have particularly difficult recruitment challenges. According to Dallas City Manager TC Broadnax, police, fire, technical (engineers, electricians, plumbers) and other trades jobs are some of the most difficult to fill in Dallas.
“Ensuring we have the right talent is critical to a city's success and growth,” Broadnax said. “We remain committed to developing strategies to recruit and retain sustainable talent in the short and long term.”
Texas' largest cities gave a variety of answers when asked which jobs are the most difficult to fill, but all are struggling to hire tech jobs. The city of San Antonio said it has a shortage of veterinarians, IT professionals and engineers. Austin has a hard time finding airport workers, STEM jobs, and telecommunications jobs. Health and public safety, public works, and waste collection are important in Houston.
Dallas has a severe labor shortage, and city governments sometimes poach workers from each other. In some cases, city officials have engaged in “departmental battles” over employees with commercial driver's licenses, Arias said.
“You cannot change the pay of CDL holders between airlines and shipping companies, because all drivers will move from one sector to another, no matter who pays more,” Arias said. he said. “And if other departments bring it up, everyone will jump back.”
Labor and business experts said Dallas' high vacancy rate, like other institutions, will eventually paralyze the city if not corrected.
“Over time, it becomes a spiral of dysfunction. [are] David Ray, a professor at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business who studies corporate strategy and organizational evolution, says:
“When people actually leave, it creates a reputation that it's a pretty tough place to work and there's not a lot of support,” Ray said.
Is it an apples-to-apples comparison?
Arias said Dallas has a higher percentage of unfilled jobs than most other cities, but its turnover rate is lower than the state as a whole. Dallas' total turnover rate was 13.6% last year, compared to 22.7% in Texas, he said. The national average according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics was 20.9%.
However, according to the same federal survey, the Recruitment and Turnover Rate Survey, June data shows that the vacancy rate in all state and local industries nationwide, excluding education, is 6.6%. This is more than three times the vacancy rate in Dallas, which also had a vacancy rate of 20% in June.
Arias said the reason the city's vacancy rate is low compared to Austin, San Antonio and industry vacancy rates nationally is not an issue with Dallas, but rather with the way vacancies are measured in other jurisdictions. He said there is a connection. For example, some cities may measure the number of interns and seasonal workers differently than Dallas, she said.
Asked about the vacancy rates in Austin and San Antonio, Arias said, “I believe these are professional people who know what they're saying and what they're doing.” Told. “But every time you do a study and try to collect data on all of us, we all do things in very different ways, and we measure things in very different ways, so it doesn't match up. It’s very difficult to find things.”
Dallas' talent shortage is further exacerbated by the political geography of North Texas. The concentration of jurisdictions in metropolitan areas makes it easy for city employees looking to increase their pay or move up in the ranks to leave Dallas for one of more than 200 other cities. .
Arias said she lost the compensation manager she spent years grooming and training at DFW International Airport.
“Retention is a dynamic challenge because once you work here, people want to hire you elsewhere,” Cuellar said.
Despite differences in vacancy rates, the cost of living in other large cities such as Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas is about the same.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Cost of Living Calculator, individuals need to earn $48,239 to cover the basic needs of an individual and a two-year-old child in Dallas County. In Bexar County, where San Antonio is located, it is $48,605. In Harris County (Houston) he is $50,297. In Travis County (Austin) it's $55,538.
Cities have also recently increased their minimum wages for city employees. Dallas' budget plan includes raising the minimum wage to $18.50 an hour next fiscal year, or about $38,480 a year for full-time employees.
Recruitment issues
While Dallas City Hall has thousands of job openings, the city only posts 178 jobs online. Cuéllar said a relatively small number of jobs are “summer only” jobs, online jobs that represent multiple jobs for the same job description, or where the city is informally selecting candidates but the onboarding process is not yet completed. He said this could be explained by job openings that have not started.
The city's onboarding process uses NeoGov software, which is at least 12 years old. The city is currently implementing a system called Workday.
Over the past three years, the number of applicants the city receives for each job opening has plummeted, according to a governmentjobs.com study referenced by the city. Arias said the candidates who do apply are currently less qualified. Even worse, candidates are also more likely to “ghost” the city after submitting an application or receiving a job offer. Other employees will use the city's offer to negotiate more favorable terms elsewhere.
Marcus Butts, Cox's director of management and organization, said the rapidly growing private sector companies around Dallas may be drawing workers away from government jobs. He said the public sector, especially since COVID-19, does not give employees the flexibility, pay and ability to shape the direction of their organizations that they see in the private sector.
“We can never compete with the private sector,” Cuellar said. “I have people in my department who made five figures and then went on to make six figures in the private sector. I think, 'Well done, thank you for taking the time to be here. , thank you for all your hard work.’ And hire me someday,” Cuellar said.
Cuellar and Arias said the biggest problem in attracting and retaining city workers is the public's negative view of government work.
“We all work more than full-time jobs for less than market wage,” said Cuellar, who earned about $160,000 last year. “That's why to attract talent, you need to fit into the culture of people who are 'Dallas Blue' inside.”
Cuéllar promised that the city would soon launch a “talent attraction campaign” to make Dallas “a leading public sector and municipal employer in Texas.” Funding for that is expected to be approved in an upcoming budget vote before the City Council.
To truly combat the talent shortage, Arias said, the city also needs to increase its compensation package, which brought in about $190,000 last year. But Arias and Cuellar said their immediate focus is on improving Dallas' brand.
“People tell me and my staff that you have to be very smart to work in government,” Cuellar said.
The unanticipated effects of the pandemic also dented morale. “Mass resignations”, increased demand for semi-remote workplaces and a wave of retirements during the pandemic have left many experienced positions vacant and created a lack of institutional knowledge within City Hall.
In the meantime, Cornell University's Professor Adler warned that severe shortages will slowly erode the trust and confidence that Dalasi residents have in their local government.
“These shortcomings must be corrected, because otherwise there will be significant short-term consequences,” Adler said. “But in the long run, it can seriously undermine people's belief that any problem can be solved collectively.”
