NYC’s Civil Service System Is Broken. Here’s What Mayor-Elect Mamdani Can Do To Fix It.
From exam bottlenecks to outdated job titles, the civil service system is holding New York back. Mamdani's administration will have more tools to reform the system than most New Yorkers realize.
12/8/25 EDIT: Adding this excellent resource on applying to City jobs from The City.
Imagine a company that was restricted to attracting new candidates only once every four years, and how much that would limit growth or change within that organization. Now add on further requirements to hire from one of three names off the top of that list of candidates created every four years, additional months to actually receive results from the exams candidates can take to get on the list, and even more months for candidates to actually start work after receiving an offer from the company. It becomes a question whether anyone can be hired at all, and what types of candidates remain at the end of such a process.
It is no secret that the municipal hiring system is broken. Ask any aspiring urban planner or civic technologist how their experience finding and applying to city jobs has been, and you’ll likely be met with a downcast sigh. There are many talented New Yorkers across a variety of skillsets who would love to work for the City but find the hiring process too complex, slow, and burdensome.1
These civil service issues are a major blocker for NYC to deliver on its public services and prevent its public infrastructure from entering the 21st century. While many of these rules were born from legitimate fears of corruption, they have become outdated and restrict government effectiveness more than they protect it. Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s administration could make huge strides in its goals of improving public service delivery and making NYC more affordable by working to reform this system.
In this post, I will do three things:
Enumerate all the ways that NYC’s civil service system, particularly its hiring process, does not work well.
Establish that these hiring hurdles have resulted in depleted agency staffing levels and thus numerous blockers on the City’s ability to deliver on its duties.
Discuss several tools and processes that Mayor-Elect Mamdani will have available to address these blockers and reform the civil service.
Quick Overview of the Broken Parts of the Civil Service
I want to keep this section relatively brief because many others have already written excellent articles on how exactly NYC’s civil service is broken. Below I will simply list all these examples, but to read about them in more detail, please read the sources linked.
Broken Job Classifications and Confusing Titles
Over 3,000 legacy job titles/classifications, many generic, outdated or mis-mapped, which do not reflect actual work roles (e.g., no “software engineer” or “web designer” title). [Eating Policy]
Hiring managers often must “hunt” among job titles to find one for which an exam exists (and which their agency is authorized to use) before they can start the hiring process. [Eating Policy]
The job classification system has been slow to evolve (especially for emerging work/technology roles), so the labels and pipelines do not align with modern skills, reducing the pool of qualified applicants for public-service roles. [Vital City]
For tech/innovation roles especially, the misalignment of job titles + antiquated exam/tracking regime means agencies often hire expensive contractors rather than build in-house capacity. [Vital City]
Civil Service Exam Requirements
Mandatory civil service exams are required for many roles, but exam schedules are unpredictable (sometimes no exam is offered for a title for years) and applicants must take them in advance of knowing if a relevant hire will open. [Vital City]
The required exam-list certificate (“the list” of eligible candidates) may come months (median ~290 days) after the exam, causing long hiring lags. [Vital City]
Don’t be fooled by the fun background graphic - there is nothing fun about navigating the maze that is civil service exams. [source[ The classification/exam system incentivizes agencies to select job titles for which no recent exam exists (so they can bypass the list); a workaround that signals the system is breaking. [Eating Policy]
Agencies can only hire from the top-scoring candidates on the list (the so-called “Rule of Three”), even if none are a good fit or are interested, reducing hiring flexibility. [Vital City]
This process forces hiring managers to move sequentially down a list until someone accepts, which can take weeks or more. [Vital City]
Because of the exam-classifications-list regime, many capable external candidates are excluded simply because they didn’t take the specific exam for that obscure title at the right time.
Delays in Hiring and HR Burden
The system creates a significant administrative burden for HR in city agencies, diverting capacity away from building candidate-pools or doing targeted recruiting, and instead putting time into “gaming” the classifications/exams system. [Eating Policy]
Interagency coordination is slow and fragmented; no unified hiring system. [Public Sector Job Board]
External applicants face significant uncertainty: they don’t know which exam to take, aren’t sure the exam covers the job they actually want, may have to pay for the exam for a job that may never open, and then wait a long time for outcomes.2 [Eating Policy]
The system tends to favor internal candidates or those familiar with the bureaucratic rules rather than new entrants or non-traditional talent, undermining the intended meritocratic process. [Vital City]
Compensation
The seniority-oriented classification and pay system (and the lack of agility in pay/role adjustments) means compensation can lag the market, making it hard to attract high-skill talent.3 [Public Sector Job Board]
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. [Vital City]
As the excellent Vital City piece puts perfectly,
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.” You can manage relatively lower salaries, you can manage laborious hiring processes, and you can manage agonizingly confusing job postings with outdated job titles. But combine all of these together, and the bar to clear for new hires from outside of city government becomes unbearable and unrealistic.
These civil service design flaws subsequently result in thousands of vacancies and failing service metrics by City agencies.
City Agencies Are Suffering From Depleted Staffing Levels
NYC is trying to run a 21st-century city with a 20th-century hiring system and a 15% staffing deficit. There are currently over 13,000 vacancies to fill in the NYC government.4 The Department of Education and Department of Social Services each have over 1,000 vacancies alone. Other critical agencies with cripplingly high vacancy rates (percent vacancies out of authorized positions) include the Department of Homeless Services (16% vacancy rate, 306 vacancies), the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (15% vacancy rate, 371 vacancies), and the City Council (22% vacancy rate, 221 vacancies). This is reflective of a citywide vacancy rate rise that occurred during COVID and never recovered to pre-COVID rates.
These vacancies are not only due to the difficulties of hiring new staff, but such challenges certainly do not help the situation. And these large staffing shortages help explain why many city agencies fail to meet their mandates and lose faith from the public, such as the majority of agencies receiving F grades on their 311 Report Card. It contributes to NYC DOT being unable to keep up with sidewalk cafe permits, to Housing Preservation and Development taking extra months to approve new housing developments, and to NYFD and other emergency departments taking longer to bring help to locations in need.
As identified over and over again in the preliminary Mayor’s Management Report from January 2025, staffing shortages are a key detriment to agencies’ performance and in cases where new hires do occur, results are quickly seen. For example,
“In the first four months of Fiscal 2025, the Health Department conducted initial inspections for 30.9 percent of the City’s restaurants, an increase of over 11 percentage points from the same period in Fiscal 2024. This increase can be attributed to the hiring of additional inspectors and the use of overtime.”
And later in that same report,
“The Health Department believes that its inability to consistently inspect restaurants and provide onsite education and correction of unsafe conditions since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to poorer restaurant performance.”
The Department of Environmental Protection Police, with a 21% vacancy rate in Jan 2025, cites attrition of the DEP police force outpacing hiring, in part because of not enough exams being offered, as the cause of a 14% drop in enforcement activity. Meanwhile at the Department of Environmental Protection:
“the Department’s hazardous materials inspection unit is currently facing a staffing shortage [with a vacancy rate of 22%] while experiencing the increase in complaints, which, in combination, contributes to the longer response times.”
Staffing shortages are directly endangering NYC residents and contributing to worsened health outcomes.
For the City to effectively deliver on its public services and maintain public infrastructure, adequate staffing is a requirement. Delivering on greater promises like more housing and cleaner streets is out of the question given the current state. To develop the capabilities necessary to address such pressing public concerns, Mayor-Elect Mamdani must reform the civil service and attract both a higher quantity and higher quality of city workers.
Tools to Address the Crisis
Clearly, there are a lot of problems with existing civil service law and these problems are pervasive from the very start of the hiring process to the ability of current municipal workers to move up the ladder or stay in their job. The silver lining of having this many broken pieces is that there is a lot of room to improve the system.
For Mayor-Elect Mamdani to achieve his stated policy goal of rebuilding NYC’s capacity to deliver public goods, the administration must consider these possible paths forward:
Do The Little Things Right
Rebecca Haywood does a great job of listing actions the City can take immediately that would ease the hiring process:
Create plain language materials for applicants, employees, hiring managers and HR staff
Improve the user interface of civil service webpages
Be more transparent with candidates about time to hire and candidates are in the hiring process
Provide more training and information for hiring managers
Unlike examination reform, which requires Albany’s cooperation, these changes can be implemented through City-level rule-making, updated HR policies, and directives through the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), allowing the Mayor to begin improving service delivery immediately. On their own, these won’t fix the exam bottlenecks, but they can immediately reduce friction for both candidates and hiring managers
If the current system must be used, the City should at least ensure that all its HR staff and hiring managers are receiving proper training and support to perform their duties.
Reorganize Agencies & Agency Funding
The Mayor has the power to organize City agencies and can use this power to reshape or form entirely new agencies. One example was the creation of the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) by Mayor Adams, which in reality was a combination of several pre-existing IT and technology agencies. Because each agency head is imbued with certain powers, and each agency may have its own human resources personnel, the strategic creation or reformulation of agencies can influence civil service hiring.
And do not overlook the impact of commissioner appointments. Agency heads are empowered by the City Charter to “participate with DCAS in job analyses for the classification of positions”, to “allocate individual positions to existing civil service titles”, and to “assist DCAS in the determination of minimum qualifications for classes of positions and to review and evaluate qualifications of candidates for positions in the civil service”. It is easy to see how the Mayor appointing the right person to head an agency can directly influence hiring processes for that agency.
Short of full reorganization, Mamdani will have the power to set the initial City budget and can prioritize funding toward HR personnel and investing more in hiring technology. Even minor changes in funding can have outsized impacts on administrative capacity and shine a spotlight on areas of need for the City. While not every agency hiring need will be solved by shifting around the budget, drawing attention to this issue can motivate State action suggested below. Simply put, agencies receiving more funding will have greater capacity to navigate the system and can better resource and train its existing employees.
In addition, simply providing DCAS more funding may alleviate hiring constraints where DCAS is involved, such as in administering exams. Providing adequate funding for the agency to at least fill its vacancies could allow for the creation of hiring training programs, revise and modernize examinations, and capacity to explore improvement in other stages of the process. Unblocking DCAS will further unblock downstream agencies that are reliant on DCAS for filling their own vacancies.
Use City Charter Section 1113 - Report and Advisory Board Review Commission
A little known and rarely used section of the City Charter, Section 1113 endows the Mayor with much power to streamline government processes. In short, the RABRC can review and waive most city-mandated reporting requirements and advisory bodies, except those required by state or federal law or certain protected sections of the City Charter. Thus this Mayor-majority-appointed board can cut through bureaucratic red tape without waiting on time-consuming approval of such actions from other government bodies.
While Section 1113 cannot be used to fix systemic issues, removing unnecessary civil service reporting requirements would free up personnel to focus on hiring and fulfilling other tasks. If civil service staff aren’t spending hours each quarter generating duplicative reports, they have more bandwidth to run recruitments, onboard staff, and redesign processes. As suggested by Maximum New York author Daniel Golliher, another use case here can be utilizing AI to clean up reporting requirements by identifying redundant and irrelevant rules and requirements.
Daniel shared with me how Mayor Adams used this power at one point to change a requirement for onerous review of capital projects that were over $10M. Adams effectively lifted this dollar threshold to speed up projects being approved in this category. One can imagine many opportunities for Mamdani to find similar efficiencies in the City’s civil service laws.
Modernize Job Classifications and Hiring Processes
Mamdani’s administration should explore creating new civil service titles with higher salaries, updating job titles to match modern terminology and reflect updated tasks, and remove outdated or unused titles to reduce HR burden. By simplifying the hiring pathways that HR staff use to fill a vacancy, timelines will be shortened and candidates can expect fewer delays and uncertainty.
Overall, the City should invest more in educating and supporting city employees involved in the hiring process. Where there is confusion or gray areas, the City should standardize and clarify. Wherever processes are already standardized, DCAS should offer regular training and release digital materials that inform how to navigate such processes.
Implemented primarily through DCAS and agency HR teams, this option would for the most part not require state legislative changes. One exception would be making changes to job classifications, which would require State authorization. By reducing complexity, standardizing timelines, and improving the candidate experience, this approach directly supports the administration’s goal of building a more capable municipal workforce that can deliver public services reliably and adopt modern technology.
Partner with New York State to reform or remove exam requirements that prevent agencies from filling critical roles
There are many ways to improve the current civil service exam system, if not outright removal of it. Reducing the number of roles that require examination, offering exams much more often, reducing burdensome requirements like the Rule of Three, and shifting to an exam that is offered as part of the interview process instead of at fixed times would massively ease hiring hurdles.
Similar changes have already occurred before instituted by Governor Hochul, including waived exam fees, offering exams more frequently, and creating thousands of exempt public service positions. The NY HELPS program and other state directives earlier this year either outright waived exam requirements for state jobs or reduced qualification requirements to increase the pool of eligible candidates.
This would require amending provisions of New York State Civil Service Law - an effort that must be pursued through collaboration with the State Legislature, the Governor’s Office, and the State Civil Service Commission. This would require state legislative hearings, negotiated bill packages, and joint City–State working groups on exam modernization. While this option offers transformative potential, it would likely take months to years for legislation to pass and be politically complex. Still, achieving exam reform would significantly advance your goals by removing structural barriers that create chronic vacancies and weaken city services.
Explore additional and alternative compensation options
NYC should examine which roles have the most severe compensation gaps relative to their private sector counterparts and improve pay for these positions. Where increasing salary is not feasible, the City can explore alternative compensation offerings for its employees.
Brad Lander had an interesting proposal when he ran for mayor to use City pension funds to help city employees with a minimum five year tenure to purchase homes. While I cannot speak to the wisdom of this specific investment strategy, I support the thinking-outside-the-box approach to attracting new talent.
Partner with New York State to reform or remove other bureaucratic hurdles
There are many other regulatory barriers imposed on the City by the State that Mamdani’s administration should work with the State on either removing completely or reforming. NYC and NYS should look to reforms implemented (and proposed) by other states and at the federal level and copy their successes. Proposals here are bold and massive. Remove DCAS from the hiring process to let agencies handle their own hiring. Increase the flexibility and range of pay bands, particularly for positions that lag severely behind their private sector counterparts.
More dramatically, the State could exempt NYC from its Civil Service laws altogether. While initially instituted with good intentions to end the political patronage system of the 19th-century, it’s clear that the current system is even worse and the State does not have the capacity to manage NYC’s massive workforce. NYC can manage its own rules and regulations governing the hiring of civil servants. With control of the bureaucracy, the City can be more responsive and quick-acting to resolve shortcomings or missteps in the law. To prevent the possibility of municipal corruption, the new hiring system could require the State to be notified of and allowed to overrule changes, or the creation of an independent City civil service commission.5
Unfortunately, like with the civil service exam reform proposed above, any of these changes will require coordination with the State government, which means reforms will likely take months or longer to pass. However, fixing the system at its roots will be necessary eventually, and I would argue that the Mamdani administration can pursue these systematic changes concurrently with the other reforms proposed here.
Conclusion
To build support, the Mayor-Elect should frame the above reforms as a workforce empowerment initiative: one that strengthens the civil service and public service delivery by ensuring agencies can hire qualified staff and reduce burnout among existing employees. Early consultation with unions and agency leads is essential: by involving them in redesigning job titles, clarifying career progressions, and modernizing promotional pathways, the administration can convert potential skeptics into partners.
Mamdani should also make full use of the bully pulpit to shine a light on all the civil service reform roadblocks and put public pressure on the State and labor unions to act as well. Similar to the election campaign’s ability to mobilize tens of thousands of applicants, the new administration can highlight how staffing shortages harm everyday services, from restaurant inspections to emergency response times. By pairing collaborative engagement with a public campaign that emphasizes the reforms’ benefits to New Yorkers, the administration can build a broad coalition of support that aligns workers, agencies, and residents behind a modernized and more effective civil service.
We have let procedure and risk-aversion consume the civil service hiring process, and it has left NYC for the worse. Let’s improve civil service compensation and reduce complexity in the hiring process to bring the City into the modern era.
As Jennifer Pahlka wrote,
“for government to be capable of achieving the policy goals it sets, it needs the right people, focused on the right substantive work, with purpose-fit systems, and test-and-learn frameworks”.
I hope that Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s administration heeds these suggestions and acts swiftly where it can to reform NYC’s hiring process. He has gotten New Yorkers excited about finally addressing the cost of living crisis and reforming the city bureaucracy, recruiting more and better municipal workers, and modernizing the technology infrastructure of the city will contribute to this goal. Much of the civil service reform will require coordination with the State, but Mamdani has shown his ability to shine a light on policy issues and a willingness to embrace new solutions.
For him to effectively deliver public goods and services, as he has stated is his goal, it will be a requirement for success.
For those personally interested in working for NYC, a great resource that breaks down how to read city job postings is this unofficial guide.
Here is the list of upcoming civil service exams through the end of June 2026. Good luck figuring out which of these exams exactly you would have to take for a specific city job.
Technology-related roles are perhaps the worst offender of the private-public sector salary gap. As someone who is a data scientist and receives no financial support besides my own income, this hits close to home. I have seen salaries for NYC data scientist-type positions range as low as $50,000 to $70,000, all while requiring several years of experience and expertise in multiple programming languages and tools. These same roles would command easily 3x as much salary in tech or other private sector fields.
About a fourth of these vacancies are for uniformed roles in the NYPD and Department of Corrections, which are dealing with staffing issues for additional reasons, but there are substantial gaps in nearly every agency.
The current City civil service commission is appointed mostly (4 out of 6) by the Mayor, and mostly for 2- or 4-year terms. A reformed commission could have more independence from elected official oversight, in return for being empowered to enact greater civil service changes.
Wow. Thank you for this overview!
Tal this was AMAZING