---
id: "workshop:hiring-reform-with-humans-at-the-center-lessons-from-st-louis-and-san-francisco"
type: "InnovateUS workshop"
title: "Hiring Reform with Humans at the Center: Lessons from St. Louis and San Francisco"
url: "https://innovate-us.org/hiring-reform-with-humans-at-the-center-lessons-from-st-louis-and-san-francisco"
date: "2025-10-09"
duration: "60 minutes"
language: "English"
instructors: ["Shifra Goldenberg","Krizia Lopez","David Huebner"]
recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h-4L5RjHFA"
transcript: "automatic, from the recording"
source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)"
licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org"
---

# Hiring Reform with Humans at the Center: Lessons from St. Louis and San Francisco

InnovateUS workshop · 9 October 2025 · 60 minutes

Government agencies across the country struggle with outdated hiring systems that slow down recruitment and create barriers for qualified candidates. Lengthy processes and outdated requirements often prevent agencies from attracting the diverse, skilled talent needed to deliver for communities.

In this workshop, Work for America will share how the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco reimagined their hiring practices with people—not paperwork—at the center. Participants will learn how these governments streamlined recruitment, reduced time-to-hire, and improved the candidate experience while still maintaining fairness, transparency, and compliance.

Through case studies, practical strategies, and lessons from the field, this session will highlight how public servants can cut through bureaucratic red tape, design more accessible hiring processes, and build teams that reflect the communities they serve. Whether you work in HR, manage a team, or are responsible for shaping workforce policy, this workshop will offer tools you can apply immediately to make government jobs more accessible and strengthen your organization’s capacity to deliver.

## Learning goals

- Identify common barriers in legacy hiring systems that slow down recruitment and limit access

- Understand how St. Louis and San Francisco redesigned their hiring processes to be more efficient and equitable

- Apply practical steps to streamline hiring in their own agencies and attract diverse, qualified talent

## Speakers

- **Shifra Goldenberg**, Chief Program Officer, Work for America
- **Krizia Lopez**, Vice President, Government Innovation, Work for America
- **David Huebner**, Chief People Officer, County of Santa Clara, CA

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h-4L5RjHFA

## Transcript

Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. The transcript alone: https://innovate-us.org/hiring-reform-with-humans-at-the-center-lessons-from-st-louis-and-san-francisco.txt (plain text) and https://innovate-us.org/hiring-reform-with-humans-at-the-center-lessons-from-st-louis-and-san-francisco.json (every segment with its start and end second).

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[0:00](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=0) Thank you so much for that warm introduction and we're so excited to be here. I'm Schiffer Goldenberg. I'm the Chief Program Officer at Work for America or WFA. We're really grateful to be here with all of you today. Thank you so much to Innovate US for hosting us and of course to our speakers from St. Louis and from San Francisco slash Santa Clara for joining us today. I'll introduce them individually in just a moment. But just to tell you a little bit more about Work for America, like Agueda said, we are a non-partisan, non-profit organization working with state and local governments across the country to hire and retain the people they need to serve the public. I got into this work because I spent most of my career in local government and I did a lot of program design and implementation work and I saw firsthand that when we were able to get the right people into the right roles, we could really achieve what felt like miraculous things, but too often that was what was getting in the way of us delivering. So that's what drives me to doing this work and I'm really grateful for all of you for being here and sharing your commitment to making government work better by getting great people into it. Our goal overall at WFA is to make public service a more desirable, accessible, and stable career path. One that uplifts families, one that strengthens communities. There are a lot of challenges that we talk about, but one huge one we talk about a lot is just how long it takes to hire in the public sector compared to the private sector and even compared to state and federal government. So local government takes more than three times the private sector average to hire, which slows down services, burns out teams, leads to fewer people who would have taken jobs in the public sector actually being able to accept those jobs, and ultimately leaves communities waiting for critical support. So the question becomes how do we make hiring faster while also keeping it fair and effectively getting great

[2:01](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=121) talent without losing what makes public service special? And that is what brought us to do this case study on hiring modernization because we hear so often from local governments that they want to improve hiring but don't know where to start. So we worked, we spoke with representatives from two cities, St. Louis and San Francisco, that took on this challenge and made really remarkable progress in a short amount of time. And what you'll hear today throughout the conversation is that ultimately while both cities replaced their applicant tracking system, upgraded their applicant tracking system as part of this work, the success really started with people in process and bringing together HR, hiring managers, IT, frontline staff, and other stakeholders together to rethink how hiring should work. And as you can see here, the impact was real. Both cities cut time to hire, improved the experience for candidates applying to roles, and ultimately made it much easier for teams to bring great people on board. So the key takeaway, spoiler alert before we even have the conversation, is that modernization isn't just about new systems, it's about empowering people to build better ones. So with that, I will introduce our speakers and then we can mostly hear from them. We are thrilled to have two incredible leaders with us who helped make this work possible, as well as two folks who are still with the City of St. Louis driving this work forward every day. So first we have David Huebner, who is representing the hiring modernization work in San Francisco, California. Today David leads the people function for the County of Santa Clara, but previously he led the San Francisco's HR modernization program, advancing the mayor's efficiency and hiring reform agenda. And he will share a little bit more of his own background for himself when I turn it over. And then second, we're going to be hearing from Cristina Lopez, who we're really thrilled to share is actually working with Work for America now as our vice president of government innovation. But until recently, she was a Bloomberg Harvard City

[4:04](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=244) Hall fellow with the City of St. Louis, where she helped St. Louis move from a paper-based hiring process to a digital HR system and did other incredible things, such as the city's first classification and compensation study in 25 years. So with that, I am going to stop sharing my screen and we can start hearing from the people who actually have incredible wisdom to share. David and Critzia, thank you so much for being with us. And to get us started, I'd love to just hear from each of you, maybe starting with you, David, just tell us about the problem you were trying to

**David Huebner**

[4:42](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=282) solve. Yeah, thanks, Shifra. And thank you all for organizing this and for having us here. I'm really excited to be in this discussion. And as I see people join, I think we have a number of experts in the room or in the virtual room with us who I know can bring a lot to this conversation as well. But the problem we were starting with in San Francisco was there were a number of leaders who were hearing about what was happening in the larger HR tech space. And they were HR leaders at the city and county of San Francisco. And they saw the solution that they had and they realized, why is there such a gap between what is happening in the larger HR tech landscape and what we have? And at the same time, there was an expiring contract for a new applicant tracking system. And the question sort of emerged of, well, how do we go to market for a new applicant tracking system? If we just say what we have today, we're going to get one response. But we know there's so much else out there. How do we go unpack the needs and ensure that we're meeting all the different needs that we have as a city and county of San Francisco, while at the same time aspiring to do something better to address some of these real pain points that you highlighted?

[5:49](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=349) Vacancy rates that are high in certain job classifications, time to hire that's longer than it should be, the knowledge that we're losing out on great talent. And so the problem that was put forward was, how do we go understand our users' needs to then design a procurement process that will help ensure that we can meet them and put ourselves in a position where we can actually continue to iterate on our hiring processes? Because we're pretty confident we're not going to solve them overnight. We're going to need to have a flexible infrastructure to allow us to do that. And that was the beginning of what was at the time called the hiring modernization project, which started with then a human-centered design concept at its core to go unpack users' needs, which I can get into later. But that was the original problem.

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[6:31](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=391) Amazing. Thank you. Kirtsia?

**Krizia Lopez**

[6:34](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=394) Yes. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share. I just want to start by acknowledging that I have several City of St. Louis colleagues here in the webinar with us. So hello, all City of St. Louis folks that were part of this project. It was really a collaborative effort. And I just want to highlight two people that are here. So Aaron Swearingen and Alex Mazzola. They are both in the Talent Acquisition Department of St. Louis City, and they were instrumental in helping roll out our ATSs. And just want to acknowledge that they're here. And I'll probably at some point turn it over to them during our Q&A, because as Shifra mentioned, I have left the city a few weeks ago to join Work for America. And so they'll be able to answer future-looking questions for our applicant system. So with that said, I'll switch over to talking about the problem that we were trying to address. So in St. Louis, we have a large number of vacancies and vacant roles for several years. The departments have been struggling to fill critical roles that were starting to affect our service delivery quality. So things like, you know, waste management and being able to take care of trees in the city, basic functions were starting to be affected by what we believed was several process difficulties in the hiring space. And we all knew that it was a systematic thing. There were so many potential levers that we could pull on to modernize our hiring processes. As everyone here knows that's worked in city government, there's not just one single root cause that could slow things down in any large-scale system. But in our case, we really wanted to improve our hiring time. And, you know,

[8:38](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=518) we were up to a space where it was taking sometimes even over a year to fill certain roles. And we all collectively sat down and identified that the hiring process we had was a big issue. First of all, it was fully mostly paper-based. We did have a very, very antiquated software from 1993 on one computer that was basically on the verge of crashing every single day. And it was really hindering the department's work. Additionally, we realized that the process itself was very cumbersome. We had over 95 steps in the process. We all sat down with a lot of city departments to figure that out. So with that said, we thought the highest impact thing we could do to address hiring times was to modernize our talents processing. And a key part of that was the applicant tracking system. That's where we decided to implement Taleo, which is a software that's part of Oracle. In St. Louis's case, the city had already purchased this software as part of a broader package of modernization. And therefore, for us, the procurement part was not part of our project because we already had it. It was more about getting this to a place where we could really roll it out. I'll add one more thing. The personnel team and IT teams and everything, it's not like they hadn't tried for many years. They actually had attempted several times to implement this software when it was procured several years back. They actually had even hired

[10:39](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=639) some consulting support and other services. But as, again, everyone who works in cities know, things can get bogged down. And therefore, we'll dive into that later. We found some key ways to get this project across the finish line, even though the city was very much underwater. And so it's just a huge shout out to everyone in St. Louis that was part of this. Mayor's office, HR, IT, et cetera.

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[11:07](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=667) And that's great. And Kritzya, that's a great transition into the next question. So can you tell us a little bit about when you did come in, what was your role in tackling this challenge?

**Krizia Lopez**

[11:18](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=678) Yes. So in our case, I had a unique role because I was with the city through the Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellowship. It's through the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. It's a two-year fellowship, and they were extremely helpful. So the Kennedy School and Bloomberg were very helpful in providing some helpful frameworks on how to tackle a challenge like this. So my role was essentially to take, in a sense, I took on, one, the process of diagnosing what was going on, what we could do. Sometimes it helps to have a third party or an outsider to look at the process. And because you're not caught up in the day-to-day, you can then identify things that are a little bit, perhaps creating bottlenecks, things that are perhaps steps that may have evolved in the last decade or things like that. So one of my roles was to kind of one of my roles was to really diagnose why it was time to hire clumsy. Why was our tracking system clumsy? Why was our process clumsy? The second role I played was really this project manager style role. In St. Louis, we have a lot of, because we have a lot of shortages in workers, actually, a lot of our full-time employees were really burdened with having to do the work. They were almost like compensating for missing workers. And therefore, it was impossible for our city to really get the space to have full-time dedicated people running such a large scale project. And I can't overstate how much the change management component of this was integral for success.

[13:19](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=799) So my role was essentially a mix of figuring out what's going on, figuring out what we should do, mapping out a roadmap, a timeline. And this project took us about a year to implement, which is pretty fast, actually. However, we had to be very, very intentional in keeping ourselves on track throughout that year. So I played that role. And I also played the role of building momentum and buy-in. I think a lot of, in a lot of cities, right, sometimes just getting the momentum and kind of getting everyone on board is a challenge in itself. So it was really important to get the stakeholders together in a space where we could all see the problems for what they are. We could build cohesion, right? So sometimes our teams work a little bit in silos. And it was really nice to see this almost like stakeholder, I guess, group coming together from various departments that were all very bought in. By the time we had discussed the problem in depth, we were all very bought in that this needed to happen.

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[14:41](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=881) Great. Thank you. David, same question. I saw you smiling. So I think we might hear some

**David Huebner**

[14:48](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=888) excited to hear the similarities and differences. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'll try not to repeat and try to sort of feed off of the great, I think, outline that Kritzya provided in terms of why sometimes I'm somebody from the outside can be really helpful. Just by way of background, I, 10 years ago, and actually Chrissy and I were both I think at Google, but one of the things that Google was doing was trying to bring more data-driven approaches and human-centered design concepts to hiring in HR. And 10 years ago, I left with the idea of what it would look like to apply those same principles with mission-driven organizations, mainly government and nonprofits. And with that as the backdrop, I ended up joining Code for America and was running a talent initiative there that was focused on sort of both sides of the marketplace. How do we get more people to raise their hand to go work in government, but also how do we help governments improve the way they hire? And it was through that work that I then met folks at the city and county of San Francisco who were coming with this problem I described previously and looking for some people to help them unpack.

[15:51](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=951) And they knew they wanted to approach it differently, which is why they had sort of come to those of us at Code for America, because they heard what Code for America and other organizations were doing in terms of trying to bring more human-centered design concepts to the government service redesign space. And they wanted to apply that to HR, which seemed to align really well with where I was coming from and looking to do. Make a long story short, I ended up then leaving Code for America and actually then having my consulting firm get hired by the city and county of San Francisco to do this work. And along with a partner, Monique Byanatan, I was able to start this work that really started with doing workshops to unpack users' needs. And that's really where we started, was bringing in a multitude of different players involved in the hiring process, understanding their pain points, and facilitating those sessions. They had gone through sessions before using lean design principles, which I think brings a lot to the table, but they hadn't done it through sort of a more human-centered approach.

[16:55](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1015) And when you look at hiring processes, I think that's one of the angles that's really necessary is how are your candidates, how are your hiring managers, and how are your HR professionals experiencing these processes? And so we looked at it through that lens, as well as the efficiency one. And that's, I think, part of why we were brought in, was try to design those workshops that would bring out that side of the equation, and not that we then only wanted to over-index on that. We still needed to figure out how we do this efficiently and effectively, but make sure we're understanding the user experience and using that as part of the argument. So that started then with a series of workshops unpacking the user experience during what can be a really lengthy, complicated process. Then as we identified pain points, looking at what root causes might be in government hiring, there's often this preconception that everything is as a result of merit system rules, that that's the root cause of all pain points. And we realized that that probably wasn't the case.

[17:55](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1075) Some of it is process, technology. There are other things there. So really trying to understand the root causes before then starting to ideate and allow people to think big and broad about how we could improve this, both short-term and long-term.

**Krizia Lopez**

[18:10](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1090) I also want to add one more thing that I forgot to mention earlier, because David just heard my opinion of this. I spoke a lot about this project, I guess exactly what David said, that process root cause identification stage, the implementation stage, but I actually forgot to mention another huge part of my role was really training the city staff. We ended up training about 700 city workers, managers on this software and how to use it. I can't overstate how useful that step is and how important it is that we had to have a training plan, a rollout plan internally. Of course, we also had an external rollout plan, and that part was essentially making sure that the public could know that there's a new system, that there's a new process.

[19:16](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1156) But internally, we budgeted a lot of time, probably six months in total, on just making sure every single department, we have like 50 something subdivisions, that all of them were comfortable using our new software and that they had no questions for the day that it launched. So, I just want to state that was another key part of my role.

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[19:42](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1182) Thank you. Yeah, no, that's a great addition. And I would love to talk a little bit more about the implementation overall as we get there. But David, building off of starting with the workshops and starting with the human-centered approach, talk about using that to inform a procurement process and how that's different than how most procurement processes work and what were the unique advantages that it allowed you to achieve in this project.

**David Huebner**

[20:12](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1212) Yeah, that's a great question. And it was one of the sort of philosophies that we were bringing to this is that we needed to design a procurement in a much more objective oriented way and in a more modularized way that one of the issues that we were anticipating is that people would want to solve all their problems, not only about hiring, but the rest of sort of HR or whether it be onboarding, every part of the exam process, so on and so forth. And that too, that people would be really prescriptive in how you went about solving it. Meaning the way that we have it today, you just got to be able to do that in this exact same way. And by making it more objective oriented, that here's the experience we want to create or here's the way that we imagine the data flowing that we could get out of our own way as an organization and allow ourselves A, to think broader, but then B, allow a broader pool of vendors to come to the table and say that I can solve that because we were no longer saying that you have to have X, Y, and Z concepts built into your system.

[21:21](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1281) We were trying to abstract that and make it much more objective oriented, which when you're especially laying the framework for allowing non-traditional government vendors to come to the table is really critical because otherwise they get lost in the minutiae of your requirements very specifically around eligible lists, referrals, right? These are terms that a lot of people in this audience probably know what they mean, but to people who are only doing work in the private sector, those things are not concepts that However, if you tell people what I need to do is create a list of pre-qualified people are known. based on other characteristics used during another hurdle in the hiring process, that's something that a lot of vendors can actually meet. It's not called an eligible list, but it still actually meets that goal. So being fairly objective oriented really, I think allowed us to lay the land for a different type of procurement process, telling the story of what are the objectives we have as an organization instead of being really specific about needing to meet these really, really gritty, nitty I could talk about this for quite some time in different domains, but that was the general gritty requirements.

[22:27](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1347) philosophical approach, making it more modularized. What do we actually need to do right now? And then also being really objective oriented. The third piece I'll just say is procuring a system that we would be able to iterate on. And I think that's really critical that we just, we knew we're not going to solve government hiring with one procurement, with one implementation, with one change management effort. What we needed to do is put in place an infrastructure that would allow us to really design a learning organization around it that would continue to iterate and improve as the talent landscape changed. And that was another fundamental piece of the procurement process of what we were looking Great.

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[23:13](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1393) Thank you. for. So yeah, let's, you've both mentioned change management throughout. So Kritzya, I would love to just build off of the last thing that you were saying. You mentioned earlier, you realized that updating the applicant tracking system would be the most impactful thing that was within your scope that you could do, but you also mentioned that it had been tried and not succeeded before. So how did you get it to move forward? And speak a little bit more about all the things you did along the way to support the What did it take? culture change and make sure everybody was coming with it.

**Krizia Lopez**

[23:49](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1429) Yes, absolutely. So for us, it was really important to understand, for example, we did spend some time seeing why did the first few attempts fail? And the personnel team was, they were great. They were very candid in sharing just, you know, they had tried to do it with consulting help and essentially some of the pitfalls had been silos a little bit. There had been, for example, the entire way this software was procured already was a result of silos, if that makes sense. In some ways, there were people working on things in, even within HR, there's different divisions. Some people were taking on some parts of thinking about the software, others were thinking about other parts, and then nobody was thinking necessarily about the cascading effects of changing a system on other stakeholders that might be, you know, all around, right?

[24:58](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1498) So how would it impact? Maybe it would impact our finance team because now the, you know, hires are going to be, you know, joining more quickly and we're going to have to then change that process as well. So there were things like that, that were more kind of like cascading effects of changing So yeah, that was really important to just analyze some of that. a system. And I will say also, really it was the, the things that worked well for us were, first of all, was to build a very representative stakeholder coalition at the start. So unfortunately in St. Louis, we had, we, it was not a high tech literacy environment in general. Our, many of our city systems are antiquated. I know our IT team works very hard to try to, you know, fix things as bandwidth allows, but in some ways we had been, these are problems that have developed over many, many decades, The fact that, and this might be a kind of shocking statement to some people on the call, right?

[26:08](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1568) but maybe others, not, not so much. We still had typewriters being used for some parts of processes and we still do in some parts of the city. There are still things like this, you know, really outdated technologies and, you know, as a, as a point in time, I think we never let the kind of, we were never, we never let ourselves be overwhelmed by the almost like scale of the task at hand. I think that was very important. We took very bite-sized, we took a bite-sized approach when we were scoping this whole thing out, right? So it's very key that all of the city leadership understood that, yes, this was going to be a big effort that requires everyone's help. But at the same time, you know, as David said, like, it's not going to fix every single thing right now. It's not the most modern software. We're going to do it in an iterative way.

[27:11](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1631) So that was another thing was just making, preparing everybody for the process of undergoing change, preparing everyone for how difficult it can be to, you know, do work in a different way. We did spend a lot of time on that. And we prepared leadership, frontline staff, as much as we could for, you know, the technical I can say like Aaron is on this call, again, he was his current talent manager. change process. He and I spent many, many, many hours poring over, you know, things that in some ways like neither of us were particularly experts in, you know, designing a software tool. But we did want to be sure that we could explain that to everyone else in a very simple way. So we spent a lot of time on explaining things to people. So let me move through some other steps that helped us. All right.

[28:13](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1693) We really wanted to be realistic. I think that's another key takeaway. It's just cool. Like can we do this in a year? Let's give ourselves plenty of time. You know, if we had to change that timeline, we could have. We built in, there was no particular rush to do that in that timeline. We just wanted to set a goal. We ended up meeting that goal, but we were throughout the process, we kept checking in Are we feeling like this is on track? as a team. So we kept things, we had markers for almost like sub goals that we wanted to reach as we're developing a system, as we're preparing the external rollout, as we're preparing our website, right? We had to create a website to let the public know that this was happening. And yeah, so another very important part of this was ensuring that we could build, we could address change resistance by having a very empathetic lens. So building trust and empathy.

[29:13](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1753) I think we had some people that were really worried. For example, people, some people were worried about, you know, am I still going to have a job if, you know, I'm the person that types the letters and now the letters are automated. Things like that. We also had, you know, we had to build trust with departments who would say, you know, how do I know? I'm so used to calling. I could call Alex and Aaron and I could just ask them for things and someone could walk over with a piece of paper. How can I trust that this will all still happen quickly in this digital realm where I can't physically see it? And so we had to do a lot of trust building and really listening, right? So listening to people's concerns, we did a lot of piloting, feedback sessions throughout the process so everyone felt comfortable. By the time the real deal was being finalized. So yeah, I think very last thing I'll say, measuring outcomes. From the start, we had the goal of having this platform be almost like a catalyst. Like this whole project for us was, it was the first time that even the whole personnel department, we were thinking of this as a culture change moment. So we were thinking, hey, we're going to have a culture of data. It's going to be great for us to be able to measure and see what is the process? What is the length? Are there steps where maybe it's taking forever to, I don't know, for a candidate to go through the scoring process. Maybe it's taking longer to go through the interview stage. So we really, I'm so proud of the personnel department and the city in general for really being open to tackling that culture change challenge. I can say that that ingredient is extremely important. I would not underestimate the power of building that almost like hopeful lens. Like, hey, we actually can. Yes, we're low resource. Yes, we have typewriters.

[31:14](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1874) Yes, we have budget issues, but we actually can innovate. We can innovate, we can modernize, and we can do it in ways that are in our timeline and our, and our bandwidth allow. So that was really great. And I'm so proud of the team for building on that momentum, even to other projects that have nothing to do with this system. It's more just like a, it's a mindset shift.

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[31:41](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1901) Yeah, absolutely. And I'm excited to hear a little bit more about the future in St. Louis in just a minute. David, I'd love to hear from you if same question about change management, and then also just where this project end up, what were the end results of this initial effort?

**David Huebner**

[32:00](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=1920) Yeah, so we went from doing the research phase, I was sort of describing earlier and then designing the procurement, then went through procurement and procured and got some non-traditional vendors and traditional vendors. And, and we didn't know where we were going to end up. What we knew is that we needed that vendor to be, want to partner with us to have a much more data-driven structure that would allow us to continue to improve, that would provide a better experience. And that was built with the idea that we needed to be able to plug into other systems. And I bring that up because Chris, you brought up educating your partners on different facets. And I remember having to educate our steering committee that involved our civil service commission administrators, as well as HR leaders from across the county on what an API was, what an application programming interface, because we were making this case that we needed an infrastructure that would allow us to be able to plug into other systems as we wanted to optimize them in the future, right? And that's where you have to figure out how much education do you need to do? But we realized if we were going to make that a minimum requirement in our procurement, we needed our stakeholders to be knowledgeable enough. But there's a lot of translation that needs to be done for these different audiences. So, I just flag that as another important piece here, as you bring your stakeholders along, of needing to speak different languages to be able to ensure that they understand why you're optimizing for the things that you're optimizing for. But with that as background, we then ended up getting into contract with a non-traditional government vendor called Smart Recruiters, who won the procurement process, putting together a proposal that involved also building some custom software to address really unique parts of the government hiring process. And one of the reasons I underscore that is one of the conversations that we had internally was, if we're going to go in that direction and allow

[34:01](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2041) this to be an option, and we decided to do so, we as a city and county have to be prepared to build a team that will support it moving forward. And that's, I think, a really important thing to be aware of as you go through your procurement, is what's the infrastructure that's going to exist afterwards? Because there's some solutions that, though they might be really exciting and bold and new, don't make sense for you as an organization if you're not going to have the capacity to support it afterwards. So that was a really big strategic decision and discussion that happened. And there was quite a bit of investment that was made to build out a team that would be able to set up and support this infrastructure. It started small. We had to keep on making the case. We didn't grow from two people to 20 people overnight. It actually happened in a phased way. But we kept on saying, if we meet these goals, will we be able to get additional support? And that's what went from at one point a two-person team to almost a 20-person HR modernization program that still is at the city and county of San Francisco today, doing a whole bunch of redesign of a whole bunch of other HR systems. And I was texting with them this morning telling them that I was doing this.

[35:09](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2109) And that's just a group that I'm really proud of and excited about because they're really laying the foundation for how to continue to innovate with the rest of the employee experience from recruitment through retirement. But getting back to the change management piece, we procured this new tool. COVID hit, and we actually had to go implement this new technology that looked very different during COVID. I was in this room. Everything was pretty much the same, except I think I have more gray hair now. But we did a lot of it from exactly the same spot and had all these sessions. And I think it's one of our learnings is that even though we knew change management was important, we still didn't invest enough in it. And I don't think we appreciated the degree to which, to Kritzya's point, people would feel threatened, concerned, not knowing what this meant for them. And the way I sort of described that and have described that in the past is realizing that so many people actually describe their day-to-day through the lens of how the previous software functioned. And so I remember being in a conversation with someone where I heard from their manager that they were really anxious, and I went to go meet with them. And when we unpacked their anxiety, what it really was is, look, my job is processing Form 359B.

[36:27](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2187) And you're telling me there is no Form 359B. And I was like, but their job wasn't that. Their job was helping with moving from final selection to the onboarding process. It happened to be with that artifact, but they define their job that way. And so when you're thinking about the change management exercise, I think really understanding the lens through which people are going to be seeing it. And if you've defined your job by this process that existed in a system, it can be really threatening. And one of our big lessons learned is we wish we had done a lot more with the middle managers who had been the experts in the last system. We're now managing people with whom we were talking about redesigning their day-to-day. And those middle managers couldn't be as much of a value add if we didn't really lead a huge change management exercise with them because they didn't know the new system. And I think one of our big lessons learned is needing to do much more with that middle management who grew up with the system are now managing people who are using it. They feel threatened by the fact that they're managers and they don't know the new system.

[37:32](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2252) And I think that's one of our big lessons learned. I think COVID definitely played into that because there was less like us going in and meeting with a large group of folks and more very pinpointed webinars just inviting specific people. And so that's one of our big lessons learned on the change management exercise, which we then sort of have iterated on or the team has iterated on since then from both a comms and a training standpoint. Thank you. All right. David spoke

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[38:02](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2282) a little bit about the hiring modernization team and where things are today in San Francisco. I want to make sure before we move on to Q&A that Critia, you have a chance to speak about the outcomes of this work, the impact that it had, and then we can invite Aaron and Alex also to share how things are going today over in St. Louis. Absolutely. So I am proud to say that we

**Krizia Lopez**

[38:26](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2306) measured outcomes of our, so we launched our Taleo software on, I think it was May 7th, about a year ago. So actually May 7th in 2024. So a year and a half, I don't know, time flies. But we were measuring this whole time what the impact is and what's super cool, so is within one year we achieved a huge reduction in hiring times. Jobs used to be filled in nine to 12 months and now they're down to two to three months, which is a huge change in just a single year. So that was awesome. We also really changed, we had a huge impact on the fill rate. So previously we were filling like 500 jobs per year and after this change we were filling like over 880 positions each year. It's a huge increase in the rate of being able to fill jobs. So in some cases we were actually reversing the trend of vacancy rates, which is super cool and a huge win. Finally there was also a lot of impacts on capacity. So in one sense we, so one, I guess one way that capacity improved is, first of all we were saving lots of money on paper and printing and mail. We calculated it was about $250,000 in just paper processing costs, you know, letters in the mail, all that stuff. I mean we were processing 20,000 job applicants each year. Imagine how many letters that would be and then imagine it now all being digital.

[40:12](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2412) We also were able to free up bandwidth for our HR team and the departmental managers, right. So because everything was now digital in our system, candidates, department leads, everyone could just log in, check the status, etc, etc. Much faster and our HR team was no longer as swamped as they had been. So they were able to now spend time on data analysis, on process improvement, and that has been a huge kind of catalytic situation, right. So now they can spend time doing things that are even more value-adding. There's also, I guess I should mention, the candidate experience and the department experience increased dramatically. I mean people were very happy with being able to just see everything in real time, things like that. And we haven't worked out every single, you know, issue or kink that's kind of normal in any tech launch, right. You're going to have to iterate, you're going to have to keep up as integrations change, as software requirements change, right.

[41:22](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2482) Some of the things we had, we're still working on is really nailing down integrations between our Oracle HCM system and Taleo, among other things like that. But I would say it was a smash success for our scrappy team. And yeah, once again, oh yeah, I do want to add that the Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Leadership Program was a huge help for us all. Actually, a part of our HR team went over there. We all traveled to Harvard together and we went to this session that was hosted by the City Leadership Initiative on managing talent. And that was really catalytic for us too, because we were able to see, I mean Aaron can speak to that later perhaps in his Q&A, but we were all able to see and really get away from day-to-day just for like three days. And we were able to think about this clearly, then get back to business. But all of that stuff really helped set us up for a very long-term kind of track record of success and improvement. I just want to say, you don't need to have the perfect setup to get started. You know, when I hear David talk, I'm almost like envious, wow, you have a whole team of 20 people just doing HR modernization. That's an incredible thing. We in St. Louis, we're like kind of DIYing it, but I think it's still possible to get so much stuff done. So yeah, that's my takeaway on the outcomes. And should I pass it to, I guess, Aaron or Alex?

**David Huebner**

[43:06](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2586) Okay, I mean, I was just maybe, yeah, just, well, one on the metrics, I think we landed on very similar ones. So like application volume was one that we realized that governments are not always good at getting the word out. And so we actually really focused on leveraging technology that helped get the word out and then redesigning how we word our job announcements and trying to lead with the impact that you're going to have. Then time to hire, as you mentioned, and then decreasing the vacancy rate. And so we saw a 50% increase in application volume, 25% more hires, which I think Aliyah and Kritzya are 30% more hires, decrease in time to hire as well in the 25% range, and then helping the vacancy rate. And I think as you anchor in those numbers, I think then you can actually get justification to grow the team. And that's why I said we like, those resources got phased in over multiple years. So that we're a little bit, we still started earlier, so we kicked off our research in 2017, right? So the phasing in of the resources happened over time and really ended up creating four teams, a data analytics, like a people analytics team, a change management and training team, a people technology team. And then we have one team that's just dedicated actually to re-imagining exams, which is trying to lay the foundation for where do we want to go with hiring in the future, knowing that we're going with hiring in the future, knowing that we still want to hire in a merit-based way, but we realized the assessment space is changing a lot. Just to share a little bit more on how those resources are split up, but I'd be love to hear from Alex and Erin as well about their experience going

**Shifra Goldenberg**

[44:41](https://youtu.be/2h-4L5RjHFA?t=2681) through this. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you, David. I also just, since there's so much more we could have talked about dropped in the chat, the case study that has more details about the work that David and Kritzya were talking about today and definitely encourage everyone to check it out. I think we can, we'll call on Erin and Alex, and we can also consider this, the transition to the Q and A portion. So Innovate US, I'll invite you guys to pause the reporting.

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