Audit gives Dallas a ‘needs improvement’ on hiring practices

An organization is only as strong as its people and processes, and a recent audit of Dallas’s hiring procedures suggests that the city has a personnel recruitment problem.

In conjunction with City Auditor Mark Swann, Baker Tilly, an organizational consultancy, recently analyzed the human resources and civil service departments’ talent acquisition processes and controls for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 fiscal years.

What Baker Tilly found offers insight into city recruitment systems that often are inefficient, ad hoc, duplicate recruiting efforts and fail to evaluate the thoroughness of job searches. The chief findings, expressed in 34 recommendations, urge the city to improve its marketing, upgrade hiring systems, better analyze hiring data, streamline communications and develop a strategic hiring plan. And once employees are hired, the city could do a better job of getting them up to speed on their duties, the audit found.

City hiring is split between its civil service and human resources departments, a division partly shaped by the city charter. The civil service unit oversees about 83% of the workforce and processes promotions for the police and fire departments while the human resources department oversees the employment of department directors and executives. But that has a major drawback, the audit notes. One unit reports to an assistant city manager and the other to a deputy city manager, potentially hurting accountability and recruiting, the audit concludes.

Most disturbing is that Dallas lacks a strategic workforce plan to identify critical, high-priority positions, forecast potential retirements, evaluate the demands of departments at risk of high vacancy, devise succession plans for executive-level positions and assess skills gaps. Department hiring managers also voiced concern to auditors that the civil service candidate eligibility list provided to them does not consistently identify candidates who meet the minimum qualifications or consider candidates who have transferable skills.

None of this should come as news to the City Council or city management. The city’s talent acquisition process has been discussed since 2000 but has resulted in no significant change. Outgoing City Manager T.C. Broadnax had agreed to many of the recommendations, but with his pending departure responsibility for change falls to the council, Interim City Manager Kim Tolbert or whoever gets the job permanently.

Some remedies make sense, such as having a single department to oversee the hiring processes and improving internal communication and coordination. Dallas would be well served to develop a citywide strategic workforce plan rather than leave that up solely to individual departments.

Dallas, which faces intense competition for labor from private sector employees and other cities, must not let inefficient hiring processes compromise its future.

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