He wants YOU for NYC!
Mayor Eric Adams has been taking a page out of Uncle Sam’s book — hitting the streets to personally recruit New Yorkers to apply for city jobs.
The mayor was spotted by The Post handing out flyers promoting a city jobs fair at York College during an unannounced stop with his staff at the Long Island Rail Road station in Jamaica, Queens last Thursday.
A December analysis by city Comptroller Brad Lander’s office estimated there were 23,000 vacancies in the Big Apple’s 35 municipal agencies last fall — though budget tightening has reduced that figure to about 20,000.
In the Department of Social Services’ Child Support Services division, there was a whopping 46% vacancy rate, with 415 employees out of a slotted 775 positions, the report said.
The city’s Cyber Command, charged with protecting New York’s cybersecurity, had a 36% vacancy rate.
Nearly a third of positions were vacant in the Department of Small Business Services, while the vacancy rate was 23% in the Buildings Department, 21% in the City Planning Department, 20% in the Department of Social Services and 17% in both the departments of Health & Mental Hygiene and Environmental Protection.
Adams admitted there are thousands of vacancies that need to be filled to run the government — and said it’s up to him and his administration to aggressively get the word out to New Yorkers that there are plentiful good jobs available.
“Often times we talk about vacancies in city agencies. But then if you ask the people in government that talk about the vacancies… you ask them, ‘but what are you doing about filling them?’ They don’t have an answer,” said the mayor and new job recruiter.
Adams has also shown more flexibility about allowing more employees to work remotely after initially resisting the idea.
Robert Chamon, a married dad of two, thanked the mayor for spreading the city jobs information during his visit to the LIRR stop.
“It’s good, good, really good. I’m just going for a job interview today so if it does not work out, I can apply at this one,” Chamon said.
Lander said the mayor’s job freeze coupled with massive upheaval in the broader labor market during the coronavirus outbreak dramatically increased the vacancy rate.
Last fall, the citywide rate stood at just under 8%, far greater than the pre-COVID rate of about 2%.
“While it is important to identify positions that are no longer needed, current vacancies appear to be driven far more by where there is private sector competition for workers, rather than by any assessment of need or priority,” Lander said. “The result is a severe lack of capacity to get things done in mission-critical areas, from creating new housing to providing services to low-income children to collecting the revenue the City needs to function.”
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