Improving employment outcomes in local government

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure this strategy addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute has developed an indicator framework to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in equitable employment in local government. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Opportunities for income: Household income at 20th, 50th, and 80th percentiles. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Employment opportunities: Ratio of pay on an average job to the cost of living. These data are available from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

• Financial security: Share of households with debt in collections. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Debt in America website.

• Prioritize reducing time-to-hire: Research has shown that the typical public sector hiring process can be notably longer than those in the private sector. This creates a real barrier to recruiting a diverse and qualified workforce, as many candidates are unable or unwilling to persist through a lengthy and involved hiring process. Therefore, eliminating unnecessary delays and rethinking the hiring process with an eye toward streamlining is an important strategy for workforce fairness.

• Emphasize retention as well as recruitment: Improving employment outcomes requires attention to the full employee lifecycle, looking beyond the recruitment phase. Invest in strong onboarding, clear career pathways, mentorship, and ongoing professional development to support employee growth and advancement. Focusing on retention reduces turnover, preserves institutional knowledge, and helps ensure that diverse hires remain and progress within the organization.

• Center the candidate’s perspective: Rather than relying on the assumptions held by hiring managers or long-term public sector employees about what will attract new populations, engage directly with prospective underrepresented candidates on what would motivate them to join local government. The factors that resonate with existing employees may differ in key ways from the new candidates governments are trying to recruit.

• Address local pain points: Workforce challenges vary widely across jurisdictions, roles, and communities. Identify the specific barriers affecting hiring and retention in your local context (e.g., competition with the private sector, an aging workforce, or hard-to-fill positions) and design solutions grounded in local data, staff input, and operational realities rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.

• Embrace multiple options to demonstrate experience: Human resources teams and hiring managers should recognize the multiple ways candidates can demonstrate competency, including—but not limited to—formal credentials or degrees. This can include relevant skill sets developed across different sectors, roles, or contexts, such as military service.

• Utilize asset-based framing and consider potential internal tensions: As job requirements, classifications, and recruitment practices are reshaped, internal staff who advanced through prior systems may experience concerns about fairness. Leaders should pursue these changes without devaluing the expertise of the existing workforce and should use asset-based framing to communicate the benefits of workforce fairness efforts. Removing degree requirements should not be framed as implying that degrees are useless, but rather that there are multiple ways to signal preparedness.

• Avoid creating pay inequities as hiring practices shift: While the goal of these efforts is to reduce workforce disparities, the job reclassifications and degree requirement changes may create pay inequities if compensation practices and advancement pathways are not also revisited. Conducting a compensation evaluation in parallel is one tool that jurisdictions can use to help guide them through this process and avoid unintended consequences. Additionally, adopting skills-first hiring practices across roles at different levels of seniority ensures fairer access to career advancement opportunities (and, consequently, higher-paying roles).

• Human resources and people organization staff: Given the central role of human resources in recruitment, retention, and the employee experience, commitment from both HR leadership and front-line staff is critical to the success of this initiative.

• Executive leadership and program staff: While HR is crucial to execution, meaningful investment from agency leadership and program staff is also necessary to transform employment processes. These reforms must permeate the organization, and workforce development must be closely tied to programmatic functions, given that the workforce is essential to effective program delivery.

• Elected officials: Elected officials can be key advocates for changes to employment policies in agencies that include or report to them. Elected officials – from City Councils to Governors – may be responsible for building support for changes, establishing governance structures, passing supportive legislation, among other steps.

• Community organizations and civic associations: Community organizations and associations can serve as important recruitment partners and channels for potential candidates.

• Residents and prospective employees: The candidates that governments seek to recruit are best positioned to identify the barriers they face in joining local government and to articulate what would attract them to a career in public service.

• Public sector labor unions: Engaging labor union representatives when implementing changes is recommended, particularly when revisiting job requirements or assessment procedures.

• Start small and prioritize low-hanging fruit: Experts suggest starting with a single department that has sufficient capacity to adopt hiring practice changes, rather than attempting to implement changes across an entire bureaucracy at once. For skills-based hiring, hard-to-fill roles can be a practical starting point for adjusting job requirements and piloting alternative selection approaches. Identifying and publicizing early wins can also help build the case for future budget allocations and capacity building.

• Leverage workforce and hiring data: Local governments should regularly collect and analyze workforce and hiring data to identify barriers to workforce fairness and set goals for improvement. Disaggregating data by job classification and demographic characteristics provides the clearest picture of progress. These data should be reported internally and externally to increase accountability for achieving workforce goals.

• Dedicate sufficient resources to implementing improved workforce strategies: Advancing fair recruitment and skills-based hiring often requires significant changes to standard hiring processes. Local governments should provide the additional training, resources, and capacity to support HR functions as these changes are implemented. For example, removing degree requirements can expand applicant pools and increase staff time needed for screening and assessment.

• Use a demographic diagnostic tool to examine practices: Local governments can have hiring or employment policies that appear race-neutral but in effect create racial disparities. Diagnostic tools guide cities and counties in examining their practices for implicit bias and developing goals to reduce disparities.

• Identify organizational champions: Implementing changes to organizational culture and practices requires leadership support at all levels. Senior leaders, such as mayors and city managers, can set vision and urgency, remove barriers, and signal commitment. Executive orders can help kickstart initiatives, but long-term sustainability depends on continued leadership engagement. Employees without formal authority can also play a key role by building peer buy-in and providing feedback during implementation.

• Regularly assess progress: Once a local government has established procedures for data collection, a formal process for reviewing progress toward goals, transparently reporting efforts to staff, and demonstrating leadership’s commitment to closing gaps will allow for continued improvement toward workforce fairness. Governments should continually improve job quality for their own employees and contractors to improve worker wellbeing and build credibility within their communities. For more on this approach, see the Job Quality Playbook.

• Leverage existing data: Many governments already collect substantial administrative data for compliance purposes, but underuse it for workforce initiatives. This includes application data, leave usage, promotion activity, and workforce records. Better leveraging these existing datasets can support smarter decision-making without adding new reporting burdens.

• Develop data-driven skills-based hiring metrics: Skills-based hiring is a promising framework, but it requires evaluation to measure its impact. Metrics agencies can utilize include the share of roles rewritten using skills-based language, year-over-year growth in talent pipelines and recruitment channels (e.g., internships, apprenticeships, work-based learning, technical boot camps, trade schools, online learning platforms, etc.), retention and burnout rates, skills-aligned performance evaluations, the number of new or expanded training programs, and tracking changes in the demographic profile of candidates across the hiring process (e.g., gender, race, socioeconomic background).

• Connect workforce metrics to service delivery: There is often a disconnect between employment key performance indicators (KPIs) and day-to-day service delivery. Governments could strengthen performance management by measuring resident experience, satisfaction, and trust in government, and by linking these insights directly to operational and policy decisions.

• Make use of more timely data collection: Employee experience data collection should be paired with a culture shift toward timely action. Governments need systems that deliver data quickly and at a granular level to inform decisions, such as more detailed employee engagement data and regular pulse surveys that allow leaders to identify employee experience issues early and respond in real time.