Two days after winning the general election, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani launched an online portal for people seeking jobs in his new administration.
More than 70,000 applications have been submitted, his team announced Monday.
But how many jobs and what types are available? Mamdani and his team aren’t saying.
The incoming mayor’s team also hasn’t explained that the legally required way to find most long-term employment with the City of New York is not through a portal, but to dive head first into the traditional civil service process.
Thousands of civil service jobs for more than 100 city agencies and departments are currently open and the city is looking to hire.
Some of the most common openings are clerical, computer and law enforcement jobs.
But getting one of those roles depends on a lot of factors, and involves clearing a lot of hoops. How do people land those gigs? How does the process work? How long does it take?
Here are the basics:
What if I want to work in City Hall?
If you want to work in City Hall itself, not one of the many government agencies, the Mamdami portal is for you! (It can also help to know someone on the transition team who’s doing the hiring.)
But those jobs are rare and hard to land. Many are given to campaign staffers or doled out as thank-yous to union or political supporters.
Some civil servants land in City Hall, like the police who patrol outside the building and clerical employees. But the majority of staff turns over with each new mayor every four or eight years.
Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
If you’re interested in any opportunity, inside of City Hall or out, you shouldn’t just submit through the Mamdani portal and leave it at that, experts said.
“If you’re a person with a keen interest in government, I would check all the avenues,” Martha Hirst, who ran the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) during the Bloomberg administration, told THE CITY.
That includes applying directly to specific city agencies or submitting a resume into the Mamdani job portal, she added.
“I would try them all,” said Hirst, who also served as the senior vice president and chief financial officer of Fordham University. “I think if you really have an interest in government, you run out every stream you possibly can.”
The civil service process can take months or even years, a problem Mamdani’s newly chosen first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, already pointed out is an issue the administration wants to tackle.
“One of the problems that everybody has been identifying in New York City is how long it takes to pay providers — how long it takes to do the hiring process,” Fuleihan told reporters last week.
He touted the “excitement” tied to the campaign and new administration and vowed to channel that into reforming the hiring process and other areas of government.
“We are going to improve those things,” he added without disclosing details.
How do I apply to work for the city aside from the Mamdani online job portal? What’s the basic process?
The simple answer is via the city’s testing and civil service agency, known as the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, or DCAS.
The city uses a civil service system initially launched in 1883 to prevent the government being taken over by patronage hires.
Each year, the agency oversees about 100 different so-called open competitive exams for entry-level jobs. Those include titles such as: police officer, stock worker, traffic enforcement agent, computer associate and staff analyst.
City jobs require a traditional written exam or something called an “education and experience review,” known as “E and Es” by insiders. Candidates who pass the exam or resume review are then placed on hiring rosters, i.e. lists of potential candidates, ranked.
The job seekers with the highest test scores or most experience or education are placed higher on the lists. The rosters remain active for up to four years.
City supervisors who do the hiring must abide by something called the 1-and-3 rule. Under that requirement, they must interview one of the top three candidates on the entire roster.
That enables them to look at more than just test scores when making hiring decisions. It also forces city officials to consider some of the top scorers.
What jobs are available?
The full list of city jobs varies each year but the city is always seeking to create pools of qualified applicants for some hard-to-fill positions primarily due to their lower starting salaries or higher pay in nearby counties. Those jobs include: police officer, correction officer, traffic enforcement agent, computer associate, public health nurse and multiple clerical jobs.
The city is also always looking to fill some more skilled roles that require specified college degrees or extensive experience.
Those jobs currently include: architect, emergency medical specialist and procurement analyst.
How do I know if I qualify?
Every city civil service job has a specific title and something called a Notice of Examination or NOE. That document lists starting salary and maximum pay, minimum requirement, possible filing fees and details if there’s an exam or merely an education and experience review.
Here’s an example of what an NOE record looks like for a Sanitation Worker, a Secretary, and Staff Analyst. DCAS also has an archive of all the exam notices although some are so old — and haven’t been offered in decades — that they date back to the Giuliani administration.
How long does it take?
The key word when applying for a city job is patience. First, exams for certain types of jobs only come around every few years, so mark your calendar now.
DCAS announces the yearly exam schedule online and The Chief-Leader, the newspaper that reports on the city work force, also posts the schedule.
For example, popular jobs like Sanitation Worker have an exam once every four years or so. That test typically generates thousands of qualified candidates. But the Department of Sanitation doesn’t hire everyone in one shot. The DSNY traditionally relies on the list to fill openings generated by attrition.
Then after you take your exam, the city must first certify each eligible hiring list. That entails making sure there are no obvious signs of cheating.
That typically takes months.
The city agencies seeking to hire then must get permission from their budget beancounters to bring on new hires. The agencies are legally required to interview people at the top of each list, as mentioned previously. Some jobs, including those in the NYPD, can have multiple active rosters and hundreds of interested applicants.
Can I apply directly to a city agency?
Yes.
Even DCAS has a site on its homepage with current openings. Many other agencies also have sections on their websites listing available roles. Those spots are typically hard-to-fill slots or unique job titles where civil service exams are rarely offered.
City agencies can also hire so-called provisional employees to fill immediate needs. Those are city jobs without many of the same civil service protections. For instance, provisional employees are not entitled to independent arbitration hearings if they are facing disciplinary charges.
Provisional employees are real second class employees, Jerold Levine, a lawyer who handles civil service cases, told THE CITY.
“If you are a provisional sanitation worker, it means you are working in the title, and have the obligations of the title,” he said. “However, you have no civil service protections and can be reassigned and given other work.”
Not all provisional jobs are dead end positions.
Hirst noted she was originally hired as a provisional Staff Analyst in the 1970s. She took the civil service exam as soon as it was offered, she added.
By law, the city is supposed to hold exams within nine months to allow provisional hires to become full blown civil servants.
“But they play games with that,” Levine said. “And there are people who work in the provisional positions for 15 years and they won’t actually have a test.”
Additional reporting by Claudia Irizarry Aponte.
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