Philly is slowly rebuilding its city workforce after the pandemic exodus — but key jobs remain hard to staff
The city government vacancy rate is 14%, meaning that about one in seven jobs are unfilled in a workforce that’s budgeted to have more than 26,000 employees.
Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic set off a mass exodus of Philadelphia city workers, the local government is slowly rebuilding its workforce, with officials now saying that the number of unfilled jobs is at its lowest point in several years.
Top officials from Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration testified before City Council Tuesday, saying that the government-wide vacancy rate is 14%, meaning that about one in seven city jobs are unfilled in a workforce that’s budgeted to have more than 26,000 employees.
That vacancy rate is down from its peak at more than 20% in 2023, after the so-called “Great Resignation” — a national wave of employee departures that took hold through the pandemic — contributed to an unprecedented level of city workers fleeing government service by resigning or retiring.
The vacant positions, which plagued agencies across the government but were most acute in public safety departments, had a cascading effect on the city’s ability to provide basic services and contributed to record overtime costs. For several years, the city bolstered recruitment efforts, but hiring could not outpace the high rate of attrition.
It remains a major problem among some jobs — like police and correctional officers — the city classifies as hard to fill.
The Philadelphia Police Department, which has reported an increase in the number of cadets signing up for the academy in recent years, is still down more than 1,000 officers from its full complement, according to a recent city financial report. That amounts to a vacancy rate of more than 19%, only incrementally lower than its peak in 2023.
The prisons department has more than 400 vacancies, a rate of more than 20%. And the sheriff’s office has a vacancy rate of 22%, with more than 100 unfilled jobs.
However, Candi Jones, the city’s director of Human Resources, told Council Tuesday that the administration has made meaningful progress.
Jones said recruiters last year attended more than 300 community events — double the number they visited in 2024. The city, she said, has targeted specific groups for recruitment, including laid-off federal workers and people who were formerly incarcerated.
And the administration, Jones said, has worked to accelerate its hiring process, including by implementing a new internal applicant tracking system. The average time from application-to-hire is 100 days, Jones said, a span which the city aims to reduce to fewer than 90 days.
“We’re really leveraging the full totality of all of our partnerships in order to attract the future workforce,” she said.