City leaders in Oakland were outraged as a new staffing report from Oakland\u2019s Human Relations Department released this week showed roughly 1,000 city jobs were vacant.<\/p>\n
The new report shows 839 vacant city positions, and a 19.69% vacancy rate citywide.<\/p>\n
Part of the reason? The two city departments with the highest vacancy rates are the Department of Workplace and Employment and the HR Department.<\/p>\n
Other large, critical departments with high vacancy rates include the city\u2019s Planning and Building Department and the Department of Transportation.<\/p>\n
The Department of Transportation alone had 119 vacant positions.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cI think this is frankly disgraceful, I don\u2019t even have concrete questions because this was shocking to me, that the numbers increased since last year, that it\u2019s been the highest since the pandemic,\u201d Oakland Councilwoman Janani Ramachandran said. \u201cThere are so many positions, front line, service delivery positions, street sweepers, engineers, things that effect everyday public life that a qualified Oakland residents want to have as jobs and they\u2019re not even on the website.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOne announcement can cover multiple jobs, so just because you see 20, that could fill 68 jobs,\u201d Oakland\u2019s HR Manager Amber Lyttle said.<\/p>\n
Oakland\u2019s HR Director Mary Hao and her team explained that roughly half the vacant positions are unfilled because the specific departments have been slow to submit the proper paperwork and hire.<\/p>\n
\u201c51% of those positions, or 434 of them, actually have no activity. We\u2019re not able to act on them because there\u2019s no requisition or they\u2019re on hold by the department for various reasons,\u201d Hao said.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s cut through the niceties,\u201d Oakland Councilman Zac Unger said. \u201cIf it\u2019s the department, then let\u2019s figure out the department, if it\u2019s HR, if it\u2019s budget finance. I still can\u2019t tell where the bottle neck is and that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to figure out for years.\u201d<\/p>\n
City Administrator Justin Johnson added another layer to the situation, saying department heads are often weighing filling positions but also keeping to a tight budget.<\/p>\n
Oakland isn\u2019t the only city struggling with vacancies.<\/p>\n
City leaders said Hayward and Richmond struggle with high vacancy rates as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"City leaders in Oakland were outraged as a new staffing report from Oakland\u2019s Human Relations Department released this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-238715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}