Eric Adams wants to use AI to make city hiring faster

The pace of hiring in New York City government is too slow, Mayor Eric Adams said on Monday. During a campaign stop, a woman at a Brooklyn senior center told the mayor her grandson is having trouble finding work in his field. Adams encouraged the woman’s grandson to look to the public sector. “We have 11,000 jobs in city work,” he said. “If your grandson is looking for a job, I have jobs for him to get.” (According to data compiled by the New York City comptroller’s office, there were actually nearly 18,000 vacancies in full-time positions across the city as of the end of August.)

City & State recently reported that despite significant vacancy rates, it can take months for the city to hire new employees. As he left the senior center Monday, Adams agreed with complaints that the pace is lethargic. “It’s a process, I hate the process. We’re trying to shorten that process,” he said. “It takes too long to hire people.”

Adams, who faces flagging hopes of reelection in November, said that one of the approaches they’re looking at to shorten the hiring timeline – a process also mired in Byzantine civil service rules – is standardizing applications across city agencies and using automation and artificial intelligence in the hiring process. “I charge my (chief technology officer) to go in and say, ‘This takes too long.’ It’s too bureaucratic and we need to be using technology and AI to shorten it by 75%,” Adams said. “It takes too long and I’m fighting like all hell to change it. But that bureaucracy in government is real." AI hiring tools have infiltrated the private sector – for both employer and prospective employee – but it’s not limited to the private sector. As City & State Pennsylvania reported in May, the Keystone state has turned to generative AI tools to shorten its own public sector hiring timeline.

City Hall did not confirm whether those efforts are already underway – or whether AI and automation are already used in city hiring in any way. 

Adams didn’t, however, respond directly to complaints City & State reported on that one of the root causes of the city’s slow pace of hiring is approval holdups in the Office of Management and Budget. When asked if the office gets in the way too much, Adams told City & State, “OMB is not the mayor, I’m the mayor.”