Hiring reform.

Confronted with high turnover and complaints about replacement staff, the leaders of a large child welfare program asked us to reform the way they hired front-line staff. We organized work groups with personnel, operations and IT staff, job-competency experts and advertising agency creative leaders — more than 40 people in all. These teams implemented competency-based hiring, moved candidate sourcing onto the web, created an innovative marketing campaign and redesigned personnel processing. The changes more than doubled applicants, attracted people far more suited to this difficult work, and increased morale throughout the agency. The project won a citywide award for technical excellence and was featured in a New York Times article.

Staffing model.

The nation’s largest Food Stamps program — serving more than 1.5 million people — had seen its work change significantly over the years with introduction of a “paperless office” system, new operations models and other operational reforms. Recent hiring constraints left the agency short-staffed, and outdated estimating tools left it unprepared to convince budget officials of its hiring needs. IMPLEXpartners built a staffing model grounded in a large field survey of the tasks completed by front-line workers. We combined the survey results with administrative data to determine the staff required for varying volumes of work, and we prepared the agency to update and manage the model. The model provided support for essential additional hiring and allowed the agency to estimate the impact of future operational changes on staffing levels.