Pennsylvania turns to AI to speed up hiring process

By Kaitlyn Levinson

By the end of this year, Pennsylvania wants to be filling vacant state jobs within 50 days. To get there, the state’s Office of Administration has turned to data analytics and innovative tech like generative artificial intelligence. 

The 50-day goal builds upon the state’s previous progress to trim hiring times since Gov. Josh Shapiro took office in January 2023. As of this March, the average time to fill job vacancies has declined 35%, from 90 days to 58 days.

It can be hard for the public sector to compete for job candidates with the private sector, where the hiring process can happen three times faster than in government. Today, closing the hiring gap has become crucial for state governments, with workforce shortages continuing to burden existing workflows and service delivery.

Over the last two years, the state’s Office of Administration has explored various strategies to streamline the hiring process. Among them: leveraging generative AI to assist hiring staff with evaluating job postings. 

Over the past year, human resources staffers have experimented with leveraging generative AI to help them navigate thousands of job classifications and descriptions when they need to develop a new position, said Harrison MacRae, director of emerging technologies for Pennsylvania.  

The tech helped align appropriate job classifications with position descriptions, streamlining the process to ensure descriptions were accurate and up-to-date to the current role, he said. 

Staff also reported leveraging generative AI to assist with drafting interview questions for candidates and summarizing interview notes to expedite the interview and hiring process.

MacRae said Pennsylvania staff have been leveraging ChatGPT Enterprises under a pilot program that concluded in March. A report released the same month found that 85% of staff participants reported having a “somewhat positive” or “very positive” experience with the generative AI. 

The pilot demonstrated that generative AI can be valuable for employees, and “AI is not going away at the moment,” MacRae said. 

In California, for instance, the city of Long Beach recently launched a pilot program to explore AI’s potential to help draft descriptions for job vacancies. And Michigan is leveraging AI to improve its statewide job portal’s ability to match candidates with appropriate positions. 

The Pennsylvania office also leverages an applicant tracking system and dashboards for expediting hiring across state agencies. 

“The data is helping us to identify where there are some trouble areas or opportunities for improvement (in hiring), and then our HR team is partnering with agency leadership to address it,” said Miranda Martin, director of talent management in the state’s Office of Administration.  

Data shows, for instance, that the interview stage alone can take up to 30 days, she explained. Those insights could help officials determine that hiring managers may need more robust training for interviews to reduce further complications or delays in the process. 

The dashboard also includes a scheduling tool that allows users to send out automatic emails when they identify a candidate for an interview. Users can set interview time and date parameters with the tool to be included in emails. Martin said that that function helps streamline the process and cut down time that would have otherwise been used to try to contact candidates by phone and schedule interviews. 

Ultimately, tech and data will continue to play a crucial role in innovating the hiring process, Martin said. 

“We’re going to continue to set our folks up for success and make sure they have access to the tools that can be most helpful to them,” MacRae said.