2022-08-30 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

Home

Merit Appeals Board August 30, 2022 CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MR. LEOPOLDINO: Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: Other questions? MR. KUNZ: One comment, I guess. Waylen, knowing that you are applying these anecdotes because of staff shortages and changing things—and maybe it's too early to tell, but do you sense or see a trend that you're starting to get more applications for positions? I know I see the numbers, but I'm just trying to, like, it's a balance betweenI don't have enough staff, there's a lot of work, we're kind of shifting from the written exam and stuff. But do you sense that there's a little ground swell of people being more interested despite inflation and everything else and COVID and everything? MR. LEOPOLDINO: Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. And I'm going to go into it when I get to the activities report. But our recent shift in strategy to be more visible in the community, we had a very, very successful event. It's the County's Community Resource FairI cannot remember the date, but it was at the Prince Kuhio Plaza on a Friday and a Saturday—and the traffic was tremendous. I thought that was a great idea by our staff to have us out there. And the focus was just communicating with the public about what the County does. We're not there recruiting, we're just providing information. So, we had a bunch of our departments out there—water for example, how to detect a leak in your toilet—which drew a very impressive amount of people in comparison to theI promise, Charlie, I'm getting to your point—but I really want to blow this up. In comparison to the job fair we did at the Civic, it was very poor. No traffic, handful of people on the two days—Friday and Saturday. So, we really had, like, fish in a barrel kind of situation. Lot of discussion. We even had people come to our HR table there and have discussions about how to apply for a job just educating. How to apply for a job, initial probationary period, new probationary period just information. And it got people excited and interested. And, like we had suspected, a lot of people didn't know that we had all these vacancies, all these job openings. And so, they were excited. So, just by that event alone, I can tell you that—yes, we have sensed more interest in County government and working for the government. And so, that happened a few weeks ago and we've already, kind of, seen more applications come through and I'd like to think it's because of all of these activities we've been doing. Page 23