2025-03-13 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board March 13, 2025 We also looked at minimum qualifications for our engineers —for our Engineer I level position, we changed the requirement so that we can actually be recruiting engineers when they're in their senior year. So, instead of having the requirement that they have to have their engineering degree upon application, we say that they have to have completedI believe it's 105 credit hours in an engineering program at the time of application, and at the time of hire they would have had to completed their degree. So, again, just different strategies to try and get people be able to recruit sooner. We also adopted an Engineer Salary Schedule. All of the jurisdictions have identified a different salary schedule —we're all a little bit different. Ours followed the state salary schedule because they would be our biggest competition here on island, but that was to eliminate the shortage differential that they had been receiving and then to make our wages more competitive, even with the federal government. So, engineers are always —engineers and architects are always in that category. But I'll be honest and tell you that in the last couple of years, even positions like Account Clerk have become very difficult to fill. So, it's the market as far as job seekers and the openings that we have —we have openings now that were never an issue in the past. And so, it's definitely a different time. MR. THOMAS: I just wonder if you make a special point of reaching out to these potentially displaced federal workers, who can be anywhere —anywhere in the world for that matter. MS. TOKIHIRO: Right. Yeah, I agree. And so, that's where as —we don't necessarily reach out, specifically, to people. We would have to find ways to advertise the openings and make sure that we're getting the word out there. CHR. CABANAS: Any questions? Okay, I have a few. So, even for the Equal Opportunity/ADA Division, the sentence there is very generic. So, is she receiving a lot of inquiries, complaints, reasonable accommodation requests? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. I mean, I don't know that it'sI mean, it's (inaudible). It comes in flows. I mean, comes ebbs and flows as far as the nature of the request. But, yes, it's a variety ofI wouldn't say necessarily "complaints" but I mean, not a lot of complaints but there are a lot of inquiries and some requests related to the reasonable accommodations. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. I noticed that for the Radio Hiring Campaign, it's pending. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah— CHR. CABANAS: Your timeline was January. This is March. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. Iunfortunately, the mayor wanted to do the radio advertising. And so, we came up with a general script, basically, just —because it was our first campaign as far as providing information about the Jobs Website and giving general information. And we provided Page 20