2025-09-26 Merit Appeal Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board September 26, 2025 the realm of your responsibility. It doesn’t need the mayor’s approval, you can go with it as far as you want to recruit for Water Treatment Plant Operators or Civil Engineers that are so difficult to recruit for. MS. TOKIHIRO: And so, for those positions we recruit in professional journals—so including wastewater, solid waste, and engineering professional journals and things of that nature. We did a trial of both Zip Recruiter to see—to take it to that worldwide audience to see what kind of response we got from that. And we’ve been looking at a couple of different companies to expand those efforts as well—looking at Indeed—different ways to get our advertisements out in that way. So, those things have all happened. We—it’s not that we’re not making those efforts. CHR. CABANAS: Mm-hmm. I mean— MS. BOND: But on—at—excuse me. CHR. CABANAS: Go ahead, Suzi. MS. BOND: But on the local level, there’s the—every evening, at some point on the local stations, I see ads for Maui’s recruitment, I see ads for Kauaʻi, I see ads for Oʻahu—but I never see one for the Big Island. CHR. CABANAS: Mm-hmm. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, and I—Michelle was reaching out to KITV because we were talking about even that highlighting the jobs that come on in the morning news, right. And so, she had reached out to them to get the information. So, I’ll follow-up with her on that. MS. BOND: These are paid ads? MS. TOKIHIRO: Correct. They are and they’re quite expensive—but we have a budget. And so, I want to be making those efforts, but I believe advertising or highlighting one job on the morning news—I believe it was about $500.00, but they do post it on their website as well. So, I think that there’s good opportunities there and good value. CHR. CABANAS: Because we have done, when I was there—we had—I’ll give you the name—it was Bruce Nakamura at KGMB. We ran certain banner-type of recruitments, especially for police. Now, each island is recruiting for police officer recruits but we—as Suzi said, we haven’t seen anything for our island—and we shouldn’t be quiet about it. We should be more proactive about it—that’s what concerns me. That’s why I keep on bringing it up because when you mentioned a Hiring Campaign, I was feeling very good about it. But it’s like it’s fizzled, and it doesn’t take one year to get a campaign going. Page 8