2010-09-21 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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bare bones to help the administration reduce its expenditures. They advertise in the West Hawaii Today and the Hawaii Tribune Herald, and those ads are kept very small. They also have the County jobs website, and ads are also on the UH Hilo's jobs website and the Department of Labor's HireNet Hawai`i.com website, which are free. In addition, they go out into the community and do recruitment talks and attend job fairs encouraging the public to apply for various open recruitments. The division also administers exams. Written exams are about 38% overall. They also administer T &Es, which are training and experience evaluations, where they assign a score to the applicant based on the applicant's education and experience. That's about 54% overall. Once they establish eligible lists, the lists are good for a year; and they refer names to the hiring departments at their request. The departments can ask for a certain number of names or they can ask for all the names. Then the Recruitment and Examination does the referral, which initiates the hiring department to conduct their selection and interview process. The table which shows numbers from 2005 to present are for open competitive recruitments. They are down to 10 open competitive recruitments for this fiscal year, which started on July 1. Applications peaked in fiscal year 2008 -2009, but the applications really are steady for the number of recruitments that they are doing. They are getting a large number of filings especially for the entry level jobs like Laborer/Park Caretaker, which is almost a thousand. Fire Fighter Recruit was over 900. The number of persons hired has dramatically decreased due to budgetary concerns. The County doesn't have a hiring freeze, but it does have hiring restrictions. They are still doing a number of recruitments, as needed, which have been approved by the administration. Over the years, the division has done things to expedite the filling of vacancies. The first thing they did in 2002 was delegate the internal recruitments to the departments, so the departments do the postings, and they issue and receive the applications. The larger departments that have HR professional specialists have been trained to screen applications. That was done in 2007. In 2008, the screening of the applications was delegated to the HR professional specialists. Therefore, not only do they screen for internal recruitments, but they also screen applications for the meeting of MQs for other personnel movements such as transfers, demotions, intergovernmental movements, and reallocations. Ms. Cabanas does random audits just to make 3