25,000 job applications streamed into NYC government in the 24 hours after Mayor-Elect Mamdani won the General Election this month. Is government cool again?

Here’s what those applicants will find when they search for jobs: Blacksmith’s Helper, Beautician, Bookbinder’s Seamstress, Carriage Upholsterer, Director of Puppetry, Fitness Instructor, Hostler, Shoemaker, Space Analyst.

Notice anything missing? Among New York City’s 3,000+ job titles, not one is recognizable to modern technologists. No “Data Scientist.” No “software engineer.” No “web designer.” No “UX designer.” No “product manager.” What are the odds those 25,000 people applied for the correct role?

Mamdani inspired them with free childcare, affordable housing, a city that works for working people. Bold promises that need bold execution and a fully staffed workforce.

Here’s the problem: New York City is about to crush that momentum.

When Your Resume Doesn’t Speak Government

When I was a data scientist in Baltimore, I saw a job posting for NYC government that would have been an objective promotion — a data science management role within the Mayor’s Office. On paper, it was perfect: larger span of control, high-impact work, exactly what I was looking for in my next step.

But I would have had to take a ~10% pay cut to move to one of the most expensive cities in America. So I didn’t apply. I can’t be the only person who’s made that calculation — who looked at an opportunity to do meaningful work and saw the city simply did not compete.

That’s the choice New York is forcing on talented people: take a pay cut and hinder your career, or stay where you are.

New York City trails Baltimore and Philadelphia in compensation for technical roles. The Social Science Data Manager starts at $73k and goes up to… $293,038. Good luck figuring that out.

And it’s impossible to tell what most jobs actually do. “Computer Specialist (Operations)”? “Research Projects Coordinator”? Even people who understand government can’t decode these 3,299 job classifications.

The Classification Crisis

New York City isn’t alone. When Cherie and I were exploring class and comp, HR Directors in Virginia, California, and New York told us, “by the time we post a job we’ve already lost.”

The city offers exams for three kinds of “Computer Associates,” covering everything from allocating desktop computers to coding. What does a Computer Associate actually do? According to the official job notice: “telecommunications hardware” and “mainframe computer operations.” Reagan-era language for 2025 jobs.

Jennifer Pahlka

tells the story of Marina Nitze trying to hire a web designer at the VA in 2014. When HR sent over the list of qualified candidates, not a single actual web designer was on it. Instead: people with Microsoft and Cisco certifications for network administration. The classification system had borrowed criteria from the wrong tech job entirely.

HR teams know this is broken. As Pahlka writes, “almost all of the capacity of HR professionals in NY city and state government is eaten up by a game they must play if they want even a shot at hiring someone fit for the job.”

This is the infrastructure Mamdani inherited.

Applying is The Biggest Hurdle

But outdated job titles are just the beginning. The entire hiring process is designed to fail.

Say you’re one of those 25,000 applicants. You’ve figured out which of the 3,299 job titles might—might!—match what you want to do. Now you wait for an exam that’s offered once a year. Miss it? You’ll have to wait until next year.

When the exam finally comes around, you pay $85 out of pocket. Then you wait. A recent report from NYC Comptroller Brad Lander found applicants wait an average of 290 days—nearly ten months—just to get a score back.

Once you learn your score, you’ll only get a phone call, if you were one of the top three scorers (the “Rule of Three”). By that time many candidates have already forgotten what position you applied for—Gordon and Paley write that “hiring managers can take weeks continuing one by one down the list until they find an interested candidate.”

So what does this mean for Mamdani? He takes office January 1st, 2026 and arrives to at least 25,000 enthusiastic applicants. Given the current system he’s probably not going to be hiring until late 2026 at best, but it’s more likely to take until 2027. How many of his goals will he be able to reach with the current 13,000 vacant positions—an 11% vacancy rate, more than double pre-pandemic levels? The Department of Finance alone has 265 vacancies while revenue that’s already owed sits uncollected.

What Actually Works

This doesn’t have to be the reality. Holly is working with governments across the country that are already making changes.

Needless requirements are being removed. Baltimore Police Department dropped the driver’s license requirement for Police Cadets. In a city where most people grow up on public transit, requiring a license was screening out great candidates for no reason. It’s the kind of no-brainer change New York should be making everywhere.

Internships and apprenticeships are creating new pathways. 37% of government HR professionals now run internship or apprenticeship programs designed to bring in qualified candidates who’d otherwise be screened out by traditional requirements.

Modern job classifications are being created. Cities and counties are creating actual job titles for data scientists, UX designers, software engineers, and product managers. Job descriptions that recognize how work happens in 2025, not 1985.

The question is whether New York will do the same. And whether it can happen fast enough.

Where Tech Fits In (and where it doesn’t)

No software platform can fix a civil service law written in 1883.

Rebecca Heywood

has a superb list of priorities for City Hall and Albany that would actually welcome those 25,000 applicants with the care they deserve.

When we first engaged with the City of Long Beach, CA, they had some of the slowest hiring in the country and a quarter of jobs sat vacant due to 9-month delays. The City effectively had two rival HR departments, of which one could only operate in public meetings.

Long Beach successfully merged the departments by ballot referendum in 2025, enabling them to enact the tech-forward operations improvements that the City’s 6,600 jobs desperately needed.

What we saw with Long Beach is that, even with policy changes, someone still has to do the work: rewrite 3,299 job descriptions, benchmark compensation across cities, assess which minimum qualifications still make sense. That’s where technology helps.

Which job descriptions haven’t been updated since 2005? Which positions trail the market by 30%? Which requirements are screening out qualified candidates for no reason?

At Holly, we help cities answer these questions—AI-assisted benchmarking shows where compensation is out of step with peers, classification tools make it feasible to modernize thousands of job specs, skills-based hiring analysis identifies which requirements make sense and which are just screening people out.

Those 25,000 people are still waiting. The question is whether New York will let them in.

Brendan Hellweg is co-founder of Holly, a platform for classification and compensation management used by local governments representing 10m people. Before founding Holly, he served Baltimore city government, where he grew the Baltimore Health Corps to 300 people.