The City of Long Beach is the second largest employer in Southern California, and is working to recruit quality talent for the public workforce of the future. To strengthen the municipal workforce and sustain the city’s quality of services, the Office of the City Manager partnered with FUSE executive fellow Sophia Style, who helped reform the city’s approach to recruitment, hiring, and retention processes.

Working with the civil service, human resources, and various city departments, Sofia conducted a comprehensive needs assessment to understand its human capital management practices, personnel requirements, and to identify gaps and best practices. Based on those insights, she made recommendations for improving the delivery of HR practices and programs, streamlining civil service recruitment and selection processes and experience, implementing innovative strategies to workforce policy, hiring, training, performance improvement and rewards, updating management practices, and increasing the quality of candidate pools. Sofia also introduced proposals to advance equity and diversity within city ranks. Ultimately, these changes will make the public workforce in Long Beach more innovative, results-oriented, and responsive to the needs of residents.