An Alternative to Traditional Minimum Qualifications in a Civil Service Exam

Presented by: Tina Pruett

In 2011 President Obama proposed the American Jobs Act, which called for various reforms and employment initiatives. One aspect of the proposed legislation was aimed at helping long term unemployed and youth find jobs.

At the same time, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee launched the Jobs+ program, a summer youth employment initiative partnering with private industry employers and non-profit organizations working with at-risk youth.

Department of Human Resources (DHR) Director Micki Callahan, tasked DHR staff with developing a program aimed at helping long term unemployed adults transition to new careers, as well as provide opportunities for youth and graduating students with little to no work experience.

A project team was formed. Under the direction of Recruitment & Assessment Services Director, John Kraus.

The project team consisted of: ◦ Jennifer Landgren, Lead Test Developer ◦ William Miles, Senior Recruitment & Assessment

Analyst ◦ Tina Pruett, Senior Recruitment & Assessment

Analyst ◦ Christina Penland, Senior Classification Analyst

WRIPAC Roundtable inquiries Internet research & Literature Review Review of “entry level” classifications in the

City to determine classifications appropriate for this project

As a pilot program, we identified 2 clerical classifications to include

Applicants were required to submit an online application to be considered for the pilot. They had to self-certify that they did not have a year or more of clerical experience, and an analyst reviewed their applications to confirm

Applicants who were eligible to participate were contacted to schedule to take the computer based Qualifying Clerical Exam (QCE)

1,635 people applied to participate in this process.

816 were rejected because they had a year or more of clerical experience. Of the remaining 819 applicants, 564 came in and took the exam, 255 were no-shows.

Five computers were dedicated to administering the qualifying exam, a total of 181 sessions were offered.

353 applicants (62.6%) passed the qualifying exam, while 211 (37.4%) failed.

Developed with a mix of new items and retired items from our standardized clerical exam.

The exam contained 40 items with a one hour time limit, which is half the number of items and length of the standardized clerical exam.

3,296 unique applicants applied to the City-wide recruitments for the clerical series (1402, 1404, & 1406)

A passing QCE score could substitute for the MQs for the 1402 & 1404 classifications

Of the 353 applicants who passed the QCE, 65.4% (231) took the city-wide clerical exam.

98.3% of the participants who took the Qualifying Clerical Exam (QCE) passed our regular Clerical Exam. (Only 4 failed out of 231).

This is a smaller failure rate than the 1404 (12%), 1404 (11%) and 1406 (9.7%) populations.

This essentially means that candidates with no clerical experience, who were able to pass the QCE, tended to do better overall than candidates who do have clerical experience.

As expected, we did find that QCE scores correlated with candidates’ 1402/1404/1406 scores (.57).

The pilot was also successful in terms of the diversity of the pool. About 83% of the population included protected class members (of those who declared their ethnicity) .

Somewhat surprising is the fact that about 1/3 of the QCE candidates never bothered to appear for the regular clerical exams, despite submitting the application.

Develop a series of questionnaires to distribute to supervisors who hire from the 2 eligible lists created as part of this program to track job performance

Survey the applicants that passed the CQE but did not show up for the clerical testing

Identify the next suitable series/job family to develop another qualifying exam