It’s been about six months since Gov. Josh Green put out an executive order to speed up the hiring of former federal workers hit by budget cuts for state jobs.
The program received about 6,000 applications and hired about 140 people. About a third of those who applied worked for the federal government.
It takes about two weeks to be hired through Operation Hire Hawaiʻi. The usual process can take months.
But Department of Human Resources Development Director Brenna Hashimoto said the initiative puts a higher burden on individual departments that have to screen candidates. Usually, job applicants are first screened by her department.
She explained that in Operation Hire Hawaiʻi, the applications go straight to the individual departments.
"It also shifts the burden for doing a lot of the screening work and a lot of the HR work to the departments. So we're finding they're using it selectively when it's a critical job to fill or they have a lot of vacancies and they want to try to use Operation Hire Hawaiʻi," she said.
"They don't use it for everything. We still have about 500 recruitments that are posted on our regular recruitment site that we manage in the traditional method."
The Department of the Attorney General and the Department of Human Services Development hired the most people through the program. Operation Hire Hawaiʻi is expected to continue through the year.
