Government Hiring Challenges | How Pre-hire Tests Can Help
Government hiring challenges are real. But the biggest one isn’t the candidate pool or the timeline.
It’s that only a few HR teams are screening candidates properly.
Only 9 percent of state and local governments use skills assessments when hiring. The rest are making decisions based on resumes and interviews, and wondering why the wrong people keep getting through.
TL;DR
Local government hiring challenges are shifting. More people are applying, but most city and county HR teams are still screening with just resumes and interviews. That gap is where bad hires happen.
A 20-minute skills assessment changes that. Cognitive aptitude, data entry accuracy, and customer service tests give you something real to work with before anyone walks into an interview.
The Screening Process Hasn’t Kept Up
Here’s the number that tells the real story. That same MissionSquare report found that only 9 percent of state and local governments use skills assessments as part of their hiring process.
Nine percent.
The other 91 percent are still making decisions based almost entirely on resumes and interviews.
A resume tells you where someone’s been. An interview tells you how well they talk about it. Neither one tells you what they can actually do.
The Timeline Problem Isn’t Going Away Either
Local government time-to-hire runs 80 to 180 days. Private sector employers fill the same types of roles in 36 to 42 days.
You can’t change public sector posting requirements. You can’t cut the approval chain in half overnight.
But you can make better use of the candidates you do have. And that starts at the screening stage, not the interview stage.
A 2026 Work for America report put it directly: applicant volume is up, but hiring systems aren’t converting that interest into the right hires. The bottleneck has moved from sourcing to selection.
What Bad Hires Actually Cost in Local Government
According to SHRM, the average cost per hire across industries is $4,700.
For local government, that number climbs fast. Constrained training budgets, longer onboarding curves, and limited HR capacity mean a bad hire in an admin or clerical role costs significantly more than the initial recruiting spend.
And the downstream damage is real.
A billing clerk who can’t reconcile accurately. A payroll processor who misses filing deadlines. A data entry hire who works slowly and makes errors. These aren’t abstract risks. They show up in public records, vendor payments, and employee paychecks.
The Roles Worth Testing and What to Use
For most city and county admin positions, a short assessment takes 20 minutes and tells you more than a 45-minute interview ever will.
Cognitive aptitude: Can this person process information, follow instructions, and handle detail work without constant supervision?
Data entry accuracy: How fast are they, and how clean is the work? You’ll know before they touch a single record.
Grammar and writing: For any role that involves reports, intake forms, or public-facing communication, this one separates strong candidates from weak ones quickly.
Customer service aptitude: For roles with public interaction, a behavioral assessment tells you how someone handles pressure and difficult situations before you’ve made a commitment.
Browse the full test library at employtest.com/tests.
Volume Hiring Makes This More Important, Not Less
More applicants means more decisions to make, often with the same small HR team and the same compressed timeline.
A skills screen gives every candidate the same 20-minute test. You get a ranked, objective view of your pool before a single interview is scheduled.
That’s not a longer process. It’s a smarter one.
Ninety-one percent of local governments haven’t tried it yet. That’s the gap worth closing.
Start with one role. See how pre-employment testing works for local government positions.