By admin 
Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a new hiring guide for California state employees this week in hopes of speeding up the process.
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Before the new guide, California Government Operations Agency Secretary Nick Maduros said, departments interpreted the hiring process differently resulting in a longer timeline. That’s because some departments were strict about how they examined minimum requirements and used a score-based system.
Three departments — GovOps, California Department of Human Resources and the California State Personnel Board — were brought together to establish the guide.
However, the new guide doesn’t impose any new mandates for departments to follow. State agencies could continue hiring candidates as they were — given they adhere to the law. Even though adoption of the new guide isn’t required, Maduros said he anticipates most agencies will use it.
Hiring managers would spend more than 23 hours per job posting to make sure each candidate has the minimum requirements before selecting candidates to interview. The new guide still requires candidates to meet minimum requirements but only screens promising candidates. When evaluating every candidate’s minimum qualifications, Maduros said, some hiring managers would require essays or extra tasks to reduce the candidate pool so it would take less time to sort.
During the early recruitment stages, the new guide encourages hiring managers to place candidates into three categories. One to interview, another to possibly interview and a third to reject. Candidates who are placed in the “no” category are notified of their rejection earlier on.
“Now what they do is look through the applications and basically decide who it is they want to interview based on the criteria that they set at the beginning, which is more in line with what the private sector does,” Maduros said.
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The interview process doesn’t use a scoring system, according to the new guide, which recommends hiring managers rank potential candidates based on best fit.
California’s new hiring guide also considers existing relationships between candidates and hiring managers to be a merit-based factor. Those known from existing relationships as high performers may get a boost while those with reputations as low performers could be adversely affected.
“While this knowledge might be an advantage for the candidate, the advantage is not unfair,” the new guide states.
California’s desire to speed up the hiring process is to attract top talent and improve efficiency, potentially reducing more than 538,600 hours of related staff time.
“The best talent is not going to sit around and wait for months for us to call them back and tell them that we’d like for them to join us with the state,” Maduros said. “They’ve got other job opportunities.”
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This story was originally published July 31, 2026 at 11:42 AM.