It looks like 25 bucks may have been standing in the way of Genesee County getting more job applicants, and county legislators and the Human Resources department have no desire to return there.
After a trial run of suspending the $25 fee for Civil Service exams since June 2022, HR Director Anita Cleveland reported a 31 percent increase in job candidates.
The experiment was due to a lackluster showing of candidates after a longtime belief that having no application fee lessened applicants’ resolve to show up and follow through on the process, county officials had said more than a year ago.
A $25 fee for all exams for police, sheriff, fire, probation and dispatch and $20 for all other competitive exams had been established in 2011 for that reason. During that prior discussion, Cleveland said that when people don’t pay for exams, “they don’t show up for exams either.”
But on the other hand, candidates at one point just stopped showing up anyway. At that time, she then proposed to temporarily waive the fees — something that several other counties had also been considering — to ramp up candidate interest and get more viable prospective job applicants.
The county has struggled to attract candidates for several departments over the last couple of years, including the sheriff’s office, which is growing with a new, larger jail facility in progress, and the mental health department.
The trial period was to run from June 1, to Dec. 31, 2022, and is current through all of 2023. The Ways & Means Committee agreed on Wednesday to push it onward through 2024 and 2025.
If the county Legislature adopts the measure during its Monday meeting, the county will lose an estimated $24,000 in revenue.
