Days after he won the mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani unveiled a job portal so his team could hire for his incoming administration with an eye on transforming government.
“For too long in city government it’s been more to do with who you know than what you do, and we want to turn that on its head,” he said in a television interview. “We want it to actually be about the work.”
Within a week, 50,000 people had submitted their resumes, his team said, with 30,000 more applying in the following two weeks. Mamdani boasted that his transition team had received applications from nearly every ZIP code in New York City.
But three months after launching the portal and more than a month after Mamdani was sworn in as mayor, just 31 people who applied through it have been hired by the new administration to work inside of City Hall, according to mayoral spokesperson Dora Pekec.
That amounts to just under 21% of the administration’s 149 new hires so far — and to an overall success rate of 0.039% for the portal’s 80,000 applicants. (Pekec said that the total number of applicants hadn’t increased substantially since the end of November.)
While there are thousands of jobs open for New Yorkers who want to work for the city in various roles, many fewer are hired through City Hall to work in the administration.
One of the few successful job-seekers on the portal included new Department of Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn, who told The New York Times that he applied for his gig through it. Flynn, however, was also selected for the transition team, and had more than a decade of prior experience at the DOT.
Pekec did not answer questions about who controls the portal now that the transition is over or whether its applicants are being shared with city departments.
The new mayor has brought back many officials who worked under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, including Dean Fuleihan who returned as first deputy mayor and former commissioner Steve Banks as corporation counsel.
He’s also kept many high-level employees who worked under former Mayor Eric Adams, including the city’s sheriff, Anthony Miranda, the acting sanitation commissioner Javier Lojan, and Michael Garner, the city’s chief diversity officer.
Looking Far and Wide?
Mayor Mamdani’s goal of demystifying city government — and bringing a fresh perspective and team to City Hall — helped him win an historic election last year. But that goal is in real tension with the city’s hiring processes.
New York City’s government employs more than 300,000 people in hundreds of roles, from teacher to firefighter to gardener.
Many employees working in agencies outside of City Hall are hired through civil service exams. There are currently thousands of open civil service gigs at more than 100 city agencies who won’t be hired through the portal. That hiring process often takes months, if not longer, to onboard candidates.
Applicants who submitted their resumes through the portal — and who declined to use their names for fear of retribution — told THE CITY they hadn’t heard much after sending in their applications.
“I’ve never received any call back or anything,” one longtime government staffer who submitted their resume through the portal told THE CITY, calling the process “total BS.”
Others said they’d heard of a “friends and family” portal for people working on the transition. An administration spokesperson said transition members had recommended their own applicants, but said there had not been a separate portal for them.
There were other doorways to having a resume seen by the administration.
The Progressive Talent Pipeline, a national organization launched in 2018 to push progressives into federal government jobs, set up its own portal to recommend candidates to the Mamdani administration even before he’d won the general election in November.
Executive Director Becca Watts said in an email that it had done so because so many people expressed interest in working for the Mamdani administration.
The group began working on a way to recommend potential employees – particularly those who left the federal government in 2025 as newly elected President Donald Trump declared war on much of the federal workforce – in September or October, she said. When Mamdani announced his own portal, they connected with his transition team.
“This isn’t an alternative or priority portal — and we encourage people to submit to the main portal as well,” she told THE CITY, noting that they hadn’t been asked by the transition team to launch it.
“Since we’ve done this as a project to encourage public service since 2018 in DC, relative to Congress and the Biden transition, it was a natural fit to orient towards New York with such a surge in need/interest there.”
Joe Calvello, another spokesperson for Mamdani, said he found three of his six deputy press secretaries through the portal, although some were already working at city agencies.
“We made sure to look far and wide at the diverse backgrounds of people who wanted to work for this administration,” he told THE CITY.
Calvello, a former aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders, said he also applied through the portal as soon as it went up, eager to be part of the next mayor’s plan for New York City. But he acknowledged that may not be how he was hired.
Mamdani reportedly showed up at a bar in Greenpoint in late December to personally pitch Calvello to join his administration, according to POLITICO.
