North Carolina takes first steps to modernize state hiring practices in more than 60 years, starting with IT

State governments increasingly struggle to compete with the private sector for top talent, often due to longer hiring cycles, lower base salaries and less-flexible remote work policies.

To combat this, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein on Monday signed Session Law 2025-34, the first piece of legislation updating the state’s hiring practices since the State Personnel Act of 1965.

The state counts approximately 14,000 job vacancies across its agencies, with the hiring process taking an average of about six months. The state’s staffing shortages have created longer wait times for services, including at motor vehicle offices and correctional facilities. A March report by the Office of State Human Resources argued that decades-old hiring and personnel policies have made it harder for the state to recruit and retain employees in an increasingly competitive labor market.

The new law, which centralizes state recruiting functions through human resources office, aims to modernize its systems through technology upgrades, user-centered design and new product management practices. Angelica Quirarte, a director at the nonprofit Recoding America, which is advising the state, said the goal is to make North Carolina’s state government more competitive in attracting talent.

“Part of the process was bringing in what I consider are tech best practices, like agile thinking, design thinking, service design, into how we approach the work in implementing this new law,” Quirarte said in an interview. “What most HR teams lack are the product management practices that actually enable the better usage of the tools that they manage.”

Rather than treating HR modernization as a standalone policy effort, Quirarte said, Recoding America is pushing North Carolina to apply technology delivery methods more commonly associated with digital services teams, including user research with hiring managers and employees, running implementation sprints and redesigning HR processes based on feedback. Jennifer Pahlka, who co-founded Recoding America, has described the model as a roadmap for other states.

“We’re changing a system that is supported by many technology platforms as well as cultural constraints,” Quirarte said. “Our theory of change here is that we can use some of those delivery functions to actually more effectively implement this policy.”

Technology upgrades in North Carolina are already underway, with the state redesigning its HR platform, Cornerstone, using product management principles found in state IT organizations. By allowing applicants to upload their resumes online instead of manually completing lengthy applications, and simplifying job postings — a recommendation from the human resource office’s March report — Staci Meyer, the office’s director, said it will drastically help the state shorten hiring timelines.

“It takes about six months to hire somebody and in the private sector it’s really about 45 days,” Meyer, who joined the office in 2024, said in an interview. “So I would love to get that number down way, way, way down in 90 days.”

Meyer said the state, with help from the state’s technology department, is also building a centralized recruiting function that will integrate IT tools, like the hiring platform Workday, to help improve data-sharing across agencies. She said record keeping in North Carolina is notoriously siloed, resulting in fragmented IT systems that make it difficult to standardize hiring practices.

“Everybody was keeping data differently, departments were keeping their own data and it wasn’t being collected the same way,” she explained. “We have a ways to go, and the data part is such a critical piece of that in learning how we’re doing this, where we’re falling down and where we can do more.”

North Carolina’s modernization effort extends beyond software. Quirarte said Recoding America is also working with state officials to redesign performance management structures by introducing more frequent employee feedback and reducing reliance on annual evaluations. The state is also using website analytics to refine guidance and identify areas where managers need additional support. Initial enhancements to the performance management platform launched July 1, with additional features expected this fall.

In addition to IT modernizing and performance management updates, the law also opens new paths to enter state government, including creating internships and removing four-year degree requirements.

“We need to make sure that we’re building governments to be resilient and adaptive to those changing needs,” Quirarte said. “We have the right people in the right roles, really managing the talent that we have as an enterprise, and making better use of the skills that are already in house.”

Meyer echoed that sentiment. As a veteran state employee in her 10th administration, she said that compensation is not the only factor driving the potential next generation of state employees.

“When you look at our younger generations, they want to do work that’s meaningful — they want to not just be compensated for it, but they want to feel great about it,” Meyer said. “I think that is a true measure of success. When we see the retention rates go up, we’ll know we’re getting great people into state government.”