AUSTIN (KXAN) — Every Summer the City of Austin relies on hundreds of lifeguards to watch over city pools.
The hiring process begins in November and to successfully run all 34 pools the city needs about 860 lifeguards.
In 2022, over 1,000 people applied to be lifeguards, PARD hired about 422, and over 200 lifeguards returned from earlier seasons, but some qualified candidates were turned away according to a recent report.
The report states: “We found that 95% of lifeguard applicants received notices that they were not selected for the position. These notices were not usually an accurate reflection of the applicant’s status. For example, 93% of the 422 lifeguards eventually hired by PARD received an inaccurate notice of non-selection.”
There is a process that potential candidates must go through which includes a background check, a lifeguard certification course and additional paperwork for employment.
Candidates apply on the city job portal, eCareer, and once their application is received, they automatically receive a conditional offer and instructions for the next steps.
When someone applies through the City job portal, PARD employees download the application and manually enter the applicant’s information into PARD’s internal system for tracking temporary employees, called TOPS.
The report states: “Three different systems are used to collect applicant and employee data: the City job portal (eCareer), PARD’s internal system to manage temporary employees (TOPS), and the City’s payroll system (Banner). Each system collects different data at different points in the hiring and onboarding process and do not interact with each other automatically.”
The report found that some applicants’ data was missing in some of these portals. There were 52 applicants who submitted an application to eCareers but it was never entered into the TOPS system and they never received the conditional offer of employment or next-step instructions. These 52 candidates were never hired.
The report stated the department could not be certain why these candidates were not hired, but they may not have received follow-up communication, they could have been disqualified by a PARD employee before entering them into TOPS, or they were not entered due to manual data entry errors.
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