Mayor Lori Lightfoot has hired or promoted 230 employees in the eight weeks since she declared a freeze on hiring.

The added workers—including 171 full-time employees, whose annual salaries would total almost $14 million—are a drop in the bucket in a city with 33,700 municipal employees and an $838 million budget gap. But Lightfoot has touted penny-pinching measures of late, including $1 million in savings from merging the city’s departments of Innovation & Technology and Fleet & Facility Management.

Crain’s obtained information via a Freedom of Information request to the city’s Department of Human Resources for all new hires and promotions approved citywide since the freeze was instituted on Aug. 20. City documents provided information on hires through Oct. 9, and a city spokeswoman said 27 positions have been filled between Oct. 9 and 16.

Lightfoot’s budget director, Susie Park, says the hiring freeze has been effective.



“This time frame last year"—that is, during the same two-month period—"the city hired 1,000 people,” Park told Crain’s. “We brought on 200, significantly less. The city’s hiring process is kind of a bell curve. This time period is a huge hiring time frame and we have significantly slowed that down. To me, it was worth it.”



In a memo to city department heads on Aug. 20, just before Lightfoot gave her state of the city address, Park ordered an immediate, indefinite halt to all new hires. The only exceptions would be positions in which candidates already were in the interview process, or “priority positions that directly affect the health and safety of the city’s residents.” Even in those cases, Park and the city HR department required approval.



Park says more than two-thirds of the hires made were already in process when the freeze began and the rest were “critical” to city operations—positions like police evidence technicians, police FOIA officers, lieutenants, EMTs, paramedics and truck drivers who will handle snow at the city's airports.