Despite recruitment ads like this, the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction is still struggling with a 26% job vacancy rate. (Photo: https://www.dac.nc.gov/)
A fifth of North Carolina’s total state government jobs currently sit vacant. Many others will likely turn over within the next year.
The state’s new director of human resources, Staci Meyer, told lawmakers last week that to fix those statistics, North Carolina needed to overhaul its HR system.
North Carolina’s state job vacancy rate currently sits at 20%. The turnover rate is 12%, but is significantly higher within an employee’s first year — 31%. Key sectors have even higher vacancy rates: 33% for health care, and 26% for corrections.
And the average time to fill one position, according to Meyer? 182 days.
“We want people moving here from everywhere,” she said last week. “We want to tell a different story about working for North Carolina.”
A directory of more than 1,000 state job postings analyzed by NC Newsline found that a majority of the state’s openings are within three departments: the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Adult Correction.
The vast majority of those postings are for permanent, full-time positions (976).
Among the sectors with the most openings: transportation (212), human services (176), maintenance (113) and mental health (78).
Openings are most plentiful where state government is centralized — in Wake County (303 openings). But there are dozens of openings across every single one of North Carolina’s 100 counties — including 80 in western Buncombe County, 101 in Granville County and 83 in Wayne County.
Of the 1,000+ jobs posted as of mid-March, 715 of them have an estimated annual salary of $60,000 or above; 192 pay more than $100,000.
Almost all of the vacancies are on location or primarily in-person. Just 92 of the openings are designated as “flexible/hybrid”; five are remote-only.
As the Trump administration cuts wide swaths of the bureaucracy, states are stepping up recruiting efforts to attract ex-federal workers. Multiple states have launched initiatives to fast-track former federal workers into state government — though hurdles, including skill sets and salary mismatches, remain.
NC Newsline’s Clayton Henkel contributed reporting.