More than 1 780 posts have been filled as part of the City of Cape Town’s drive to replace some of the 10 000 staff lost during the ”rigorous and undirected” staff restructuring of the past seven years.
A further 1 000 posts are ”being filled”, the Cape Times reported on its website on Wednesday.
The city received 500 applications within 24 hours of advertising 202 posts for project managers and civil engineers last week.
”The filling of critical vacancies translates into service delivery,” David Beretti, executive director of corporate services, told the corporate services portfolio committee.
The posts are to be filled by July so that the city’s new budget may be spent without delay.
Beretti painted a picture of the ”ineffective and inefficient” staff structure produced by the merging of the seven administrations into the unicity and compounded by the African National Congress administration’s restructuring.
The organisation was ”top-heavy”, with too many senior managers, functions duplicated, an imbalance in resources and no organogram in place.
The acting director of strategic human resources, Justine Quince, said the city was constrained by national government regulations that capped staff costs at 28% of the city’s revenue.
The realignment of staff had come at a ”big cost” as skills had been lost.
”The external market has changed and the city has lost its competitive edge.”
Many staff had been appointed without CVs and the city had no record of their interviews or assessments, Quince said. — Sapa