CASE STUDIES / CITY OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
CASE STUDY · LOCAL GOVERNMENT · PUBLIC SECTOR HR & OD
We Finished In 2024. The City’s Numbers Were Still Improving In 2026.
City of Richmond, Virginia
Municipal government
Richmond, Virginia
Virginia’s capital employs roughly 4,000 people across every function a city runs. We were engaged to assess how its human resources department was organized, and engaged again to benchmark roughly 500 of its classified positions against neighboring localities. The City’s own published workforce reporting has moved in one direction every year since.
SECTOR
Local government · council and mayor form
PROFILE
Virginia’s capital city, roughly 4,000 municipal employees, more than 226,000 residents
ENGAGEMENT
2 engagements, 2022–2024
SERVICES
HR organizational assessment · organizational design · job architecture · compensation and classification · market benchmarking
IN BRIEF
Reform In Government Is Easy To Start And Difficult To Keep.
Richmond had commissioned external reviews of this department before ours. The conditions those reviews described were still being documented by the City’s own auditor when we arrived.
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We designed for what happens after the consultant leaves, because in a municipal government the people who sponsored the work rarely stay to finish it.
A department-wide assessment returning a 91% response rate, delivered with a redesigned structure and rewritten job architecture.
A citywide study of roughly 500 classified positions across 8 analysis groups, benchmarked against four neighboring localities.
Four workforce measures in the City’s published reporting that continued improving for years after we completed.
THE CHALLENGE
A Capital City, Thousands Of Employees, And A Hiring Process Measured In Months.
Richmond delivers services across public works, public safety, libraries, parks, courts, social services and utilities. Every one of those depends on the ability to hire, classify and pay people correctly, and the City’s own auditor had documented an average vacancy taking well over two hundred days to fill.
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The administration wanted a clear read on how the human resources function was structured, staffed and credentialed before deciding what to change.
Public sector HR is a compliance function first.
Classifications are set in city code. Pay plans are adopted by ordinance. A recommendation that cannot survive a public meeting and a legal review is not a recommendation, it is a slide.
Sponsors change on political cycles.
Administrations turn over, senior leadership rotates, and priorities reset. Work built around a single champion tends to leave with them.
Reviews had been done before.
This department had been examined by outside parties in prior years. What the City needed was not another diagnosis but structures its own staff could operate without us.
Municipal reform fails in a predictable way. A study lands, a presentation is well received, and eighteen months later the organization looks the way it did before, because nothing in the recommendations changed what anyone actually does on a Monday.
We built the deliverables to be operated, not admired.
THE WORK
Assess The Function. Then Price The Workforce.
Two engagements across three years. The second existed because the first surfaced a gap the City had already suspected and had never had the capacity to close.
2022
THE ASSESSMENT
How the department was built, and what it needed instead.
A confidential department-wide survey returning a 91% response rate, alongside interviews spanning HR leadership, departing staff, the administration, budget and finance. We reviewed the City’s own prior audit commitments against what had actually been completed.
WHAT WE HANDED OVER
Sixteen recommendations, a redesigned department structure, eighteen rewritten job descriptions, a service level agreement carrying performance measures, and a professional certification framework.
2023
THE CITY-WIDE STUDY
Roughly 500 classified positions, priced against the market.
We benchmarked the City’s classified workforce against four neighboring Virginia localities, organizing the analysis into eight groups that followed the City’s own collective bargaining structure rather than a generic job family model.
WHY THE STRUCTURE MATTERED
A municipal pay plan is adopted by ordinance and negotiated by unit. Analysis organized any other way cannot be legislated without being rebuilt first.
2024
THE DELIVERY
A small number of roles were significantly behind.
Citywide, Richmond was competitive against its neighbors. Underneath that average, a handful of roles sat far below market while others sat comfortably above. Those were the roles at genuine recruitment and retention risk.
THE FINDING THAT MATTERED
A single citywide average would have reported a healthy position and hidden every role that needed attention. We reported by group, because that is where the decisions get made.
That last point is the one we would carry into any government engagement. An organization the size of a city is never uniformly ahead or behind the market. It is ahead in some places and materially behind in a small number of others, and those few are where the vacancies, the failed searches and the turnover concentrate. Reporting a citywide average is accurate and close to useless.
How We Work Inside A Municipality.
Public sector engagements fail for structural reasons more often than analytical ones. Four things we do differently here.
We build to the legal instrument, not to the slide.
Classification changes move through city code. Pay adjustments move through an adopted ordinance. We write recommendations in the form the client will actually have to enact, so the work does not need translating by someone who was not in the room.
01
We collect evidence the organization cannot dismiss.
A confidential survey with a response rate above ninety percent is difficult to wave away, and that matters when findings are uncomfortable. We pair it with interviews across leadership, current staff, departing staff and adjacent departments, so no single perspective carries the conclusion.
02
We hold the organization to its own prior commitments.
Most government departments have already told an auditor what they intend to fix. Reading those commitments against what was completed is the fastest route to an accurate picture, and it grounds every recommendation in something the organization has already accepted.
03
We leave operable instruments behind.
Job descriptions, a service level agreement with measures attached, a certification framework, a benchmarking structure aligned to bargaining units. These are things staff can run, update and defend after the engagement closes. That is the difference between a report and a change.
04
THE EVIDENCE
The City Publishes Its Own Workforce Numbers. They Kept Moving.
We do not claim sole credit for these figures, and no consultant honestly could. A great deal of work by the City’s own staff sits behind them. What we would point to is the direction and the duration, across years in which we were no longer engaged.
OPEN HR AUDIT FINDINGS
35
6
Reported to a City Council standing committee. Early 2023 against 2025.
AVERAGE DAYS TO FILL A VACANCY
226
127
The 226 figure is from the City Auditor’s own review predating our engagement. 127 by 2025.
EMPLOYEE TURNOVER RATE
12.20%
9.40%
2023 against 2026, reported by the City as a record low.
VACANCY RATE
16.0%
12.30%
2024 against 2026, from the City’s published budget reporting.
Every figure above is drawn from the City of Richmond’s own published record: City Auditor reports, budget documents and materials presented to City Council. None of it comes from confidential client data, and any prospective client can verify all of it.
The reason we lead with duration rather than magnitude is that magnitude is the easy part. Almost any competent review will produce a first-year improvement, because attention alone moves numbers. The test is the third year and the fourth, after the sponsor has moved on and the consultant is long gone. That is the window these figures cover.
PUBLIC SECTOR CAPABILITY
What A Government Client Is Actually Buying.
Municipal HR and organizational development is a distinct discipline. If you are evaluating firms for this work, these are the four things worth testing before you award.
Fluency in how it gets enacted.
Classification sits in code and pay plans are adopted by ordinance. Recommendations have to be written to survive that path.
Labor structure literacy.
Analysis organized around bargaining units rather than generic job families, because that is how a municipal workforce is actually negotiated.
Comfort with public scrutiny.
Findings in government are read by auditors, councils, unions and press. We write them to hold under that reading.
Instruments, not slideware.
Job architecture, service measures and benchmarking structures the client’s own staff can operate long after the engagement closes.
THE OUTCOME
Richmond Kept The Instruments After The Sponsors Moved On.
Between our first engagement and today, the administration changed, the senior leadership that commissioned the work moved on, and the department was restructured. That is ordinary in a municipality and it is exactly the condition under which most consulting work quietly disappears.
The job architecture, the service measures and the classification framework did not disappear, because they had been written to be operated by staff rather than presented by a consultant. Richmond’s published workforce reporting has continued to improve through every one of those transitions.
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This engagement remains our most substantial public sector work, and it is the one we would point a city, county or authority toward first. Not for the size of it, but because the results outlasted everyone who commissioned them.
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If you are weighing a classification study, a compensation review or an assessment of how your HR function is built, the question we would start with is what will still be running three years after the engagement closes.
MORE PROOF
What Changed After We Arrived.
Retention
NONPROFIT · DISABILITY SERVICES
In a sector built on turnover, more of Las Trampas’ people plan to stay.
Segments
CONSUMER BEAUTY · RETAIL
One company, three workforces. They were not having the same experience.
Outsourcing
NONPROFIT · FRACTIONAL HR