State employee unions are linking recruitment problems to Tier IV pensions. Connecticut’s own data point to another obstacle: how long it takes to hire someone.
Connecticut takes roughly three months to fill a state job. The statewide median time to fill an approved vacancy was 92 days in August, according to Department of Administrative Services (DAS) data. It was 90 days in April, 89 in May, 91 in June and 90 in July. For five straight months, Connecticut’s hiring timeline has hovered around three months.
CSEA SEIU Local 2001 says SEBAC sees another culprit in the recruitment problem: Tier IV pensions.
SEBAC — the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition — is the group of state employee unions that bargains over pension and health benefits. The awkward part is that SEBAC agreed to Tier IV. It negotiated the 2017 deal that established the new pension tier; 83 percent of votes cast by union members approved the pension and health changes, and 15 of SEBAC’s 16 unions endorsed them.
Put simply, Tier IV covers most pension-eligible state employees hired since late July 2017. Workers still get a traditional pension, but they contribute more toward retirement than workers in the previous tier and also put 1 percent of their pay into a separate retirement savings account, which the state matches.
There was a reason for the change: Tier IV was designed to make retirement benefits for future state workers less expensive for taxpayers. In other words, it wasn’t imposed on the unions. It was the deal they made.
Now the unions want a do-over.
CSEA says Tier IV is a “central focus” heading into the 2027 pension and health talks and links the tier’s alleged “inadequacies” to Connecticut’s ability to “bring in new talent.” CSEA has not released a detailed bargaining proposal, so taxpayers don’t yet know exactly what the unions will demand or what it would cost.
Where the Delay Shows Up
DAS breaks time-to-fill into four stages. The final one, agency selection, begins when an agency receives a candidate list and ends when one or more candidates are hired. In August, the statewide median for that stage alone was 69 days.
That doesn’t mean somebody in HR spent 69 days staring at a résumé. The stage includes application review and selection procedures required by law, labor agreements and affirmative-action rules. But those aren’t days spent waiting for applicants. They come after the agency has a candidate list in hand.
At the Workers’ Compensation Commission, agency selection took 237 days in August, pushing total hiring time to 250 days. The Connecticut Siting Council reported 207 days overall, while the State Department of Education reported 189.
Different agencies hire for different jobs, so those figures don’t explain any particular vacancy. They do establish a narrower point: substantial delays can occur after Connecticut already has people eligible to hire.
DAS Knows Speed Matters
The state appears to agree. In 2023, DAS launched a start-to-finish hiring review with Deloitte and said the “speed of hiring” was hampered by requirements in statutes, regulations and collective bargaining agreements.
Then on July 28, DAS issued a new hiring policy covering permanent classified executive-branch vacancies under its jurisdiction. It tells managers to fill vacancies “as soon as possible,” allows early application review to reduce time to fill and directs interview panels to reserve time early. Once a finalist is selected, managers and HR are told to time offers so Connecticut can “compete effectively in the job market.”
The policy is too new to judge using August’s completed hires. But the emphasis on speed makes the point: DAS recognizes that hiring time affects Connecticut’s ability to compete for workers.
Connecticut also isn’t exactly recruiting with bargain-basement salaries. Connecticut also isn’t exactly recruiting with bargain-basement salaries. According to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by Red Jahncke, the average Connecticut state employee salary reached about $101,500 in 2025 — second highest among the 50 states.
So, Connecticut is offering comparatively high pay and still taking roughly three months to make a hire. That makes the hiring process itself awfully difficult to ignore.
Pennsylvania Cut the Clock
Connecticut doesn’t have to accept a three-month hiring process as the price of government employment. Pennsylvania says it cut its average time to hire by 42 percent, from 90 days in January 2023 to 52 days as of April 2026, crediting process improvements, modernized tools and targeted recruitment. Vacancy rates for permitting, licensing and certification jobs also fell from 14 percent to about 5 percent.
The states do not necessarily measure hiring time the same way, so this is not an apples-to-apples ranking. The lesson is simpler: governments can attack hiring delays directly.
If unions want to blame Tier IV for Connecticut’s recruitment problems, bring receipts. How many people aren’t applying because of the pension? How many candidates withdraw? How many offers are rejected because of Tier IV? How often do applicants actually cite retirement benefits as the reason?
The public time-to-fill data doesn’t answer those questions. They do document a slow hiring process.
Connecticut has unfilled state jobs. That’s a fact. The union claim is that Tier IV is helping cause them. If SEBAC wants the state to rewrite a pension deal it helped negotiate, it should have to prove that claim — not simply repeat it.
If Connecticut is attracting eligible candidates and then spending weeks or months getting them from a candidate list to a hire, that’s a different problem with a different solution.
Before Connecticut spends more money trying to make people want state jobs, it should make sure it can hire the people who already do.
