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The personnel department wields quiet, behind-the scenes power at City Hall and has a degree of insulation from the mayor’s office — a vestige of a 1941 reform effort to reduce employee churn from patronage and machine politics.

The personnel director oversees standards for hiring, firing, payment and promotion of the city’s more than 5,000 civil service employees. The director and staff also negotiate with unions that represent many of those workers, including the police and fire departments. Unlike most other city department heads, whoever fills it can be ousted only through a process that includes formal charges of malfeasance.

Neither does the mayor get free rein to pick the permanent director of the personnel department — she picks from three candidates forwarded to her by the Civil Service Commission, which chooses the slate after competitive testing. A Jones spokesman said there is no timeline yet for hiring a permanent director.Ìý

The commission also chooses an interim director, who must come from the personnel department, when the top post is vacant. A commission meeting Wednesday included an agenda item to amend that rule but it was unclear whether a change was made.

The commission is made up of three mayoral appointees who serve staggered six-year terms. Jones has appointed one new member to the commission this year, Dean Kpere-Daibo, an attorney at Constangy Brooks, Smith & Prophete.

The Personnel Department is in the midst of trying to manage a labor shortage that is affecting most industries and locales around the country. City jobs have an added hurdle: they must be filled by city residents, which personnel staff have said makes filling some vacancies extremely difficult.

But some aldermen have complained that the process for applying for city jobs is outdated and difficult.Ìý