More than 74,000 people, with an average age of 28, have applied for roles in Zohran Mamdani’s new administration. Those figures are both a measure of enthusiasm for New York City’s incoming mayor and a sign of how tough the job market is for young people in the five boroughs.
Young voters and volunteers fueled the 34-year-old Mamdani’s fast rise from a relatively unknown Queens assemblyman to mayor-elect of America’s largest city. A lot of them had time on their hands: New Yorkers aged 16 to 24 faced a 13.2% unemployment rate in 2024, 3.6 percentage points higher than in 2019, according to a May report from the New York state comptroller.
New York City had a 5.8% unemployment rate overall in August, 1.3 percentage points above the US average. The city added roughly 25,000 jobs this year through September, compared with about 106,000 during the same period in 2024, according to city data.
Mamdani’s campaign pledge to lower the cost of living in New York resonated with voters struggling to find jobs and establish themselves at a time when rents have stayed high and income growth has slowed. Now he’s looking to hire an unspecified number of roles across 60 agencies, 95 mayoral offices and more than 250 boards and commissions, with senior roles a priority, according to his transition team.
The typical size of the New York City mayoral staff — commissioners, communications, operations and community affairs — is about 1,100, according Ana Champeny, vice president of research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit finance watchdog. City government in total hired 39,455 people in 2024, according to New York City data.
Applications for roles in Mamdani’s administration have come from workers of all experience levels and from a wide range of backgrounds and industries, said Maria Torres-Springer, co-chair of the mayor-elect’s transition team. About 20,000 of the applicants came from out of state.
When Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008, workers submitted more than 300,000 job applications to his administration. Blair Levin, who co-led the technology transition team for Obama, said he received around 3,000 of those resumes. He whittled the pool down to 75, a relatively easy task because he needed applicants with specific tech and economics skills, he said.
Without invoking the term “AI,” Torres-Springer said the applications would be filtered using “the typical technology that any big corporation would have in an applicant-tracking system.” The resumes will then be sorted and matched to different agencies.
Mamdani’s avid use of social media, which helped him connect with young people during his campaign, has continued into his transition efforts, creating excitement — among young people especially — about the prospect of joining his administration.
“The average age does tell a particularly interesting story in two ways,” Torres-Springer said. “It might be because of volatility in the job market but it’s also because I think we are attracting, the administration is attracting, New Yorkers who may not have considered government in the past.”
Take David Kinchen, a 28-year-old data engineer who moved to New York from northern Virginia three years ago. Since getting laid off from a job in fraud detection at Capital One, he has applied for more than 1,000 roles and completed at least 75 interviews without an offer, he said. Kinchen volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign and applied to the administration, highlighting his tech credentials and a passion for photography.
“I did data engineering, so I could help with database decisions. There was also a creative option on the application, since I could work as a staff photographer too,” Kinchen said.
Another applicant, 22-year-old Aurisha Rahman, has struggled to find a job since graduating with a civil-engineering degree from Hofstra University on Long Island.
“The job market is even worse than it was last fall,” Rahman said. Mamdani’s resume portal was one of the few places she found open to entry-level applicants.
Rahman, who was born and raised in Queens, said she wants to give back to the city where she was raised and wouldn’t be picky about a position. “Whatever they need, I’ll do it. I don’t care,” she said. “Right now, it’s better to be busy with something than nothing.”
Politics8 years ago