Brendan Hellweg ’14 is using AI to improve the way cities and towns attract and hire workers
While government efficiency has become a contentious political issue at the federal level these days, Brendan Hellweg ’14, co-founder of the municipal-hiring start-up Holly, sees improving the efficiency of local governments as a goal that everyone can celebrate. “There is an opportunity to do big things in the public sector,” insists Hellweg, who launched his Brooklyn-based venture in 2023 after earning a joint MBA and Master of Public Policy from Harvard’s Business and Kennedy schools. “What I’m now trying to do with Holly is to enable millions of Americans to find fulfilling careers in the public sector so that they can better serve their communities and we can all benefit from better public services.”
Holly’s licensed software helps cities and towns sidestep what Hellweg and his co-founder Cherie Chung identified as a major barrier to better municipal services: too many open positions, and managers with no time to fill them. Holly’s artificial intelligence platform—built on a database of some 45,000 government job listings—automates the process of creating job descriptions and postings, provides salary guidance, and ensures that jobs are in compliance with any hiring rules.
“The average time to hire for a local government is 135 days, four times longer than the private sector,” explains Hellweg. “By the time governments send their first interview invites, people have already accepted jobs in the private sector. Local governments are losing candidates just because the process itself takes too long.”
That delay comes at a steep cost. Each year taxpayers end up footing the bill for $86 billion in overtime pay, he notes. Meanwhile, more than 1 million government jobs remain unfilled, a lost opportunity for people looking for careers in public service.
Hellweg’s appreciation for well-managed local government dates back to his time at Williston, when he spent two summers working for former Holyoke mayor Alex Morse, who at age 22 was among the country’s youngest civic leaders. “I got to see the role that cities can play in economic development,” says Hellweg, also a Holyoke native. “I saw that the difference between a coffee shop succeeding and not succeeding was the ability of the city to administer grants, to help support the launch, to bring a community forward. The ability of an affordable housing development to succeed was driven by the mayor’s persistence.”
He took that insight with him to Yale, where he earned his undergraduate degree in ethics, politics, and economics, interning his junior year for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in Washington, D.C. After graduating, in 2018, his desire to return to local government led him to Baltimore, where he served as special project manager and data lead in the Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation. Initially his work focused on using data to help at-risk youth, but with the arrival of COVID-19, he was asked to launch the city’s contact-tracing program (see Bulletin, winter 2020). He ended up hiring 275 workers in under a year, an experience that continues to inform his work today.
Holly is still in start-up mode, but Hellweg is encouraged by the response the company is receiving. Two pilot programs are now underway, one launched last fall with the city of Long Beach, California, another this spring with San Bernardino County. Last December, the company raised more than $2 million in a pre-seed funding round, and Hellweg hopes to have a five-person team on board by year’s end as the company expands with additional pilot programs.
Recent events—specifically the Trump administration’s controversial staffing cuts at the federal level—have added to Holly’s momentum. “I didn’t expect that our niche of government hiring would be the hot topic of 2025, but the opportunity to connect local governments with outgoing federal workers is huge,” says Hellweg, adding that he recently posted an analysis of federal workforce disruption that has gotten tens of thousands of views and hundreds of responses. “Across the country, local governments are facing increased scrutiny to operate leaner while filling the gaps created by federal uncertainty.”
With his co-founder Chung, who previously worked for the government-benefits app Propel, Hellweg sees Holly as reframing the discussions around government efficiency, as well as around AI. As the partners wrote recently in their Substack newsletter “Public Service: Designed with Data,” “Together, we saw an opportunity to use AI to revolutionize how governments hire—not by replacing humans, but by eliminating the repetitive tasks that keep HR professionals from doing their most important work: connecting with people.”
Ultimately, Hellweg sees Holly as a vehicle for boosting the appeal of public service, an underappreciated yet vital component of civic life. “People think that local government is a sleepy career where you serve your community, but not do too much beyond that,” he contends. “The truth is, the vast majority of public sector jobs are state and local. It’s the source of most public services that you interact with every day. So it really matters to get it right.”