When Mayor Bill de Blasio first announced plans to amass an army of contact tracers last month, Tien thought she’d be a perfect fit for the job. A Brooklyn resident in her mid-thirties, she speaks two languages and previously worked in a public-facing health care role. Most importantly, it was a job she could do remotely, while caring for her infant daughter. (Tien requested to be identified under a pseudonym because she did not want to endanger future job opportunities.)

Within days of submitting an application, she was interviewed by a recruiter with the Bachrach Group, a staffing agency contracted to handle the hiring process. After taking a six-hour training course, she was asked to start as a Contact Tracer I immediately. At a time when she’d resigned herself to long-term unemployment, the $57,000 salary and healthcare benefits felt like a lifeline.

The recruiter went silent for the next week, but Tien wasn't immediately worried, despite not having officially signed a job offer. ("You only give someone health plan info if you're planning to hire them," she'd thought.)

Finally, this past Tuesday, she received an apologetic but vague email from the Bachrach Group, informing her she had not actually been hired. “Realistically, I might know even less than you,” the recruiter wrote. Tien said she reached out to two other friends who had been led to believe they had contact tracing jobs, both of whom had also been informed their positions were now “on hold.”

“The rug got pulled from under our feet,” Tien said. “It just seems to us like an utter mess and no one knows what’s going on.”

In order for New York City to reopen, health experts say it's crucial to build out a massive team of contact tracers to track and isolate individuals infected with COVID-19. De Blasio has cited recent progress in that effort, announcing this week that more than 1,800 tracers have already been hired. The full slate of 2,500 will soon be ready to meet the state’s criteria for phase 1 reopening, pegged to begin in the next week or two, according to the mayor.

But several previously hired tracers now say their job status is unclear, with little indication about when they might start or what their work would actually entail. Some say they left other jobs — during a period of historic unemployment — for positions they fear may no longer exist.

A recruiter for the Bachrach Group, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared retaliation, confirmed the would-be contact tracers' complaints about the chaotic hiring process.

“This is an ever changing project. Nothing I’ve been told has stayed the same,” the recruiter said. “People who may have thought they got the job probably won’t be hired. A lot of us aren’t happy about it.”

Much of the confusion, she said, stems from sudden shifts in guidance from NYC Health & Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, which is now overseeing the contact tracing program. While the initial job listing had suggested the work would be remote, the project’s leaders recently determined that they need far more people willing to work in the field.

According to the recruiter, Health & Hospitals informed the hiring agency on Friday of a new “quota” on picking workers from selected zip codes — ahead of an announcement from the mayor that about half of contact tracers were from the hardest-hit communities.

As a result of those last-minute directives, an untold number of contact tracers have been informed their jobs are no longer available, even after their applications had been processed and they’d been given start-dates, according to the recruiter.

One Hell’s Kitchen resident told Gothamist he cut his hours as a flight attendant to focus on the job, which he was supposed to start this week. On Monday, he received a call informing him that the remote position was no longer available, and that he would have to reapply to be a Contact Tracer II, which involves field work and pays slightly more. He said he would gladly take that position, but still hasn’t heard back four days later.

“I stopped working for this, and now I don’t even know if I have it,” lamented the 35-year-old. He said he was half-expecting to start work next week, while also prepared to never hear back, and wondered whether it was too late to apply for unemployment this month. “I’m in a total gray zone right now.”

According to one official briefed on the matter, the bungled hiring process can be tracked to the mayor’s controversial decision earlier this month to yank the contact tracing program from the city's Department of Health. Though the DOH has far more experience handling tracing initiatives, de Blasio tapped Mitchell Katz, the leader of NYC Health & Hospitals, to oversee contact tracing in early May, after the mayor's long-simmering feud with the city's Health Commissioner reportedly boiled over.

“This is exactly what we feared would happen when you try to recreate existing structures from scratch,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “It risks further delaying the launch of this program, which at the moment is the main thing holding us back from reopening.”

Asked about the hiring issues on Thursday, de Blasio emphatically denied that there was anything seriously wrong with the contact tracing program.

“I don’t like when someone talks to one person or a couple people, assumes that is the truth about a larger initiative, and then says there seems to be chaos,” the mayor said. “I have no indication of anything like that. What I’m seeing is something coming together really, really quickly and effectively.”

In a subsequent statement, mayoral spokesperson Avery Cohen acknowledged that the city’s staffing priorities had changed as they moved at “lightning speed” to build a contact tracing operation.

“To ensure we meet this goal, we are increasing the number of tracers that will work on the ground in communities, and shifted our workforce accordingly,” she said in a statement. “Individuals hired for remote positions have now been offered field positions where possible, and training is underway ahead of our launch. No written offer letters should have been rescinded and if any were we will make that right.”

Cohen did not respond to follow-up questions about how the city would “make that right,” or how many people had mistakenly been hired. Inquiries to NYC Health & Hospitals were not returned.