Williamstown Town Manager Search Committee Refines Job Announcement
Daniel Gura, inset, makes a point about the position announcement under consideration of Williamstown's Town Manager Search Advisory Committee on Tuesday.
The search committee, which includes two members of the five-person Select Board, reviewed a draft job posting and draft survey questions compiled by GovHR, the head-hunting firm employed by the Select Board to guide the search process.
On the position announcement, the committee added language to signal one of the town's priorities in a new town manager and modified the baseline requirements to ensure that it draws applicants from the broadest possible pool.
"What I would love to see and members of our committee and certainly the community would love to see is some statement about who we are as an organization in terms of town government," Jose Constantine said regarding the draft job announcement. "Something speaking to us embracing folks from diverse backgrounds and experiences and that we do everything on our part not to exclude but to include a wide range of identities and experiences.
"I might look at [Ngonidzashe Munemo] who would be more familiar with the language we use in job ads. But from what I'm seeing, it's not here, and it should be here."
Munemo is a political science professor and interim vice president for institutional diversity, equity and inclusion at Williams College and a member of the search committee.
Later, another member of the panel, Abigail Reifsnyder, backed up Constantine's comment.
"Under the 'successful character will:' category, because it has these sweeping statements like 'Have a passion for public service,' that would be the place where we could put something like, 'dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive community,' something like that," Reifsnyder said. "I think it deserves to be really bulleted out as an important, separate feature."
Co-Chair and Select Board member Hugh Daley agreed that was the consensus of the search committee and directed the HrGov representatives at the meeting to add language to that effect to the position announcement.
The committee also agreed that the draft language about job requirements was too limiting.
The draft presented for review on Tuesday evening said the town was looking for someone with a bachelor's degree and that a master's degree in "public administration, business administration or other advanced executive level training such as [International City/County Management Association] Credentialed Manager" would be "viewed favorably."
"Do we want to eliminate someone who doesn't have a bachelor's degree but might have significant experience?" Susan Puddester asked her colleagues.
The group concluded that it did not.
"I would agree with that," Dan Gura said. "I think there's generic language people typically use that just says, 'You have to have these two things or relative, equating experience. I think it's probably unlikely that you would end up finding that. But I wouldn't want us to feel like we wrote it in such a way that if that did happen we didn't have an option to take a look."
Gura later noted that many people who do not have bachelor's degrees have attended college but may have been a few credits short of graduation when they started their career paths. He characterized graduation as an "arbitrary line to cross."
"I feel like I have to take the bait a little bit," Munemo said with a laugh. "I think the company line is it's not too arbitrary. But, more seriously, I think to Susan's point, if we write the equivalent experience language, it just allows us to look. It doesn't mean we'll take that person. It just means off the bat we're not going to exclude them."
Daley advocated for preserving language in the announcement that encourages applicants with credentials like the ICMA certification in the GovHR draft.
He pointed to similar certification programs in other professions and said they're a sign that professionals are willing to learn and grow in their respective fields.
"I kind of like those credentials," Daley said. "You don't necessarily need a college degree to get them, but it means you're interested in your industry and you have taken some professional development within it."
Lee Szymborski of GovHR told the committee that fewer than 20 percent of the ICMA membership have the credential, which requires a rigorous course of study. He said he only had one or two clients who required the credential, and he tried to discourage them from doing so. Szymborski's colleague, Michael Jaillet, noted that the Massachusetts Municipal Association offers a professional development program with Boston's Suffolk University that could be a different credential candidates might offer.
"I'll second that," Constatine said. "From what I know about this program, they're working had to diversify the makeups of town managers and town government across the commonwealth."
"If you want diversity, I think adding that will help that," Jaillet said.
With those modifications, the search committee tasked GovHR with producing a final draft of the position announcement for review and, potentially, approval at the panel's July 13 meeting. Daley told the panel he also hopes it will give final sign-off to the community survey at that meeting.
Szymborski said GovHR likes to keep the survey in the field for 10 days, which would allow the panel to have results by its July 27 meeting and use them to craft a "position description," a more detailed document for potential candidates that is a followup to the position announcement reviewed on Tuesday.
Szymborski said the announcement is the beginning of the outreach process to candidates and described as "priming the pump" for candidates who might later look at the full job profile when available. Ideally, he said the gap between the announcement and the description should not be more than a couple of weeks.
Tuesday's other piece of business for the search committee, the survey, will seek to get input from residents and other stakeholders about the qualities they think are most important for a new town manager.
The committee discussed whether the survey can be crafted in such a way that will allow respondents to rank the qualities — like "strategic," "collaborative" and "innovative" — that they choose as priorities.
Some members of the committee questioned the value of data from a survey that asks respondents to prioritize from a list of characteristics all likely would agree are important in the next town manager.
"In my experience, hiring two thousand people in the last four or five years, I've never had anyone put 'untrustworthy' on their resume," entrepreneur Chris Kapiloff said. "Instead of using these questions to say, 'Who loves America and apple pie?' let's get more information that's going to be pertinent on the type of person we want. No one is going to say one of these qualities is completely unimportant."
Szymborski said the GovHR survey template has been useful to past clients, and the committee will get valuable data from open-ended questions like, "What are the top three issues/challenges you think will face the new Town Manager?"
More importantly, he encouraged the search committee to solicit public input any way it can.
"The other value, and this, I think, I think is very important for Williamstown, at least so I've heard: Given the issues the town has gone through in the last year or so, you can't not do this survey," Szymborski said. "The fact that you're reaching out on all this has value in and of itself."
To that end, Puddester suggested that the search committee hold listening sessions with a couple of members of the panel similar to the ones she was part of as a member of the Planning Board. The plan would make two members of the search committee available on different days of the week to collect input from residents that the members then could convey to the larger group.
Daley said he would poll the members of the committee about their availability to do the listening sessions.
Tags: search committee, town administrator,
