Williamstown Town Manager Search Group Aims to Conduct In-Person Interviews
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Town Manager Search Committee on Tuesday decided to aim for in-person interviews starting next week in a process officials hope could conclude as soon as the first week of April.
Before moving to executive session to consider which members of a pool of six applicants it wants to interview, the committee discussed in open session the form those interviews will take.
The aim is to narrow that pool to two or three finalists to send to the Select Board, the hiring authority for the town government's top administrative position.
Last fall, the screening committee identified three finalists, though only two chose to move on for interviews before the Select Board, which ultimately decided not to offer the job to either candidate.
This time, some members of the search committee hope that if the panel interviews candidates in person instead of by teleconference, it will have a better result.
"I'm a big, big advocate for all these interviews being done in person in front of all of us as a committee," David Moresi said. "I feel that might have been one of the failures last time. It seems like when you met with the candidates in person, different perspectives were gained."
Select Board member Hugh Daley, who co-chairs the search committee, said the town could "fly in" candidates for the initial round of interviews or they could drive to town if they lived close enough. But, either way, an in-person interview was a priority.
"I thought it came across strongly in the last meeting that one of the things that changed in between the search committee's decision and the Select Board's decision was the physical presence of the candidates with the Select Board, with the community, being in person with them," Daley said.
"The Select Board room [at Town Hall] does have the ability to do hybrid meetings. So it is conceivable that we could bring in committee members who can't attend in person. The assumption is the applicant is in person."
Daley initially suggested that the Search Committee could conduct all of its interviews on Thursday, March 31, and he initially indicated that candidates who could not be in town that day might not really want the job.
"They have to make the effort to get here to let you know they're not just throwing their hat in the ring," he said. "They're going to invest in the idea of being your town manager. To me, that's a good indicator of interest."
Daniel Gura disagreed.
"That's true, but I've never heard of someone giving you a single day for an in-person interview," Gura said. "If their response is, 'I can do it in person but it has to be the 30th,' I don't think it's fair for us to say, 'Then you're not committed.' "
Daley said Gura made a "great point" and settled for a message that notifies applicants the committee has "a strong preference for in-person, but open to Zoom if you can't."
Consultant Lee Szymborski of GovHR told the committee that candidates likely would agree to in-person interviews even at the initial stage of a two-interview process. But he suggested the committee be a little more flexible.
"Typically, what we tell candidates is the interview is on this date with the understanding that, in most cases, it's a couple of weeks out," Szymborski said. "With a couple of weeks, we've been successful in 98 percent of candidates being able to make that."
Daley asked Szymborski to pitch March 31 and April 7 to candidates as interview dates, "and if more of them say they'll only be here on the seventh, we may just have to say that's our day."
By next Thursday, the search committee hopes to have a smaller and better list of questions than it brought to the interviews in October.
"We need to cull that list down from 20 [questions] to 10 and focus them a little bit more," Daley said.
Gura, Andrew Art and Susan Puddester volunteered to be part of a working group to reduce the number of questions while preserving their spirit in hopes of generating better conversations with candidates this time around.
Tags: candidate interviews, search committee, town administrator,
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