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Job Opportunity - Owen Sound City Manager

March 11, 2007

As most of you are probably aware the City of Owen Sound has a rather significant employment opportunity up for grabs. With the departure of our present City Manger, Craig Curtis, the city is on the lookout for “the right person to lead this progressive City located on beautiful Georgian Bay”.

The position: (I grabbed this from Municipal World )

CITY MANAGER

Owen Sound, Ontario

We are looking for the right person to lead this progressive City located on beautiful Georgian Bay.
http://www.e-owensound.com

You have leadership skills and expertise in implementing strategy, directing policy development and inspiring a skilled and dedicated team of employees. You have a demonstrated track record of working effectively with elected municipal leaders, building positive collaborative relationships and advocating with other levels of government. A commitment to continuous learning is built upon your university degree or equivalent in a relevant discipline.

You will champion economic and cultural development opportunities and respect Owen Sound’s special physical environment and rich heritage. You will be dedicated to improve the community and its already high quality of life.

If you want to help build a wonderful future for the City of Owen Sound, please let us know by forwarding a letter and your résumé to The Search Committee at search@e-owensound.com. We will begin reviewing all submissions for this prominent position in this far from ordinary City on March 23, 2007. The closing date is April 15, 2007. However, we are accepting resumes until the position has been filled.

In accordance with the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, personal information is collected under the authority of the Municipal Act, and will only be used for candidate selection.

The City of Owen Sound is committed to employment equity.
Posted: 2007-02-27

You can also read a little more about the position on the City web site or in the official job description(.pdf) or the job posting(.pdf)

I really encourage everyone to take an opportunity to review the job description and consider the significance of finding the right person to fill it.

It was this thought that lead me to thinking a bunch about how this position will be filled. Who is responsible for this hire, what does the interview process look like and maybe more importantly what is the city looking for?

The last one should be a bit of a thinker. Beyond skill sets and degrees (which are laid out clearly in the job description) I am interested as much, if not more, in the persona and attitude of the individual chosen to help lead this city (sorry… have resolved that one yet? do we have a keen sight on where the community is heading?, if you have thoughts on this add them below)

I am fairly confident that there will be no shortage of experienced and highly capable applicants to this position. Owen Sound is a great community to live in with fabulous people to live with. So with assumable a good number of applicants to choose from how do we find the right candidate? The city has no doubt posted the position in all the usual places, such as the Municipal World reference above. Beyond that, how does one find out about this position and apply? Or where else should the posting be made prevalent?

This has me thinking… the Internet is a very powerful tool for position relevant information in front of niche audiences big or small. If we have and idea of what we would like the future of the community to be, we can influence this to a certain degree by making sure the right people are aware of the opening. If for example there is local interest in the technological advancement in the city/region we might like to look for candidates with interest. Perhaps we would like to find some candidates with eye on the sustainable development of the community. Where do we find this candidate? This job posting is significant enough part of the future of this community that I think we might want to get more than a few more people involved in the search for the ideal candidate.

You can play too…1) get a discussion going around town. This will get more people involved in step two. 2) Start floating the idea/details around. Perhaps you have come by an ideal candidate in your business or social life. Pass the word on. 3) We might also want to ask the City to keep us in the loop as the selection process goes on. If we want this to happen I think more than a few of us are going to have to ask.

Here’s what I’d like to do… I would like to interview some potential candidates for the position of City Manager(and post them here of course). The trick here is that I won’t know how they are?(city are you going to tell us who they are?) So they’ll have to contact me directly. Further to that idea, I would like to interview the potential candidates with your questions. Sure, I have a few of my own, but not nearly as many interesting ones as we can come up with collectively.

So here we go…to keep this discussion alive is simple. You can add you thoughts and questions for our potential City Manger as a comment on this post. Feel free to post more than once and I encourage the act of riffing off (expanding on) questions already posted by others.

I am sure I will build more on this idea in the near future, in the meantime, here’s your chance.

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Written by Ryan · Filed Under The City, Community, theOwen 

Comments

One Response to “Job Opportunity - Owen Sound City Manager”

  1. Anne Finlay-Stewart Says:
    March 11th, 2007 at 7:57 pm

    The current city manager has politics far to the right of mine - likely appropriate, given that 90% of the city residents do too. (Although my sister once said she found me only slightly to the left of Ghengis Khan. ) I like Craig’s humour, his interest in art and letters, etc. but I am told that he has one other very admirable characteristic which I think we should seek in his replacement. When given new information, Craig can say “I was wrong” and change his mind. Let’s not get someone who thinks he already knows what’s best (look to Meaford for such a chief administrator and the potential consequences.

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