At their public meeting on Feb. 11, the village administrator search committee seemed to be leaning toward hiring an outside search firm to help with their efforts. But Mayor Rory Hoskins announced during the village council meeting on Feb. 22 that the search committee had stopped receiving resumes effective that day and would begin evaluating them without help from any outside source.
At the Feb. 11 search committee meeting, held over Zoom and announced in advance on the village website, the committee said they would revisit the different packages offered by search firms since they weren’t overwhelmingly happy with the resumes they’d received thus far.
During a private meeting held on Feb. 17, however, the plan changed, and the committee instead decided to continue the search without outside help.
According to Commissioners Joe Byrnes and Jessica Voogd, both members of the search committee, in phone interviews on Feb. 22, despite initially leaning toward using services of GOVHRUSA, a sudden influx of resumes from a listing on GOVHRUSA’s website prompted them to change their opinion.
“If we are already getting resumes, and some decent ones, from the same organization we were planning to hire, maybe we don’t need to hire them after all,” Byrnes said.
He said he felt confident after receiving the second batch of resumes. “The original batch, for the most part, were from people you wouldn’t think would apply for a village administrator position,” Byrnes said, adding that many of them had little or no administration experience at all.
But the resumes that came in later, Byrnes said, were better. “We got some good ones,” he said. “There are a few with a lot of experience.”
Voogd said she’d been on the fence about hiring a search firm after the Feb 11 committee meeting, especially since they were learning toward the $2,750 package, which included many of the same things the committee had already done, such as coming up with a job description and posting it to websites. Like Byrnes, she said when several good resumes came through the GOVHRUSA website posting, she changed her mind about needing that service.
Hoskins cited side effects of a COVID-19 vaccine and a scheduling conflict as his reason for not attending the Feb. 11 meeting, though he is part of the search committee. At the Feb. 22 village council meeting, however, he said even before he knew he wouldn’t be able to attend the meeting, he thought about what it meant to have three village council members on a committee that was discussing personnel matters.
If he attended the Feb. 17 meeting, he said, the meeting would be subject to the Open Meetings Act. He opted not to attend so the meeting could be held privately, allowing the rest of the committee to speak freely without worrying about public opinion.
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