Hiring a new CAO not for the faint of heart

If ever there was a time for mayor and council to acknowledge their limitations, this is it.

A stopper needs to be put in any delusions that hiring a new chief administrative officer is going to be easy. Sending out a few emails and putting a couple of ads somewhere (or maybe a tweet?) is the sort of thing the neighbourhood corner store might do for hiring a kid to stock the shelves, but it falls short in picking the City’s top bureaucrat.

It is, if you’ll excuse the expression, ignus fatuus.

If you look around the council table, you won’t find a lot of experience in this. Among the nine of them, how many senior City officers have they hired?

The answer is, none. Even if you count the two that the mayor has been involved in with the regional district, that comes to an average of 0.222 per council member.

There’s nothing surprising about that — no Kamloops council has had to hire a CAO for more than a decade. Experience in hiring in their own businesses and vocations ranges among councilors, but it doesn’t appear overwhelming. Those who do have some background in it will understand the challenge.

The adage that he who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client is useful here — a council that does its own hiring is on thin ice.

I don’t, of course, propose that council let someone else make the decision. But the process is not for the faint of heart or the inexperienced. Council must begin by defining the kind of person it wants, someone who will “fit,” then wade into the marketplace to identify candidates, doing reference checks, and grilling the contenders.

In other words, council needs a headhunter, which is just another word for recruiter, someone who knows the corporate world, and knows where to look. Someone who doesn’t sit around waiting for replies to ads or emails, but who recruits.

Then, the headhunter shortens the list and prepares council, and the candidates, for interviews. Even with instruction, interviewing candidates, especially at this level, is not a skill learned overnight (and, while the HR department is often good support, it can do only so much).

I came across a column this week called “The headhunter,” by a guy named Nick Corcodilos. Admittedly not neutral on the topic, he nevertheless has a lot of smart things to say about hiring top managers.

He writes, for example, about the “hidden candidate pool…. That is, they’re not looking, but they’re available.”

Employers who try to do it all themselves are simply hiring from what they think is available, not what might be — like shooting at whatever fish happen to swim by, says Corcodilos.

Make no mistake — even with the help of a headhunter this is no day in the park. The real work begins with the shortlist, and hiring by committee is not easy, beginning with the inevitable absence of at least some council members at pretty much every interview.

When the interviews are done, nine people will have to get together and compare incomplete notes.

They don’t need the distractions of having to deal with their own mistakes.

Would a headhunter be expensive?

The more important question: What would hiring the wrong CAO cost the taxpayers of Kamloops?

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca