SALEM — The firm helping to hire a new town manager is looking for a candidate who plans to stay for several years — and there could be a large crop of them to choose from.
Donald Jutton, president of Municipal Resources Inc., said the company had received 38 resumes by Tuesday, just days after the job was advertised.
"My expectation is that we'll be comfortably in the range of 100 (applicants)," Jutton said.
Job ads won't be the only thing attracting resumes. Jutton said MRI maintains a database of people looking for town government work who have applied for other jobs. They recently received more than 100 applications for a town administrator job in Derry. But residents shouldn't feel like they're going to get Derry's leftovers.
"I think Salem would be lucky if they wound up with one of the people Derry didn't pick," Jutton said.
He said the pool of candidates for that job was "incredibly strong."
"We expect we'll see duplications or redundancy," Jutton said. "It's a small market."
He said there are fewer than 5,000 town managers across the country. In addition to the many applicants for the Derry job, MRI can also tap recent applicant pools for a town administrator job in Hooksett and an executive administrator job in Dartmouth, Mass. While Derry might be the closest fit to Salem, every town is different, Jutton said.
"Derry's and Salem's needs are similar in some areas, but they're very different in other areas," he said.
Jutton said one thing the firm will be looking for among candidates is a proven track record for staying in the same job for an extended amount of time. Salem has struggled to find managers in the past who have had long tenures.
"One of the things we're looking for in this instance is somebody who has a long-term history of stability, someone who understands how important it is for someone to be around long enough to kind of stabilize and get some structure in place," Jutton said.
That will mean filtering out anybody who might have the kind of personality conflicts or differences in leadership style that led to quick ends to other town managers' careers in Salem.
"Salem has had a lot of managers come and go for various reasons, and certainly it's easy to point at the political issues," he said. "That's the story of life in that business, first of all, and I think whoever comes into the job is going to have to be, to some extent, a diplomat and a peacemaker."
Ideal candidates likely won't be wooed away by other open jobs either. He said Lebanon, which has a population less than half Salem's size, had an opening. Two other jobs in Yarmouth and Amherst, Mass., are about to open up, Jutton said, but he expected most of the applicants to be from Massachusetts.
Compared to less centrally located New England towns, Salem can be a more attractive place to work, he said.
"You've got the quality of life of New Hampshire, but you're 40 minutes from Boston, 40 minutes from the seacoast, 40 minutes from skiing," he said.
Jutton would know — he was a town manager in Salem in the 1980s. It was where he started his career.
"I see it as a great opportunity for somebody who wants to work hard. It's a tremendous opportunity," he said.
To run a town with Interstate 93 running through it, a busy retail environment and a $40 million budget, MRI will be looking for candidates with similar experience. He said New Hampshire or at least New England experience is preferred, because the government here can be very different from other regions of the country.
He said whether an applicant had experience dealing with labor unions, similarly sized budgets, and locally managed municipal water and sewer would be considered.
MRI will whittle down the candidate pool based on factors like education, experience and telephone interviews. Six semi-finalists will be interviewed by a citizen panel, Salem staff panel and a professional panel in November. Using input from the interviews, MRI will bring the board about four finalists to choose from, Jutton said.
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