State of NJ Unveils COO Job Description

Today, in an exciting development the Governor's Office opened a website for the COO search and unveiled the job description for the new COO. Take a look at:

http://nj.gov/camdencoosearch/job/

The job description is wonderful. Accolades to the Governor's staff, they are clearly beginning to get the picture of what's going on in Camden. Camden needs a COO with a strong background as a public sector manager.

Another interesting note is that the Search Committee is called the Camden COO Advisory Search Committee. This is very smart. The size and diversity of the committee inevitably makes it unsuitable to be overly involved in the implementation of the search process. The high quality candidates that we want to apply for this job are not going to want their names made public until the final steps in the search process. It is critical for the staff to use the committee to set goals and priorities for the search and then review the final tier of candidates. It's important to set clear boundaries and expectation for committee members to understand their role.

A critical question for the Governor's staff to address will be at what point and in what format should the Advisory Search Committee meet the potential candidates. This needs to be well planned. Immediately afterwards the press will have the names of the candidates and the information will be made public.

I'm hearing that the Governor's staff got a taste for the strong personalities and amount of dissension that occurs amongst leaders in Camden. The Mayor unexpectedly showed up in Trenton on the day of the first search committee meeting. Also committee members had a lot of strong opinions about the takeover and the search.

This committee is an important opportunity for Camden leaders to see how a well facilitated, well run committee can do a national search. If this process goes well it can have many positive reprecussion in the years to come as other searches are done for new City Department Directors, etc. The Governor's staff are going out on a limb creating this committee and they deserve a huge amount of credit. They could have done this search behind closed doors and never involved anyone from Camden.