Above: Last night, the Town’s recruiter set the stage for the Select Board’s interview of finalists. (image cropped from meeting video)
The Town has posted the video from last night’s interview of three candidates for Southborough’s Fire Chief.
As I wrote yesterday, the meeting was held without the ability to attend remotely. As I updated this morning, Chair Andrew Dennington emailed yesterday afternoon that a video of the meeting would be made available for subsequent viewing.
Dennington explained that the lack of a live streaming was “to avoid any potential risk of someone attending online and then informing candidates in real-time of the questions that are asked.”
At the time of my original post, I couldn’t confirm all three candidates’ current positions (so I didn’t posit about any). Dennington explained that their resumes weren’t posted “out of respect and consideration of the candidates who ultimately will not be chosen”.
But he did confirm the identities of the candidates, who were interviewed.
Below are the finalists, along with links to their section of the video:
- Brian Harrington, a Deputy Chief in Hudson (click here)
- Laurent McDonald, the current Fire Chief in Oxford (click here)
- Andrew Puntini, a Captain/Shift Commander in Foxborough and on-call firefighter in Ashland (click here)
Each candidate was given about an hour and was told that the board had a list of 15 questions for them and potentially some follow up questions.
Prior to the interviews, the Town’s contracted recruiter explained their process for narrowing down to the finalists.
According to Community Paradigm’s Bernie Lynch, they brought in 15 candidates, then narrowed them down to seven who were each intenviewed for 30-45 minutes. Those were then narrowed to about five to send to the assessment center.
The assessment team was comprised with former fire chiefs described as “very familiar with the current and former Fire Chiefs” and the responsibilities of a chief for bot the fire and emergency medical services. According to Lynch, the team was very pleased with the assessment results and:
felt that each one brought something a little bit different in terms of skill set that they would bring to the job and they all come from a little bit different background in terms of where they are in their careers.
You can view the full video of the meeting here.
The Select Board is scheduled to discuss and potentially appoint one of the candidates at a meeting on Monday morning, April 8th, at 8:00 am. (That one will have a hybrid attendance option.)
If the board does choose to appoint a candidate, that is generally contingent on successful negotiation of a contract.
In Lynch’s introduction, he assured the board that over the weekend, members would be able to reach out to him and the person who conducted the assessment center to “talk through” any issues that come out of the interviews.
