The Council moved to hire an external consulting company to help the GSS develop and implement its Strategic Plan.
Greg Christie, Director of Finance prefaced the motion by saying, “We’re at a very interesting [point of time] in the society where we’ve been giving serious consideration to [. . .] how we want to run the GSS over the next few years.”
Scott Blythe from AdvanceU1st Consultants gave a brief summary of his firm’s proposal to assist the society to specify its goals, and to define and carry out actions to help achieve those goals. He identified a few points of improvement, including a lack of planned action to carry out goals and ways to measure their success, as well as there being no structured points of communication with university governing bodies like Senate or the Board of Governors.
Concerns from Council representatives included hiring externally instead of providing opportunities to grad students, and there were some questions regarding the ambiguity of the language in the proposal.
Interim Executive Director Mike Soron pointed out the advantages of having someone external who is not bogged down by regular society business to work on long-term planning.
The motion ultimately passed by simple majority.
Executive Director Hiring
While Mike Soron is currently filling in as Interim Executive Director of the GSS, come September, the staff position will once again be vacant.
Council voted to begin the hiring process of a new Executive Director and appointed a hiring panel. The society will advertise the position over weeks to come, and will be accepting applicants until the end of July. The selected candidate will be ratified at the August Council meeting and will be trained to take over in September.
The position will pay a yearly stipend of approximately $70,000 — a figure which was concerningly high to some representatives of the Council. It was pointed out that this was the national average for a director of a non-profit organization with one to two years of experience.
Some discussion revolved around the possibility of the position being held by a student, as the GSS has articulated a desire to create opportunities for graduate students. Soron replied, “We would be putting the society at risk, quite honestly, by not having somebody with the institutional memory lasting over a year, a full-time dedication to the society separate from any academic commitments [. . .] I do think that’s quite important.”
The hiring panel will add a testing component to the process to ensure candidates meet the desired level of skill for the position.
