In early 2023 the board of directors began discussing the importance and value of an Executive Director role at Temple Ohev Sholom. This discussion dovetailed with the desire to onboard a third party accounting firm to handle TOS’s “behind-the-scenes” financial bookkeeping (AR, AP, Taxes, etc). In great news, both of these discussions have turned into work streams and are proceeding at pace.
In the interest of transparency, and a strong desire to have open and available dialogue with the congregation at large about such an important role as the Executive Director, we’ve created this page to both keep you informed, and allow you to easily “reach out” with ideas, questions, or a desire to take on more responsibility in this or future processes.
Timeline:
- December 2022 – Ohev Sholom’s Financial Admin takes a new position outside of TOS.
- December 2022 – TOS board has initial conversations about whether to hire a full time financial admin, or to outsource. Outsourcing is identified as a beneficial path to reduce cost, increase expertise, define accountability and supports rethinking our in-house staffing needs.
- December 2022 – TOS Treasurer steps up to run TOS financials on an interim basis in order to learn “what we don’t know” towards defining the role going forward.
- January 2023 – TOS Personnel Committee members begin researching the Executive Director role, its definition, pros and cons.
- February 2023 – Spring-boarding off of the Union For Reform Judaism’s National Association for Temple Administrators documentation and job board, a first draft TOS Executive Director job description is created to begin to formalize the idea. The job description is iterated on repeatedly.
- March 2023 – A refined Executive Director job description is presented to the TOS board at large in the March meeting.
- April 2023 – The TOS Executive Director job posting is made live on the bulletin boards at Ohev and the JCC, included in Kol Central, on the NATA online job board, Indeed and LinkedIn.
- Mid-April 2023 – 15 applications have been received, from as far away as Israel, California and NY, and as near as our very own Harrisburg.
- Late-April 2023 – Interviewing has begun.
- Mid-May 2023 – A candidate has been identified and presented to the Board of Directors (BOD). The Board of Directors then voted to authorize the Personnel Committee to negotiate an offer with said candidate.
- Late-May 2023 – Negotiation with candidate has commenced, and a potential offer has been presented to the BOD for approval.
- May 30th, 2023 – The board of directors approved an offer, which has been presented to, and accepted by the candidate.
- June 12th, 2023 – Temple Ohev Sholom hires an executive director and continues to grow in programming and membership.
- December 2023 – Board discussions continue, reviewing the Executive Director and Office Administrator roles. Motions are made in recognition of the effort required to keep up with the growing pace of events and new members at Ohev to not only commence a new Executive Director search, but also to move the Office Administrator role from part time to full time. These motions carry with an overwhelming majority of the board.
Have questions or ideas? We’d love to hear from you: [email protected]