***Update (12/07/2020) – The city is revising the job advertisement.
Per Allison Keller in the HR department: “We are currently in the process of updating the job advertisement. The job description has never included the term, only the advertisement. The change will be effective later today.”***
The City of Appleton is seeking a “progressive” person to fill the position of Deputy City Clerk. The positions in Appleton’s city government, both appointed and elected, are all theoretically non-partisan, and using the term “progressive” to describe the sort of person they want as a city clerk strikes me as inappropriate.
I emailed the HR department last week asking them to clarify what they meant when they used this term. After my first email was purportedly not received by them, I emailed them a second time and did receive a response from Allison Keller in the HR department.
Per her email: “We view the term ‘progressive’ as someone who is creative, thinks outside the box, and is continuously looking for improvements for our processes. We do not mean it to have any political inference.
We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. We will review our usage of the term more closely for future job postings”
I understand that “progressive” can have a non-political meaning, but the words “conservative” and “liberal” also have non-political meanings and yet I highly doubt they would have been used in this context. Would the HR department seriously have thought it was appropriate to run an ad saying…
“The City of Appleton is seeking a liberal, energetic person for the position of Deputy City Clerk.”
Or
“The City of Appleton is seeking a conservative, energetic person for the position of Deputy City Clerk.”
Judging by the response Appleton City Hall has received on their facebook posting about this, it seems I’m not the only one who views their use of this term as coming across as inappropriately politicizing a non-political position.
One of the jobs of an HR department is to be aware of the subtleties of language and how things will be perceived by the public. I’m very curious, when they wrote this ad, if they were genuinely completely oblivious to how it would be interpreted. In this election year, countless videos have been filmed and endless pages written regarding the dynamics between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic party. In 2020 of all years, “progressive” is above all a political term.
Are the people in Appleton’s HR department really that obtuse or was the city subtly trying to signal the type of politics they desire in their job candidates? And why, when they had at least one person email them about it and now have multiple people commenting on their facebook post–all indicating they’re reading the term with its political definition–have they not revised the listing?
I have reached out to the HR department for further details.
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