To Örebro University

The essay aims to empirically examine which public administration values that are used when recruiting municipal directors, with a focus on whether job advertisements contain a comprehensive picture of this important public mission, which can contribute to suitable people applying for this type of position. The purpose is limited to the following questions, which we intend to construct a theoretical framework around in order to be able to answer at a later stage: • Which public values are prominent in job advertisements for the recruitment of municipal directors and which values appear to a limited extent or not at all? • How are public values formulated in job advertisements for municipal directors in the form of word choice and reasoning? • What does the process look like in the creation of job advertisements for municipal directors? Recruiting well in terms of presenting from the beginning a comprehensive picture of the values and tasks of the position is important; especially in public administrations as employment affects the social-, political-, and economic parts of society. The issue of recruitment becomes interesting, as we can study to what extent democratic and economic values that managers need to relate to emerge already in the initial phase of recruitment. The municipal director becomes particularly relevant because he/she works in an organization that manages several welfare services within a broad spectrum with a large turnover. Through an empirical analysis of a quantitative and qualitative nature of job advertisements and e-mail interviews, we can conclude that it is economic values that primarily appear in the job advertisements. The descriptive study has managed to produce data which indicates that there is a local variation of values, that the complexity of the role does not emerge, it focuses to a large extent on economic values. This data may be useful for future studies that may conceivably investigate potential institutional change in public management or if party affiliation affects the content of the advertisement.