THE hunt for Bradford Council's next chief executive is set to resume, after councillors failed to find anyone suitable last year.

And one member of the appointments panel believes the authority should be head-hunting potential applicants on a far greater scale than before, to secure the highest-quality candidates.

The panel, made up of three senior councillors, decided to go back to the drawing board last month after none of the candidates they interviewed were deemed up to the job.

They will meet up on Monday to decide how to proceed.

Councillor Mike Ellis, the Conservative representative on the panel, said it was time for a fresh approach to the recruitment process.

He said: "We will look at what we did last time and decide whether we could have done it differently.

"There is not a laid-down procedure but, shall we say, in the past there has been an accepted way of doing things. I think we have got to look at that.

"Also, do we put more emphasis this time on having someone contact people who we think might be interested, be more pro-active?

"There was a certain amount of that done last time around, but I don't think to any great depth."

Cllr Ellis said he would be discussing his thoughts with the other two members of the panel - Councillor David Green, leader of the Labour-run Council, and its deputy leader, Councillor Imran Hussain - when they meet on Monday.

City solicitor Suzan Hemingway is standing in as the authority’s interim chief executive after the departure of Tony Reeves from the £178,000-a-year role in October.

In his last interview with the Telegraph & Argus before stepping down, Mr Reeves said he saw the chief executive role in Bradford as "the top job in local government".

Cllr Ellis said he agreed with this assessment.

He said: "With what we have got in front of us in Bradford, with the Combined Authority, with the need to bring inward investment and the need to create jobs and so on, it is a very challenging job.

"But for somebody that wants rewards - and I don't mean financial rewards, but somebody that wants to feel they have actually made a difference to the district - I would agree with Tony Reeves that it is the greatest job in local government."

Cllr Green declined to say before the meeting how he thought the candidate search should proceed.

But he has previously suggested one of the reasons they could be having recruitment problems was because potential candidates could be too busy preparing for this year's elections.