Further Questions: How does the initial selection work?

Here’s the first in a series of six great questions posed by a reader.

This week I asked people who hire librarians:

Who does your first round of sorting/selecting applicants for interviews (a computer/an HR professional/you/someone else…)? Is there generally a fixed number of applicants selected for the initial round  or does it depend on the position, the pool of applicants, or something else entirely?

Because librarians are faculty here, HR does not receive the applications. They are sent directly to the chair of the search committee. The search committee has a rubric by which the members evaluate the applications. Each application must have all of the required qualifications and usually one of the desired to be an A application. The committee meets to go through the applications one by one and assigns Yes, Maybe, and No to each application. The Yes applications are narrowed to the number of candidates who will be phone/Skype interviewed..

– Laurie Phillips, Associate Dean for Technical Services, J. Edgar & Louise S. Monroe Library, Loyola University New Orleans

Hopefully I can share some insight into how this process works at the majority of staffing firms. Usually selection at a recruitment agency is a two stage process. The first selection occurrs when a candidate initially sends in their resume (by email or by uploading it via a web portal). This selection is usually carried out by a recruitment consultant scanning the resume (and cover letter/email, if there is one), to screen out anyone who clearly doesn’t have any library/records experience, qualification or relevance. I’ve had teachers, plumbers, and today a welder…

The second part of this stage, with many agencies, is a telephone screening call. Different agencies have different policies – some will register everyone who applies who has some relevant experience/qualification, while others will screen out any who don’t pass the telephone pre-screen – that would generally be candidates with poor communication skills but could also include those with unrealistic expectations (in terms of salary for their level of experience, for example) or who don’t meet other criteria the agency has decided to apply.

Once a candidate is registered with a staffing agency, the second selection takes place when a consultant has a job vacancy and searches through the database to find candidates who are a good match, in order to contact them to see if they are interested. That search is often an automated one, using either codes generated when the database file was created or keywords from within the CV/resume (or a combination of the two).

In order to make sure that your details are amongst those retrieved during this second selection process, it is important to make sure you include all the relevent keywords. For example putting “familiar with a range of online subscription sources” isn’t much help when a recruiter is searching their database for instances of the words ‘Factiva’ or ‘Lexis Nexis’!

I have noticed that many candidates leave recruiters and hirers to make assumptions from their resume – “I’ve worked for x years as a Librarian in y kind of organisation – so it’s obvious I can do inquiries, cataloguing, acquisitions, or whatever’. Well to the database search engine it isn’t obvious, and resumes like this rarely come up in searches. Consequently those candidates find they don’t often get calls about vacancies.

It is important to remember that a recruiter may interview 10-15 people a week, every week. After a few months it becomes impossible to remember all those people – so a database search is really the only practical way to make sure that more than 1 or 2 weeks most recent applicants get a chance. Making sure your resume is searchable, for the types of skills you want to use in your next job, is therefore very important.

– Nicola Franklin, Director, The Library Career Centre Ltd.

We’ve no HR department.  I as director do the first contact.  A quality control librarian does the final selection based on quality of sample records.

– J. McRee (Mac) Elrod, Special Libraries Catalouging

In our system, all applications  go through our City HR office.  When we put in a staffing requisition, HR pulls the appropriate applications, grades them (using unknown criteria), and sends us names.  Sometimes they send us 5 names, sometimes 3 names —  you never really know what you’re going to get.  Sometimes (too often) they send us the same names over and over even though we’ve passed over the people multiple times.

We’re not really sure what drives the number of names we receive, nor do we fully understand the grading criteria that is used.

– Emilie Smart, Division Coordinator of Reference Services & Computer Services at East Baton Rouge Parish Library

We are a medium sized library and when we post a good job (full-time with benefits) we will get between 30 and 40 applicants. The process for interviewing and hiring is slightly different for our lower level positions. Pages, substitutes and hourly employees are selected by the person who will directly supervise them.

We don’t have an “HR professional” on staff so the department managers and I conduct the interviews. Typically I let the direct supervisor or manager sort through the applications and pick out about 10 we might want to interview. As director, I then go through that smaller pool and identify those that we will interview. We do not have a set number of candidates we want to interview. It depends on the importance of the job and the size of the candidate pool.

In the case of full-time employees I participate equally with the manager of the department in the actual interview, but I make the final call on who will be offered the position. We work from a set list of questions so all candidates are asked the same questions and we take turn asking the questions. Generally we talk a bit about each candidate right after the interview, but do a more thorough review after all the interviews are completed.

– Christine Hage, Director, Rochester Hills Public Library