In 2013, as part of the Job Hunter’s Web Guide series, I ran a profile of Library Jobline, the job board run by the Colorado State Library (funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services). They still provide listings, and have in fact grown! But of course some things have changed. Below are some updates (and a new question).
Who Runs It?
It is now run by Network and Resource Sharing, a unit of the Colorado State Library.
What’s changed about your site since the 2013 profile?
The site has grown significantly since 2013 in terms of the number of employers and job seekers that have signed up and the frequency of job postings. In 2020 we partnered with the Rhode Island Office of Library and Information Services and incorporated their job board into LibraryJobline. This has been a great relationship and we hope that it might serve as a model for partnering with other state/regional job boards in the future. More generally we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of employers outside of Colorado to the point that jobs for libraries within the state are now about half of all new posts.
Regarding the website itself, there have been few changes in functionality since 2013. Our focus remains the same: make it easy as possible for employers and job seekers to connect, while providing a platform that encourages collecting, analyzing, and reporting data for library (and related) employment. To that end we’ve stripped away some of the burdensome posting requirements for employers, and we’ve continually refined our email notifications so that job seekers more reliably and accurately receive notifications of new posts.
The *NEW* Question: What are your standards for job listings (e.g. must include salary)?
We require a few basic pieces of data about the job such as title, employer, location, and a job description. Additionally, employers can have their jobs “featured” by providing additional data for hours, compensation, and benefits. We don’t edit people’s ads but we do occasionally reject ads for jobs which are not within or closely related to the field of librarianship.
What’s the job hunting landscape like for your target audience?
It’s probably not unlike the general economic landscape as a whole: beginning in late 2020 we saw a significant increase in the number of jobs posted, but that has not been accompanied by a change in the number of new job seeker accounts or traffic to the site. For example, we had twice as many jobs posted in 2021 compared to 2020, but just about the same number of new user accounts for both years. It’s early yet, but that trend has continued up to this point in 2022.
We recently published an infographic for 2021 and you can see that here: https://www.lrs.org/fast-facts-reports/2021-library-jobline-fast-facts/
Thank you!
Hiring Librarians 