Every other week or so, I have asked a question to a group of people who hire library and LIS workers. This is the final question for 2023. I’m going to take a little hiatus on this feature, with the idea that we’ll probably be back in 2024.
If you have questions you think I should ask, if you’d like to be someone who responds to questions, or if you have any other feedback on this feature (timing, things to change, things to keep, etc.) please shoot me an email at hiringlibrarians AT gmail.
This week’s question was suggested by someone who hires librarians:
When interviewing both external and internal candidates, do you ask additional or different questions of the internal candidates? What kinds of questions tend to get helpful answers from your internal candidates?
Celia Rabinowitz, Assistant Vice-President for Academic Engagement and Director of Mason Library, Keene State College: We always receive very clear instructions (as I expect most search/hiring committees do) that treating candidates fairly means that we are required to ask the same questions of all candidates and to provide the same information to all candidates. So if a candidate asks us a question during the search process we need to be sure that all the other candidates also receive any new information that is included in a response from us.
Obviously an internal candidate comes into a search with a knowledge base that is, by definition, qualitatively different from external candidates. One way to try to address that is to be sure to use the same set of questions with every candidate at each stage of the search, but to use the opportunity for follow-up questions to focus on something an internal candidate might know, or even something from an external candidate’s credentials that the committee members are interested in. Questions from candidates themselves can also create opportunities for a conversation that opens up the ability to move beyond the set of questions we have for all candidates.
I always hope that we create questions that give each candidate the opportunity to help us understand how they think, how their experience can help us, etc. And that includes internal candidates. All of this probably seems a bit unrealistic, but perhaps taking this approach means ending up in a situation where we are as close to being completely fair as we can be.
Anonymous Federal Librarian: When hiring for federal positions, our library always follows the rules established by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). That means that every interviewee is asked the same questions, internal or external. The goal is to ensure that each candidate is evaluated the same. However, having interviewed for positions at several other agencies, not all federal libraries follow the OPM rules. We are not able to ask follow-up questions, so the interview process can be a bit intimidating because there is no back-and-forth. Candidates who interview at our library are evaluated on how well or thoroughly they answer the questions. What I find with some internal candidates is that they are not as thorough as they need to be, and that ultimately hurts them. There is an assumption that they don’t need to go into detail about their accomplishments because we already know them. While it’s true that the hiring panel usually knows them and knows their work, the internal candidate needs to “sell” themselves like they are an external candidate. I usually find candidates who use the STAR (situation, task, action, result) method for responding to interview questions to be the most successful.
Hiring Librarians 