Oh hey! Every other week or so, I ask a question to a group of people who hire library and LIS workers.
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 thoughts and feelings please shoot me an email at hiringlibrarians AT gmail.
This week’s question is:
Since you started hiring (if you’re willing to ballpark this for us, that’s appreciated), how has the process improved? How has it gotten worse? Bonus: what’s one thing you wish you could do/enact to continue to evolve library hiring practices?
Anonymous: I think that hiring has gotten different.
In my area there are more part time positions than full time. Add that library pay tends to be low-ish and people are still into working from home our candidate pools are sometimes not robust.
However, I have noticed with the last couple of postings that since we have not been so rigid on regular ol’ library experience that we have gotten a few candidates who had interesting backgrounds and since hired have been a breath of fresh air.
I still want the librarians we hire to have a MLIS or equivalent, but that is kind of it. Our equity training has changed what kind of questions we ask and what kind of experience is desired and personally I think it is going to help our library while playing this long game.
Rachel Vagts, Special Collections and Archives Manager, The Denver Public Library: I think one of the best improvements I’ve seen both as a job searcher and as someone conducting and participating in searches is the practice of sharing the interview questions beforehand. I think we all want our candidates or ourselves to be prepared for the interview process and I don’t see any benefit in the “gotcha” aspect that can happen when the questions are only shared during the interview process. It also helps to level the playing field for people who prepare differently, who are visual rather than verbal learners and in the case of complex questions (which we all ask!) it makes sure you get a complete answer.
I also think the improvement of virtual meeting software has been helpful. For a screening interview, I find the video call much more effective than the phone interview of the past. The improvement in call quality and audio has also been a benefit in these settings. This has allowed us to more effectively expand our interview pool since we typically conducted primarily local searches for most of our positions.
The one thing I’ve been surprised by and find frustrating is the lack of cover letters. With many organizations using automated software (we use Workday) it can be confusing for the applicant to both understand we’d like a cover letter and to even figure out how to attach it to the application. I still find that document to be useful to gauge a person’s interest and how their experience may or may not intersect with a specific position.
As far as what I’d like to change in the grander scheme of recruitment–I’m always for pay transparency. In Colorado it’s state law that the salary has to be included and I’d love to see that be required on the national level. It helps everyone have a better understanding of the position, the compensation and provides greater equity for all applicants.
Celia Rabinowitz, Assistant Vice-President for Academic Engagement and Director of Mason Library, Keene State College: I started hiring as a director in 2002. For a few years before that I was hiring staff in public services but not library faculty. So it has been a long time! I think I would say that the shift to digital files has actually improved the process because files are more accessible than when they in one secure location that search committee members have to retrieve them from. The downside is that the rating system which is based on stated qualifications is not very forgiving. If a candidate is rated “below average” it can be difficult to get them back in the pool even if a committee conversation results in a desire to make a change. That said, it is interesting that people on committees tend to be relatively consistent so there is enough interrater reliability to make this useful.
Increasing levels of outside control of the process is one thing I think has gotten worse. There could be a range of good and bad reasons for this including concern about legal challenges, efforts at making searches more equitable and diverse, etc. The “control” is often presented as more robust support for a search from institution/system recruiters. My experience has been mixed including everything from limiting the files we see to trying to take on the phone interview portion of the process.
I would like to be able to ensure that all searches contained a salary range. At my institution the faculty contract is openly available so faculty can easily find that even if it is not in the ad. And staff positions usually contain an hourly or salary range. I would like to return to being able to give candidates phone/Zoom questions in advance which we are no longer permitted to do. And, I’d like to see academic librarian searches take less time overall and always, always include clear communication at each stage of the search to all candidates in the pool in those stages. I think my institution does a good job of that but a little bit of reading makes it clear that this is not consistent. It sends a pretty strong message about an institution and its culture when a candidate in the final stages of a search never hears anything, or worse, receives a communication a year or more after the search is over. What is going on with that?
Dr. John Sandstrom, College Professor and Acquisitions Librarian, New Mexico State University Library: I have been hiring staff since the late 1980’s. The staff I’ve hired includes students, staff, paraprofessionals, and degreed librarians in a variety of institutions. The hiring process has become more formal at all levels. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The formalization has tended to decrease favoritism, but it has also decreased flexibility.
I wish the HR departments would recognize that the boilerplate they use for generic “clerical” positions does not work particularly well for libraries.
Laura Daniels (she/they), Assistant Director, Metadata Production and Acting Director, Cataloging and Metadata Services, Cornell University Library: In the past 10-15 years, I’ve seen some hiring processes become more candidate-centered. For example, it’s now accepted practice (at least where I work) to share interview questions in advance, and I’ve personally had really good results from this practice. Candidates had time to think through and give more nuanced responses to our questions and I hope they felt a little more confident at the same time. There’s also better awareness now of all the potential biases that influence our impressions of candidates and how to counter them so that we are truly evaluating candidates based on the position criteria. Despite this awareness, I still think we can do a better job of not making assumptions about candidates.
I don’t know if this aspect is worse or has always been bad… but I see us looking too often for “unicorns” (candidates with very specific and not necessarily intersecting skills) and also seeking candidates with professional experience (such as cataloging experience) for what is effectively an entry-level position. How are our potential colleagues supposed to acquire such experience?
The lines around what is considered “professional” work and qualifications (master’s degree/MLIS/experience) for library roles continue to be blurry which I don’t think is necessarily bad or good. It continues to be the case that many of the diverse and capable candidates I think we should be hiring either cannot afford a graduate degree or must make steep sacrifices in order to do so. This reinforces the status quo, and does not serve either our profession or our users.
Hiring Librarians 