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:
Can you think of a time (or times) when you made a mistake in the hiring process? What was it, when did you realize it was a mistake, and were you able to correct it? How has your process changed as a result of this mistake?
Dr. John Sandstrom, College Professor and Acquisitions Librarian, New Mexico State University Library:
The biggest mistake I ever made when hiring someone was to hire a friend of mine. I did not recuse myself and I should have. He would have still gotten a job with us, but it wouldn’t have been at my location.
The primary change to the hiring practices is that we placed more emphasis on personal relationships with the candidates and recusing yourself ceased to have a stigma attached to it.
Anonymous: Yes, I have made a mistake in hiring. It was about a year ago when we hired a volunteer to take over a paid position. The mistake – since we already knew this person we did NOT interview him. Big mistake. We worked with him for a year, then he left to take a full-time position at another library. After he left we hired another volunteer (after an interview!) and discovered that he had not told her correctly about how to shelve!
Has our process changed? Not really but we will never again hire someone without an interview – regardless of how well we think we know them!
(It also didn’t help that at that time we didn’t really have a “clerk” position so his position technically was the same as other staff that were doing much harder work. That is in the process of being rectified!)
Jennie Garner, Library Director, North Liberty Community Library: We made the mistake of not checking references for a candidate we hired several years ago. The candidate seemed like such a great fit and they gave such a strong interview, we didn’t call the references. It wasn’t noticeable at first but the new employee had several challenges with their work including what we assume was time blindness – showing up to work late every day, sometimes 20 or more minutes. Then it became apparent after a couple months that the work projects they were hired to complete were not getting done and they were spending time on less important tasks or creating their own projects that were not within their job parameters. We really did our best to try to coach them along. We offered them a later schedule to try to remedy the tardiness but they just continued to be late even under the new schedule. Then we tried verbal and written warnings, stepping through the disciplinary process and offering performance reviews and more one-on-one coaching with administrative staff. In the end, we ended up having to fire that individual as their challenges were impeding other staff work and causing some morale issues. It was a tough learning experience.
Today, we call references for every position including our part-time with just a few hours a week and we have really honed the interview process. Our job postings, job descriptions, and interview questions have been reviewed by our staff EDIA committee to work toward consistency and equity in the interviews. We have at least two staff involved in every parttime interview, typically an administrator (director or assistant director) and another full-time team member. The fulltime team works the front lines and we appreciate their input in an interview. For fulltime hires, we have administration and at least one more fulltime staff person. All interviewers work together to select interviewees and after each interview, we debrief and choose the final candidate as a team. (This also builds interview skills for our fulltime staff in the case that they move into management in the future.
While we still occasionally may misstep, the process is a lot smoother and much more reliable. We have a fantastic team and I believe it’s in large part due to this process and also to the inclusive hiring practices.
Hiring Librarians 