Category Archives: Podcast

My guest is John Fink, everyone’s favorite Canadian and Hiring Librarians superfan. In this episode, we talk about how Americans can live and work in Canada, perform a dramatic reading of a Job Hunter’s survey and bitch about Twitter.

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube music and other various podcasting sites (let me know if you can’t find it on your preferred platform). Next week on episode 5, I’ll talk with that memory worker Sophie Ziegler about leaving libraries.

Transcript:

Note: This transcript is AI-generated, with minimal clean-up, and may contain some errors.

Emily Weak 0:07
This is the hiring librarians podcast. In it, we examine the landscape of hiring and job search in the library and information science fields. My name is Emily weak. Over the last decade, I have surveyed the practices and opinions of more than 2000 workers on both sides of the hiring table. I have shared these interviews as well as the work of authors, researchers, career coaches, recruiters and other such folks on the site hiring librarians.com. I’m excited to expand this work to a new space here on the hiring librarians Podcast. Today I’m talking to John Fink, John B. Fink perhaps – which do you prefer? Do you use your middle initial?

John Fink 0:52
It doesn’t really matter. I usually just say John think that’s fine.

Emily Weak 0:56
John Fink is somebody that I met on Twitter. As you may know, hiring librarians started in 2012. And it ran for about four years. And then I took a break. And I recently started to back up again, I guess it’s not so recent anymore. It’s maybe about a year and a half. And I interacted with John a lot on Twitter. And you probably did too. John was a big Twitter guy, and then Twitter kind of tanked. I don’t know, a different megalomaniac took it over. So, but anyway, let’s start by John, will you will you tell the good listeners out there, who you are, where you are what you do?

John Fink 1:31
Certainly, my name is John Fink. I am currently the digital scholarship librarian at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. And the I work in my institutions Digital Humanities Center, my own background, like people always ask what does digital humanities always say it’s kind of what you bring to it. And so why it and sort of vague field which is both strength and it’s somewhat its downfall. And my own background is as a library systems administrator, like a Unix system administrators, so I do a lot of infrastructure and consulting work around computer infrastructure and computer programs and stuff. And I’m quite lucky, quite lucky in that I can’t think of another position in this country. That’s quite a bit like mine. Now, Canada being, you know, quite a bit smaller in population, the United States. So I’m sure there’s quite a number of people in the states to do this. But I have a specific remit for open source software and promoting open source software, which has been sort of my shtick for 30 years almost. And so I’m quite happy that that’s in my position. Yeah, so I’ve been at the Digital Humanities Center since its inception, which was about 2012, late 2011 2012. Before that, I worked in a different position in the same library, mostly working around the ILS, which was a bit a bit hairy. In

Emily Weak 2:49
you are an American in Canada, which I think and what so you talk a little bit about how you got to be an American and Canada and thinking particularly, there might be people listening who would like to be.

John Fink 3:04
So Properly speaking, I’m a dual citizen. So I did naturalize as a Canadian, six or seven years ago, Oh, gosh. And I primarily think of myself as a Canadian, because I’ve just been here that long. But I did come up as an American. I was born in Indiana, and I moved here in 2007. And there is a feature in what was called NAFTA and is now called Calusa. I don’t know what it was called. But the the prior President change the name of the treaty, and I can’t remember it’s called now but I’ll just call it NAFTA, where members of a specific range of professional Classes can get get a work permit fairly easily provided they have a job offer. And so inexplicably, although when you think about when the permit was issued was around late 80s, early 90s, it is very explicable. But nowadays seems very strange librarians are on that list. And so if you have an MLS and MLS MLS, you can as an American or Mexican, although I’ve never seen a Mexican citizen up here, I’d quite like to you can apply for jobs in Canada. And there is no restriction on the number of people that come in, there’s no quota. Obviously, there’s a quote in terms of number of jobs, but the government doesn’t set a quota. And when I came in, I apply at the job offer letter in hand, and I applied for the work permit at a border crossing at two in the morning. Just like and they were like you’re doing a gap and so it took about two or three hours any wait around the border crossing and I have my work permit. So folks that see job ads in Canada can apply for them now. It’s good to check with the institution that they will support you know, they’ll they’ll want because obviously they’re gonna say we don’t want any foreign applicants or whatever. That’s nothing you can do but you don’t want any darn Americans. You know, and I have run into that where people have been advertising and they don’t want to hire under the TN one permit even though it doesn’t cost them anything and I think it’s More like do we have to pay your moving expenses and stuff like that more than the the actual administrative burden of the work permit, which is largely on the on the applicant, at least initially. Now, the problem with the TN one is that it’s a three year permit, when I came was a one year permit, but a three year permit now it can be renewed, but it’s not designed to be renewed. I had mine renewed every year and it wasn’t a problem. But But I can understand some institutions might be a little reticent, if they think that renewal will go weird. And then they have to advertise a job again, or what have you. But permit is they’re still there, even under the new new NAFTA, still same permit.

Emily Weak 5:39
And you do a little bit of hiring you are on hiring committees in your work. Wow. Do you have advice for job seekers? Or do you have a general philosophy at home?

John Fink 5:51
Yeah, well, I will first point out that I don’t have the power to hire fire directly. I am a rank and file librarian. And the way that we’re organized in my workplace is that people in my labor unit, don’t supervise other librarians. And so I have been on committees, several committee like librarian hiring committees, but I have not been the principal Chair of it, which is almost always who the position reports to. So I have been in an advisory capacity and I feel that, you know, I’ve had good input, and people listened to me, but my final decisions are never mind. Just getting out there. And advice, like, it’s really hard to say advice for applying other than people tend to shy away from applying to things that they don’t 100% or 90% match. And I would advise people to be a little wider in their conception of what they can do. Now, I you know, obviously, the moderation is a key in this, because I have certainly seen positions that we’ve advertised, where someone is resolutely unqualified at our very base level, like well put in a position must have a library degree. And we’ll get a bunch of history, people applying without library degrees, things like, and so you know, take care to look at those grips and say, minimum requirements and try to heal to those. But the you know, desired or everything, I think has a lot more flexibility in it. And that would be my chief piece of advice. I used to have other advice. And I’m just going to tell you what my other piece of advice was that I don’t say any more, because I think it’s terrible. So just putting that out there. As you say, I just didn’t show you that, you know, I wouldn’t say it’s wrong, but it’s it’s not good. And that is be flexible in where you move. So I still think that’s a good idea. But it’s a terrible thing to tell people because either they can be flexible, or they can’t be flexible. And if they can’t be flexible, 90% of the time, they have a good reason they have family, they have a support network, their doctor is there or whatever. And so it’s it’s just sort of demeaning to tell someone, Oh, you, you should be able to move to the middle of nowhere, Saskatchewan, for a job. And either they know they can’t, or they can’t. And so I don’t say that anymore. Even though it is a truism, and I believe probably still and you’d have a better idea of this than me that if you apply for a job where a library school exists, you’re gonna have a hard time.

Emily Weak 8:15
I think that’s an interesting point in context, now to perhaps always in context, but I also hear from folks who are like, you know, I have to look in the states that are Americans, or like, I have to look in the states that are safe for me to live.

John Fink 8:28
Yeah, yeah. Which absolutely consideration now, and was not certainly when I was job seeking last. And so I do tend to forget about that. But even even in Canada that’s starting to sort of creep in, although not to the extent and hopefully, progress too far. But there are places I won’t. If I was applying for a job, I would think very, very, very heavily about applying to simply because I’d be worried about what I have a job in a year because is there somebody who has it in for higher education or what have you. But that’s that is a such a minor thing. But compared to the very many places in the United States where I would expect people even me and as disclosure people can’t see me because it’s a podcast, but I am a 50 year old white, straight man cisgendered boring as hell just cookie cutter dude, if you have in your mind the vision of a Unix system administrator, I am basically that except I may be a little thinner. Typical system is rare, but I have that, that error about me. And so I don’t even want to speculate on the amount of judging of risk factors. And, you know, will I be murdered? Or will my rights be taken away that that our trans and LGBTQIA plus colleagues have when considering where to apply for things because it’s just quite a lot hairier than it used to be? And it’s it’s heartbreaking so yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Emily Weak 9:54
I am also not a transgender person. I am a cisgender person and I but I am thinking to what we’re discussing now. You You know, we say, oh, it’s bad now. But you know, it was bad in the past too. So maybe this is a variation that people have had for a long time. But it’s now at least a consideration that we can. Right where people are talking about perhaps I don’t know, or Yeah,

John Fink 10:14
I mean, I don’t at all want to say it was it was better in the past, it was probably better than within, you know, prior, let’s say, let’s just say as an arbitrary benchmark, 1998 to 2016, probably better than now. As far as people safety and stuff goes, but it’s, you know, things have always been fraught for some constituency or another. Yeah. And I think part of what makes it more fraught now, and this is maybe kind of a terrible thing to say, is that the kinds of things that are happening is states are beginning to affect cisgender straight people and women, especially talking about things like reproductive rights and things like that. So it’s touching on more people’s rights that were previously thought to be perhaps unassailable. And that’s, that’s my back of the envelope thinking as a as a Canadian man. So good, feel free to do that.

Emily Weak 11:10
What’s the name of your podcast as a Canadian?

John Fink 11:13
Canadian man is the world’s least popular podcast.

Emily Weak 11:20
So when did you last look for work, you’ve been in Canada for quite a while.

John Fink 11:26
So when I last looked for work was probably in 2011, or 2012. And I didn’t look terribly, terribly hard. The working environment that we had at my school from 2000 7012 was a little fraught, we lost a lot of people, a lot, a lot of people, people that could be mobile did leave, I couldn’t leave for various reasons. And but I did apply for a few jobs, I want to say to in about 2011 2012. The last time I looked very seriously for work with a with a sort of undercurrent of distinct urgency was 2007. And I applied for, I think, three or four jobs at that point. And not the one that I’m in now or that the institution I’m in now in Oh, seven. Yeah, yeah. So I’m out of practice, as far as applying for things. But I do try to maintain an awareness of the issues that folks are going through and your your site has been just one, I just love it. I loved it initially. And I love it. Now the reboot, it’s just wonderful.

Emily Weak 12:29
In my head, sometimes I think of you as John thanks superfan. And it makes me feel really good. Like it was really nice. When I just was like thinking about bringing it back. I was like, Should I bring it back? And you’re like, yes. Yes. And

John Fink 12:47
if I could say what I have crucially liked about it the most. And this, it’s not that the other parts are bad at all. But it gives such a window into a hiring managers perspective, with the interview questions, and when they are bad, or when I think they are bad, it’s very instructive. Like I can’t call it any specific examples of the moment. But there are folks like if if someone has a arm tattoo, I’m like, This person is not serious. I’m like, Oh, my God, this is this is an attitude you have. And I’m like, Oh my word. And so there are various sort of ads showing for lack of a better term that people do when they when they have anonymity that is very illustrative. And I can’t see has been duplicated, at least not in the same way in any other place that I’ve looked at for, you know, how library and hiring works. Like I haven’t seen anything quite as illustrative as the interviews with certainly with hiring managers and also with with job seekers as your site has been. So I really loved it for for ages because of that. Well,

Emily Weak 13:50
thank you. It’s an interesting, always an interesting quandary for me, and I’m thinking more about when I started it, I was like, I’m just gonna put everything out there. And I would also sometimes pick like incendiary parts of interviews to as the title, have people come in and read it. And I’m thinking more now that I’ve come back about, like my responsibilities in terms of curation. And in terms of just like, it’s been an eye opening experience for me, like I’ve learned a lot of things, not just about when I read an interview, and somebody says something, and I’m like, oh, that’s definitely terrible. But when I read an interview, and I’m fine, and then I hear people talk about it, and it turns out, it isn’t fine at all. I go Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Like wake up Emily. Like the the survey that I did. That was the what two candidates were it was a huge wake up for me because I like the the people I’m interviewing are terrible. And then I left but I was also terrible.

John Fink 14:52
I’m sure you weren’t terrible. I don’t remember the specifics of that, but I’m sure you’re not terrible.

Emily Weak 14:55
It was before you know as before I even knew the term cisgender so I I was a survey that sort of assumed that people were cisgender and other people who were not. And even the questions did that. And I didn’t realize it until people pointed that out to me. So I am very grateful to hiring librarians for both for pointing out things, all kinds of things. But I also think about, like, if I, if I post a survey, and the title is something that’s like, you know, yeah, I’ll never hire a man wearing a fedora or something. Yeah, well.

John Fink 15:33
But, look, for example, I just want to say that having a hook to draw people in is valuable. And if somebody said that to you, knowing that it was part of a, you know, something that was publishable, or it was going to be published, you’re obviously not springing this on people saying, oh, secrets between you and me, they know that you’re going to write about this, but I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that. It’s in the interview. It’s an interesting salient part, it hooks and gets people in. Yeah, I mean, you use your judgment, you don’t want to be too much of a of a jerk. But but you know, if someone really did say, I don’t want to hire a guy wearing a fedora, or it’s like, I want to know why I have good to read this. Yeah, I think I think that’s a perfectly valid advertising tack to take when you’re writing up a write up?

Emily Weak 16:19
Well, I mean, I think it sort of depends, like, it has to do with it, like, it sounds like I’m advocating for that, to some extent, like it’s, like his or that, that that’s, you know, somebody might read that and, and go like, Oh, gosh, I should never wear a fedora if they don’t want to deeper or if they don’t, you know, go like this is one person’s opinion. Like, when I read it in context of like I have, I have a gajillion interviews, and this is just one weird person who doesn’t like fedoras. But I think if you don’t, if you just see it out of context, you see hiring librarians never wear fedoras. And if you are more aware, and you hear that this is bad, like you, you know, you it’s it can squash, the fedora, I can

John Fink 17:06
see why you say that. And I’m going to go out on a limb and try to speculate why you think that way. And if I’m totally wrong, or I’m being a jerk, you can absolutely shut me down. But I think because you conduct your interviews in a way that you do not insert yourself editorially very much at all, like the only place I can think of where you insert yourself in a tutorial is perhaps selecting, you know, you have the things where there’s this checkmark Yes, it yes, I’m looking forward zero to five years or whatever. But then there’s sort of the free form fields that you might pull out or excise stuff from. And that’s where you’re exercising a judgment, editorial judgment, but at the same time, you don’t. And I think this is a wonderful thing I don’t want at all say it’s bad. But you do not at the end, say yes, I conducted an interview, and this guy was a big jerk. And he thought this, this, this and this, put it out there mostly unvarnished mostly not with your own feelings, whatever they might be on the matter, except for picking the lead sentence, and deciding what to excerpt from freeform fields. And that to my knowledge is the only place you’re inserting yourself actively into the report. And so I can see you say, Okay, these are the only two places that I do this, therefore, this is me, you know, being a jerk or whatever. And I can see the temptation for someone else to, to really editorialize The this is how I felt about this interview. And but you don’t and I think that’s a big strength because the interviews succeed or fail on their merits to the reader. Yeah, and not necessarily on your feelings on the matter. So I think that’s very good.

Emily Weak 18:37
You know, I, that’s definitely the where I’m coming from, like, I don’t, and it’s for a couple of reasons. First is like, all of my, the, the meat of my content is things that other people say and if I go around saying like, this person said this, and it’s terrible. Let me make fun of it. Like wouldn’t say things to me. Yes. Like, I do think it’s the the value of it is not like my opinion, as somebody who has read or thinks a lot about hiring, the value of it is, in that aggregate of, you know, here, here’s a snapshot of the landscape of what’s going here. Yeah, here’s a real person and real people, things that are weird, but like that being said, there’s also to some extent, your neutrality does not exist, right? So I can’t I can’t say well, I’m neutral and I’m I’m just putting all these out there and everybody you get to decide like the very act of publishing is not

John Fink 19:35
certainly it’s impossible to be neutral it’s very very impossible because of the by your very act of you soliciting these things, you’re taking a stand in some way. And the fact that you may publish some and may not publish others is isn’t an editorial decision also. So I don’t want to say that Emily weak you know, the, the the impartial judge that sits in the heavens and doesn’t insert herself at all Because the opposite is not true. But you do as admirable a job as possible with the published reports, I would say, in terms of not inserting yourself. Instead, we get to insert ourselves we’ll be on on Mastodon or wherever and say this. And I love fedora. And I’m going to wear a fedora every day because I hate this interview or whatever. So we get to do that. And you get to not do that. And that’s, I think, a good arrangement overall. Yeah.

Emily Weak 20:26
Which kind of brings a nice segue, I did kind of want to talk about Twitter, because I like Twitter. For listeners who don’t know John’s twitter handle was at ADR. So if you followed at BDR, you, John, you were a big Twitter guy.

John Fink 20:40
Yeah. Yeah, as you could probably tell from a three letter username, I’ve been on it quite a long time. And at times, I would tweet like, you know, like, I was getting paid per the word. And then I stopped, I have not removed my account. I stopped in November or late October 2022, when when, when things were evidently getting quite dire. And I don’t regret it. I kept my account for a while after that, because I still had a number of researchers asking for scrapes, and other kinds of analysis, which worked up until I want to say May or April of this year, and then they shut down the at least the the API that didn’t cost $60,000 A month or what have you. So I still have an account and I vacillate daily, like should I delete it? Should I not delete it? Or delete it will some Nazi skip up, you know, the ADR name and start and start publishing things? And that’s been mostly my my reticence like at, you know, but I fully expect at some point, that the management of Twitter will go look, if someone hasn’t tweeted in five or six months, then I’m going to auction off their username to the highest bidder, blah, blah, blah. At that point, I mean, I have no choice and somebody else will be a DRM on Twitter slash x. And we’ll just have to deal with it. But yeah, I found it as I think a lot of people did a massively useful, perhaps the most useful, professional tool I had from Oh, seven to 2022. Just a phenomenal tool. And I would be lying if I said, I didn’t miss its reach. And the people that I met there and all this stuff, because I am on Macedon, I’m fairly active. But of course, it doesn’t have nearly the amount of reach that Twitter had. And I have a blue sky account that I don’t use, because I’m mad that someone took ADR or blue sky and I can’t be that there. So I’m very petty about that. But yeah, just it’s yeah, it’s a real bummer. It’s a bummer. How things shook out, but perhaps predictable, but still still a bummer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah,

Emily Weak 22:37
I agree. Hiring librarians I still do post on Twitter, and I hate myself every time I post.

John Fink 22:48
It’s, it’s, I don’t think you should hate yourself for that. I think the utility of it will go down will continue to decrease. And you may think, well, that’s probably not worth it anymore. But I think at this moment, I certainly don’t hate you for posting hiring librarian stuff on Twitter. That’s fine. Well, that’s

Emily Weak 23:05
great. Thanks for not hating me that makes the interview. When I restarted the blog, it was the main way that people were driven to the blog. And it was also and I interviewed Meredith Lowe, who runs the site, archive SCAG, which posts, archives job postings, and she said, nowadays, people don’t comment on blogs anymore. Like when in the first part of home life, people would comment it to hear what people were saying. And now like, there’s been like, maybe two or three actual comments on the blog, since I restarted February 2018.

John Fink 23:40
Why do you think that is?

Emily Weak 23:41
Why people don’t comment on blogs, I think it’s just like, blogging is not what it was man, like, like I came in 2012 was maybe the end of like, the peak library blog era, and people would would comment on different blogs, and like you would see long, you know, like, a controversial article and like, in the library with a lead pipe would have like 50 comments, you know, it just is much fewer now. And I think it’s because people are used to like, don’t read the comments that, you know, people use the comments being like, yeah, you know, just spam or like, I don’t know, weird conspiracy stuff, or it’s not it’s just it’s not a place I think we’re a lot of like, people go where the smart discourse happens, I guess, or where the acceptable discourse happens, which I think was became Twitter and was Twitter for a long time. There is still some discussion on Twitter, but it’s it definitely is not as robust, and it’s definitely not as fun.

John Fink 24:38
Yeah, I go to Twitter maybe once every two weeks to see if anyone’s trying to reach me. And almost all of it is Miss attributed now. Yeah, a lot. A lot of porn bots, for instance, which is fun, and other stuff, but people that are just not trying to reach me and like

Emily Weak 24:56
it’s definitely a much weirder landscape. Yeah, yeah. But how do you feel about Mastodon, I like

John Fink 25:02
Mastodon an awful lot I do. And part of that I’m going to willingly serve up as because I am an extremely old man, I’m 50 years old. And when I I, and that means I was 18, when the World Wide Web was invented, it does remind me of the sort of DIY low rent kind of stuff that was around when I was maturing on the World Wide Web where people had it a web rings and little sites and, and things were not I don’t want to say non commercial, but somewhat less commercial. And the whole federated nature of Macedon sort of reminds me about Usenet used to be and use that wasn’t perfect, but it was an interesting thing. And I do like the folks that are there, I really, really like the the sort of robust nature of being able to determine what level of visibility your Toots have, whether you want them to be global, whether you want them to be unlisted or private. I think that if you remember Google Plus, that was the ideal because you could, you could have different groups, and that was fantastic. But but other than that, this is quite a good way to do it. And I even like the fact that things aren’t searchable, things aren’t searchable, unless you specifically determine them to be searchable. Yeah, regarding Macedon, it’s a it’s federated in nature is both of course, a distinct advantage. And of course, a distinct disadvantage. Because for some folks, the notion of figuring out where to go, where to sign up is dizzying. Yeah. And to me that was that’s very normal, because that’s, that’s part of the internet I grew up with, but people growing up with a very monolithic, at least in terms of social media, this is a natural to them. And they want to be in the large place that everyone else is in. And Mastodon solves that by Federation. But you could argue, I think, quite convincingly, that solves it not as a not as good a way as just having one large site that everyone’s on Twitter. And I think that’s why a lot of LIS folks, and including people who are acting Macedon and aren’t really much anymore have sort of migrated to blue sky. Because that seems to be perhaps the the place where people lie is people feel more comfortable for whatever reason, and I don’t want to cast aspersions on people for doing that, because they have their reasons for it. But I’m not like I said, I’m not on there very much. And that’s just my guess, based on people who have seen the active and then it’s like, catch me on blue sky and all that stuff. So my guess is most of the quote unquote, library and discourse is probably on blue sky these days. And I don’t have any idea about threads, threads, maybe I don’t know, threads. Threads is a weird thing for me. So I don’t

Emily Weak 27:42
know. Yeah, like, initially, threads was like, wow, there’s a lot of people on threads. And then I’ve looked back on it. And like, there’s like a lot of people and weeks ago or you know, I mean,

John Fink 27:53
there was such a thing as a scalloped curve, I think is what they call it in terms of adoption of technologies, and that there’s a high level of adoption, then it falls off. And then it sort of, you know, sort of averages out to something. And I know threads had an absolutely phenomenal first week or so because they gated everybody from Instagram, basically. And I think that the user experience on threads was dissimilar enough from Twitter, or perhaps crucially similar enough in the wrong ways that people sort of bounced off it, or a lot of people bounced off it. And I don’t know what their user user stuff is like now, I have no idea. But they probably scalloping along although at a lower rate than they were initially, we should get

Emily Weak 28:37
on to our dramatic reading of interviews. The idea for this podcast is that I have this survey of people that are looking for work this job hunters survey, and it got nearly 470 responses, over 400 responses. And so I’m trying to put them up on the blog, and it takes forever. So I thought John would be kind of just we could read a few of them out to you and then maybe talk about that no one that we’ve decided we wanted to start with was one that I picked sort of randomly happens to be a job employee that’s in Canada, we haven’t practiced this. So if it sounds disjointed, or perhaps boring, it is because we are winging it. I will start by reading the question interview question and John will read the answer. So first, I’ll say this person, this is a response dated February 13 2023. So the first question is, how long have you been job hunting?

John Fink 29:37
Six months to a year?

Emily Weak 29:39
Why are you job hunting and this is a checkout.

John Fink 29:42
I’m employed outside of the field and I’d like to be in it. Next step after finishing an MIT diploma. And if I can interject a little bit editorially, in in Canada, it’s quite common for people that work in tech positions. I don’t want to say paraprofessional it’s a terrible, terrible term. But non librarian library work? Oftentimes it requires a library Tech degree from

Emily Weak 30:06
college. Is that like an undergraduate degree? Or is that a gun? No,

John Fink 30:10
that is what we call colleges in Canada is typically what Americans are called Community College. And so the library tech would be like a two year diploma typically.

Emily Weak 30:19
So it’s sort of similar to our community college. Yes. Next question. Where do you look for open positions, partnership

John Fink 30:26
jobs, which is a listserv for Canadian LIS professionals?

Emily Weak 30:30
And tell me more about introjection? This

John Fink 30:33
is not yes. In Canada, because we are very small environment as far as both population relative the United States and places to look for work relative the United States are basically two large places for librarians to look for work partnership is the premier one. And there’s also the University of Toronto has a job board, but partnership is sort of the gold standard, and pretty much the place you look first for work in librarianship in Canada,

Emily Weak 31:00
is it run by the Canadian Library Association,

John Fink 31:03
it is not interesting, because there is no Canadian Library Association. There’s there used to be a thing called the CLA, Canadian Library Association, but it was disbanded eight or nine years ago, I can’t remember exactly, I actually got an award for them a national award for being a cool guy about a year before they disbanded. So I have that in my office. And I think, Oh God, this organization exists. And they became they sort of morphed into the oh, I can’t remember the name, the Federation of Canadian Library Associations. And part of that is because and I don’t want to get too far into the weeds in Canadian political history. But Canada is a confederation, which means that the provinces often have more Sway on things in the national government, and that sort of Peters down to things like this. And so even when the CLA was an ongoing thing, the Ontario Library Associations was considered a bigger fish, like conference wise and clout than the national award, which would be very strange. It’d be like thinking, Oh, the Ohio Library Association is bigger than the ALA and I’m like, Okay. And so yeah, so there’s no CLA partnership. I can’t remember who runs partnership. I don’t I don’t remember at all. Oh, God. But it’s not the CLA will say that.

Emily Weak 32:18
What’s great, that’s really interesting to me that, like, I know about Canada. And I don’t know if

John Fink 32:26
that is a very common thing for Americans. And it’s not not not at all comment on your your awareness or not. But Canada is just a weird little beast, and it’s another country as a whole foreign country. And sometimes it’s difficult to remember that if you’re an American.

Emily Weak 32:41
And I am looking at the partnership job board, and it says it’s run by the provincial and territorial library associations. Yep. So back to what we’re supposed to be doing. So we’ll continue to read this job Hunter interview. So the next question is, what position level are you looking for? And all that apply?

John Fink 33:00
Entry level and clerk library assistant?

Emily Weak 33:03
What types of organization? Are you looking in? Check all that apply?

John Fink 33:07
academic libraries, archives, and special libraries?

Emily Weak 33:10
What part of the world are you in Canada? What’s your region like?

John Fink 33:14
An urban area?

Emily Weak 33:16
Are you willing slash able to move for employment? Again, check all that apply?

John Fink 33:21
Yes, anywhere?

Emily Weak 33:22
What are the top three things you’re looking for in a job?

John Fink 33:26
Not always client facing metadata focused in a city I think I can tolerate.

Emily Weak 33:33
How many jobs have you applied to during your current search? Please indicate if estimate or exact 10, which I think is exact. What steps actions or attributes are most important for employers to take to sell you on the job again?

John Fink 33:49
Pay Well, funding professional development and prioritizing work life balance.

Emily Weak 33:55
Do you expect to see the salary range listed in a job ad?

John Fink 33:58
Yes, and it’s a red flag when it is not other than not listing a salary range?

Emily Weak 34:02
Are there other red flags that would prevent you from applying to a job too

John Fink 34:07
much experience requested while simultaneously not asking for qualifications?

Emily Weak 34:12
How much time do you spend preparing an application packet?

John Fink 34:15
20 minutes. Most of the jobs I apply to don’t require more effort since they’re tech jobs. Ah, and I expect that means library tech, not technology specifically. Oh, I don’t know. Yeah.

Emily Weak 34:28
Interesting. What are the steps you follow? To prepare an application packet?

John Fink 34:33
I added my cover letter and CV to match the posting and make sure it’s up to

Emily Weak 34:36
date. How do you prefer to communicate with potential employers over email? When would you like potential employers to contact you

John Fink 34:44
to tell me if the search is at the interview stage even if I have not been selected? Once the decision has been filled? Even if it’s not me? How

Emily Weak 34:51
long do you expect an organization’s application process to take from the point you submit your documents to the point of either an offer or

John Fink 34:59
rejection to Two weeks after the posting closes, either for an interview or notification that I have not been selected, I

Emily Weak 35:06
feel like we’re gonna go back to some of these things. So how do you prepare for interviews?

John Fink 35:12
I research the institution to see what they’re doing, which collections they’ve acquired any projects, etc. and review my cataloging skills.

Emily Weak 35:20
What are your most hated interview questions? And why?

John Fink 35:23
Do you have any questions for us? Because I always forget my questions. And most of them are answered during the course of the interview.

Emily Weak 35:30
During your current search, have you had any of the following experiences and this is submitted an application and got no response

John Fink 35:38
happened to the majority of the time or always? During

Emily Weak 35:41
your current search? Have you ever had an interview and never heard

John Fink 35:45
back happened the majority of the time or always? Have you ever

Emily Weak 35:49
during your current search interviewed for a job where an internal candidate was eventually chosen? I don’t know. Have you ever asked for an accommodation for a disability?

John Fink 35:59
I don’t know. I don’t know why Oh, no, no.

Emily Weak 36:02
During your current search, have you withdrawn an application before the offer stage?

John Fink 36:08
Not Applicable?

Emily Weak 36:09
Have you turned down an offer?

John Fink 36:11
Not Applicable?

Emily Weak 36:12
If you’ve asked for an accommodation, what happened?

John Fink 36:15
I haven’t, because I have invisible disabilities. And people tend to make way too intense eye contact, if I tell them what they are.

Emily Weak 36:23
If you want to share a great, inspirational, funny, or other story about an experience you’re about at any stage in the hiring process. This is a very broad question.

John Fink 36:34
Here, the interviewer mispronounced My name as everyone does, and I started laughing her face. Oops.

Emily Weak 36:41
How are you doing? Generally check all that.

John Fink 36:44
I’m maintaining not out of money yet. But I’m worried.

Emily Weak 36:48
When did you first start your job? This is meant to be after you finished your MLS or other graduate level degree in Las fields. And they may be answering it based on their LSAT degree.

John Fink 37:04
Possibly but they did say more than six months before graduating my MLS other LIS degrees. So it’s not clear if that means the library tech college diploma or the MLS like it’s not, to me, it’s not clear.

Emily Weak 37:14
It’s not clear why because, yeah. So the question was, when did you first start your job search?

John Fink 37:19
More than six months before graduating in my MLS? Other LIS degree?

Emily Weak 37:23
What kind of work was your first post graduation professional position?

John Fink 37:27
Not Applicable? Because it hasn’t happened yet?

Emily Weak 37:30
Did you get support from your library tool for your first job? Or any subsequent ones? No,

John Fink 37:36
because I got told I didn’t have the personality to be a library worker, ie nice and bubbly. And I was left out in the

Emily Weak 37:44
cold. Oh, man. It’s such a bummer. Indeed. Yes, very much. So. Yeah. John, you were interested in talking about this one, not just because it’s from Canada. But you want to talk about what those reasons were? Yeah,

John Fink 37:58
well, obviously, I was drawn to it. Because of the Canadian aspect. Because anytime someone from Canada sees something about Canada, they get really excited and jazzed. But there were things about it that really jumped out at me. And I am so nervous about about trying to speculate because obviously the person isn’t here, we can’t follow up, we can’t ask things. And so I’m Oh, I’m a little bit nervous. But there are things that really jumped out at me. And particularly, I think the first one that I did want to draw attention to was the 20 minutes. And it’s mitigated somewhat by saying that’s mostly library tech jobs. And I haven’t applied for a library tech job in a very long time. It’s quite possible. It’s a 20 minute thing, but I was a fairly short amount of time, even maybe even for a library tech, if they have a cover letter, and they can do that. And they have like one that they’ve worked off of, and they can edit it and match the CV to the posting in that 20 minutes. And maybe it’s fine, that that might not be problematic. It just seems a bit short to me. And

Emily Weak 38:54
just to clarify, just to clarify, before you go on, you’re talking about the answer to the question, how much time do you spend preparing your pocket? This person says they take 20 minutes, which is on the shorter side of what I’ve read. Yeah,

John Fink 39:08
I would say that’s pretty short. A couple hours seems to me to be probably average or what have you. But the 20 minutes and again, if it’s LTE library tech stuff, maybe that’s appropriate. I’m not sure but for librarians, MLS positions does seem a bit short. The next thing is the two weeks after the posting closes. Now again, we don’t know if they’re talking about LT library tech stuff or librarian stuff. So I’m just gonna address the library inside of it. That’s enormous ly fast. That is a very, very optimistic take on how fast at least committees that I’ve been in operate. And I think fairly typically we are for academia, like at two weeks after the posting closes, we probably are just winnowing through the resume pile for people that we are thinking about interviewing or people that we cannot interview for whatever reasons and by God were absolutely not in a position to make an offer at two weeks after closing, probably three weeks before, we’re gearing up to ask for interviews, I would expect, but gosh, two weeks, that’s just, that’s unrealistic. And I realized academia is terrible in that way. And if one goes to the private sector, you know, the next day, they made a decision, all that but that for better, for worse and probably worse, that’s how academia operates. Right now.

Emily Weak 40:26
I did a training with Oregon State University for search admitted in search advocates or people that are from outside the department or outside the institution that would sit in on a committee and sort of work as an advocate for equity and hiring both the person who would be hired and for within the the hiring committee, like you might have a hiring committee where we’re certain members don’t feel as free to speak. So like, sort of considerations. And she really talked about if you’re interested in equity and hiring, you have to slow down because you have to really analyze not only what you’re asking for what you’re doing, and you have to like, give yourself time to go like, am I putting a barrier or a barrier does it need to be it’s not just analyzing the person but also analyzing yourself on what you’re doing? Yeah.

John Fink 41:17
Which I think is a very good way of putting it I have not heard of a of a search advocate. That’s extremely, extremely interesting. I’ve never encountered that before. So that’s very fascinating. But yeah, you’re right. If you go too quickly, you run the risk of missing, especially the eye type stuff, but really, almost any kind of aspect. And so you can go too fast. You can also go too slow, of course. But yeah, I can I can see

Emily Weak 41:42
what I’m gonna pick out of this.

John Fink 41:44
Um, the Do you have any questions? For us the most hated interview question, I can understand why. Absolutely. But I find this question, very essential. And we always, always, always ask it, I think most people ask it. And it’s essential for me, because it is a much more accurate gauge of how much the candidate might be interested in the position for the various unique aspects of it. And I’ll just say that, like, you know, someone says, Oh, I remember seeing a couple years ago that you had this, you were doing this project, or that project or something, something that shows that they have done a bit of research or interested in the work beyond just being a job. And that’s unfair. And a bit of a privilege thing to say, I’ll say, because, of course, people you know, especially for the blind for work, more often than not, they’re in a dire economic straits, or they’re, there’s some problem, people don’t often look for work when they’re satisfied at the job that they have, of course, and so they, you know, it is something there’s like, this is a job, I can do it, I’m going to submit the stuff. And so it’s maybe a bit much to ask them to, you know, to cater to our specific needs. But when someone has a really insightful question that goes beyond what our job ad said, that does impress me, it absolutely does impress me. And so for this person, I would advise like, Okay, if you forget your questions, maybe write them down. I don’t know the answer during the course of interview, that doesn’t mean that you can’t say, this was really interesting. And this aspect, can you elaborate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it’s something that I would really encourage people to take care of, because it’s almost always asked, and it’s an it’s a way to really get you in there. Like as somebody who has done some care and research. Yeah. And

Emily Weak 43:33
I will say, like, sometimes you do have an interview, like, just from my personal experience being interviewed, sometimes you do have an interview where you ask your questions during the interview, or they’re really good at explaining, you know, they they do answer all of your questions in the interview, and I have gotten jobs where I’ve gotten to that question, do you have any questions for us? And I will say, like, I was going to ask about this, this and this, but you answered all of my questions. I think this has been a really great interview. And that’s, you know, and I have, I’ve gotten hired with that. So I think it doesn’t have to be a stress, right, that this question can be, yeah, great. This question is our opportunity to talk about things that interest

John Fink 44:11
you. Yeah, it’s sort of like the cover letter of interview questions. And that it’s, it’s a place where you have a little more flexibility to illustrate beyond, you know, your work experience, the kinds of things you’re interested in, and the kinds of things you like about the job. And the

Emily Weak 44:25
other way that I’ve encountered this question that’s is weird is sometimes if you are if I’ve gone for an interview, and it’s a very structured interview, and the panel includes a lot of people who aren’t employees or aren’t, you know, aren’t people that you would work with? And in that case, I think sometimes it’s an odd question. If, if it’s, do you have any questions for us, and I’m talking to people who don’t even work at the institution,

John Fink 44:48
right? Like don’t work any institution at all or don’t work in the department that well in institution

Emily Weak 44:53
at all. So in public library interviews, at least here in the States, sometimes the initial panel and You may not have this kind of question in that initial panel, but sometimes the initial panel is is not so much an interview as it is an oral exam. So it’ll be timed. You’ll have, you know, half an hour to answer six questions or one hour to answer six questions. And the panel in order to be more fair will be made up of people who don’t work at the institution. There’ll be other library staff. So like, if you’re interviewing in Oakland, California, it might include staff from San Leandro and San Francisco. So So like in interviews like that, sometimes the to me, that’s a weird question,

John Fink 45:36
I want to say and I can’t recall directly, but I want to say we have had interview committees where we’ve had folks from either Mohawk College, which is our local community college or other places, maybe once or twice, it’s almost never happened. But I want to say it’s happened at least once. And that’s very interesting. Like, I know so little about public libraries, other than being an enthusiastic patron, that that’s really informative. And the public library world is something I very much admire and don’t know enough about. So that’s really, that’s really interesting. Yeah, like, that’s

Emily Weak 46:06
something that’s interesting to me in doing these, these survey interviews, because I do talk to us by brands and academic librarians. And like, we think, Oh, library jobs are all the same, and they’re really not

John Fink 46:20
rational, I would, I would be, at least initially a terrible public librarian. It would take me a while to gear up. And yeah, the work is, I mean, obviously, there are similarities, but the work is different enough as a lot of differences. Also, what else

Emily Weak 46:36
in this interview is standing out to you, John, the mispronunciation

John Fink 46:39
of name thing is odd. Because I can’t relate to this, of course, because I have an extremely boring name that is very easy to pronounce for at least for English speakers, but I would take care to say, you know, my name is such and such and such and such. And you obviously can’t control if someone’s going to mess that up. But you probably shouldn’t laugh at them, either. And this person does recognize that. Yeah, and obviously, you’re in a high stress situation. someone messes your name up, you may not be able to control giggling, but it’s something that probably reflects poorly in interview situations, you just start laughing like, no. So the advice I would say for this is, my name is is X, Y, Zed, and it’s pronounced or whatever, just like try to put that out there at the beginning, because people will feel much better. Like the interviews are much better. If they’re not messing your name up, at least I would. Yeah. And so I think trying to clarify that before, you know, the interviewer gets too far is probably the best tack to take.

Emily Weak 47:40
Yeah. What else do we want to talk about?

John Fink 47:42
Very good, then then I will get into the possibly the diciest. The question is, did you get support in our library school for his job hunt? And I said, No, because I got told I didn’t have the personality to be a library worker and was left out in the cold. I will preface this by saying I went to was charitably put a fairly middling library school, and I got no support from them, either. What I had already worked in libraries for almost a decade. And so arguably, I didn’t need the support that maybe somebody who hadn’t worked in libraries would need. And I again, I feel very bad about speculating over much about this, because we only have this sentence to go by. But I would be absolutely horrified to learn that someone in a position at a library school in a position of authority, let’s say a prop or admin person said, Yeah, you are a real sourpuss. Why, why are you even here? I mean, is it possible? Yes. Is it horrific to consider? Yes. Because charitably put the time to tell someone when you think they may not like the kind of work or be cut out for it is before they apply to school. Right? So if someone is thinking of going to library school, and they come to me, and they say, I think in our library school, I will try to be quite honest about especially about job prospects. I don’t try to speculate about their personality, but I’ll say look, especially if I’m working on library before it can be really hard to break in for various reasons. And but once someone is in school, it is incumbent upon you especially as someone associated with the school, but even people you know, in the wider world, myself included to not tell them they made a mistake. It’s absolutely insane to do that, because it’s it’s like they’re already in school, they put a lot of time and probably a lot of money and a lot of their emotion, likely into this and you telling them that they’re a big idiot, or they’re completely you know, I’m not equipped for this, especially on an asked like, if someone said, Look, I’m concerned that you know that I may not have the right attitude, then you can try to be diplomatic and say, maybe this this this, this someone just flat out says you’re just a dour man, why are you here? Like, I just can’t. It’s just Not people deserve support. And if you can’t give them support, because you really think they’re jerks or whatever, then we’ll don’t actively impede them. That’s not the so

Emily Weak 50:08
this one too, this is making me remember another interview, because this person also says earlier that they have invisible disabilities and pupils. Way too intense eye contact, if I tell them what they are, which to me means they might be on the autism spectrum, maybe. And if there’s another, here’s another interview where the person says specifically that they are on the spectrum. And is also told by an interview. They’re like, horrific interview story is the interviewer who calls them. I apologize for using this term, but they call them socially retarded, and they say, how can you expect to get a job being like this? And I think this is actually

John Fink 50:56
yeah, I didn’t want to speculate invisible, invisible disabilities, but my guess would have also been autism spectrum. And it’s, you know, as someone who is very Allo, non autistic, in that way, like I love eye contact, I love to talk to people to get get their opinions on stuff. I am very cognizant that eye contact for people on the autism spectrum is almost always not good for them, almost always. And when they do it to you, if they’re making, they’re often making a very serious effort to come across to you in a way that you find comfortable. And it’s much better idea for you to not do that. And so that would be my guess, based on the invisible disabilities and the eye contact thing. But if somebody if you, let’s just assume they’re autistic, it’s a bad thing to assume. But let’s just assume if I am on the autism spectrum, and I tell someone an interview that and they start staring at me directly. Yeah, terrible. Yeah. Why would you intensely stare at someone that said that unless you had no idea about sensitivities of people, typical sensitivity people on the autism spectrum? That’s crazy. It’s just that’s a very goofy thing to do for someone. But yeah, I didn’t want to address that question too much, because we don’t know the nature of the visual disability. But yeah,

Emily Weak 52:12
to me, this is really the lesson for people who hire and when when we talk about like hiring for fit or personal personality, as a tool in hiring, I think it can be a little tricky, because you do think about it, particularly if you’re hiring for a customer service position, you do think about personality and customer service. But yeah, we need to have an understanding of that personality is not a litmus test,

John Fink 52:38
know, what is it like? It is a factor. It is a factor and, and someone who is holistic, that’s the term I’m trying to think of someone’s holistic, like, like I am, it is incumbent upon us to recognize that. And I don’t want to discount fit and personality as a factor. But I think that it’s way too vague. And way too open to abuse to make it something that you’re making a big decision on that. It really is like it’s such a it’s much too open ended. It’s just but I mean, it shouldn’t be a consideration. Yes. Should it be the primary consideration? No, I don’t know. It’s a difficult thing to gauge.

Emily Weak 53:19
This is part of to me a part of the slowing down factor in hiring is you really have to look at that and see like, Well, how am I you know, if I’m going to think about personality, or fit as part of what I’m preparing for? How can I do that in a way that is not? You know, how can I do that in a way that’s inclusive and right doesn’t exclude people based on neuro divergence or other sorts of cultural differences? Yeah, yeah.

John Fink 53:45
That said, I did want to address another point in this that I can’t remember where it is. But it’s something they didn’t want front facing work. And they didn’t want they wanted metadata work and not front facing work. Yeah. And just in a very mercenary point. librarian level metadata work is not a growth industry. Not to the point that it was when I started, when I first came to this job, for instance, we had an entire floor have catalogers Uh huh. And now we have maybe two or three, gosh, maybe more than that, because we started getting stuff shelf ready. And still, like we have a very robust and extremely punches way outside our weight Special Collections Department. And so they have cataloging which I believe they call arrangement description, so they have dedicated folks for that. But for us, we don’t do very much. And I I’m not a cataloger I’m not that department. So I hate to speculate outside my zone, but we don’t, to my knowledge, we do not do very much original cataloging. And so it would be a tad problematic for someone to say yes, I want 100% Back Office metadata work where I can just sit and put my head down and do my metadata and not have to worry about talking to people. And that’s not good. I would say not a very realistic expectation. That said, you know, it’s also not realistic for someone like let’s say you are hired, you submitted a work to say, now you’re on, you know, you have 20 hours on rough desk or whatever, that’s not very fair to somebody that applied for a kind of job than then you know, as the other other duties as assigned got got an excessive amount of public service work, if they don’t feel they’re up to it. But I would argue, and again, this is my, you know, 50 year old holistic sis, white guy opinion that almost all library work is in some respect, front facing customer work, there’s always an aspect of it. How much I you know, is is really depends on the job, like, in my job, I don’t have I don’t sit at a public facing desk, the department that I work in is not actually public access, like there’s a swipe card that you got to go to go in, so I’m not getting random people to come in. But I still do a lot of consults. I work with a lot of people. And that does require a customer service, ie for lack of a better term bubbly, and enthusiastic skills and all that. And so it’s unrealistic to assume that you don’t have at least some aspect of that in almost any library job or library tech job for that matter. And so it’s a little hairy, to say, Yeah, I prefer not to have that kind of stuff. Because it’s it’s at least in academia, and probably also in public’s. And you of course, be able to speak to that, that it’d be unrealistic to assume that, that you could do that to not have public facing work. And I’m

Emily Weak 56:33
reminded of a an article I read, I think, when I was in library school that was talking about the catalogers at a university, and specifically assigning them reference desk shifts or other ways in which they could interact with students. Because when it came time to budget, you had to sort of justify student interaction to keep your job. When it comes down to justifying, can you find a position? If a position is directly interacting with students, they may be considered more, more valuable, you know, or the more might be better able to justify spending funds there. Yeah,

John Fink 57:11
that’s absolutely consideration. I can see that being being a budgetary item, because increasingly, increasingly, it’s like, okay, what do you do that student centered, student focused? student focused? Yeah. And that’s a consideration. So I’m not surprised. That’s interesting.

Emily Weak 57:26
Yeah, John, I think we need to wrap up, our listeners might be asleep.

John Fink 57:30
So we’ll we’ll rebrand this as a podcast to help you go to sleep at night. There you go. That’ll be it. That’ll be the milieu we work in.

Emily Weak 57:38
Yeah. Yeah. Bedtime Stories with John Fink. No, that’s

John Fink 57:42
nice.

Emily Weak 57:44
Has a nice ring to it. I want to say thank you so much. I really enjoyed chatting with you.

John Fink 57:48
Thank you, Emily, I’ve just been such such a fan of the hiring librarian stuff for so long. It was it’s a distinct pleasure. Absolutely. And I would do it at any point. Again, if people could tolerate me, I would not advise me right away. I would say put the bargains out there. If you get a lot of feedback, saying This guy’s a big old jerk. And I’d rather hear from somebody else that isn’t this guy, then I will be hurt. But I will understand.

Emily Weak 58:10
I will tell you, you’ll just never

John Fink 58:16
assume Okay. Is

Emily Weak 58:18
there anything that you like? Do you have a SoundCloud or anything you need to plug? No, no. Okay.

John Fink 58:24
There’s a conference going on next month. And in Canada, our library tech conference, or Library Technology Conference. So if you know code for live, it’s basically the Canadian version of the code for life. Although properly speaking code for life is the American version of us because we were first in the pattern it on us. But anyway, I’m giving a talk there. I think it’s late October, if you’re there, it’ll be one of my worst talks I’ve ever given. So please, please tune in and listen, and it’s just going to be awful. That’s my plug. I’m going to be access conference in Halifax next month, and it’s just going to be terrible.

Emily Weak 58:57
You’re at the conference and you’re having trouble feeling sad or going to sleep?

John Fink 59:03
Precisely. No, I want to stress that I am only saying I will be terrible. The conference is almost always fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll say that.

Emily Weak 59:11
Well, thank you again. And we will say thank you podcast listeners,

John Fink 59:15
thank you.

Emily Weak 59:36
This has been the hiring librarians podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Our website is hiringlibrarians.com I’m the host of today’s episode, Emily weak, and my guest was John think audio editing is provided by AJ Summers. The theme tune was written and performed by Matthew Travers. And you can see more of his work on MatthewTraversMusic.com. Finally, while this podcast and the hiring librarians project are and will remain free, we do appreciate cash contributions. If you’re interested, please head on over to patreon.com/hiringlibrarians.

Episode three of the Hiring Librarians podcast! My guests are Kirsten Elliott and Darren Flynn who, along with Harriet Notman, are the folks behind Fair Library Jobs, a UK-based project working to improve library hiring and recruitment practices by advocating for transparency, equity and respect. If you’re looking for a thorough list of best practices for fair hiring, check out their manifesto. If you’re looking for a good read, sign up for their Substack. If you’re on Bluesky, check out @FairLibraryJobs.Bsky.Social And if you’re still on Twitter, you can follow them @FairLibraryJobs

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube music and other various podcasting sites (let me know if you can’t find it on your preferred platform). Next week on episode 4, I’ll talk with that well-known Canadian, John Fink.

Transcript:

Note: This transcript is AI-generated, with minimal clean-up, and may contain some errors.

Emily Weak 0:08
This is the hiring librarians podcast. In it, we examine the landscape of hiring and job search in the library and information science fields. My name is Emily weak. Over the last decade, I have surveyed the practices and opinions of more than 2000 workers on both sides of the hiring table. I have shared these interviews as well as the work of authors, researchers, career coaches, recruiters and other such folks on this site hiringlibrarians.com. I’m excited to expand this work to a new space here on the Hiring Librarians podcast.

Hey, hello, everyone. Welcome to the hiring librarians podcast, still kind of a new podcast, where we don’t quite know what we’re doing. But we were having some good conversations with people about library hiring. And I’m really happy to be here today with Darren Flynn and Kirsten Elliot, from Fair Library Jobs, which is… we’ll talk more about it later. But it’s a very interesting website that is fighting, as the title says, for fair library jobs. And we’ll get more into it. So Darren, do you want to start us off? Will you just introduce yourself?

Darren Flynn 1:23
Yeah, sure. So my name is Darren Flynn, I use the pronouns he him. And I’m an academic liaison manager at a university in the UK. So I work at the University of Northampton, and I manage a team of five academic librarians, and a couple of other people who are part of my team. I’ve been doing this role for about three and a half years, I’ve worked in libraries for about 11 or 12 years now in a range of different roles have done different jobs, in different sectors and in different institutions. So that’s me.

Emily Weak 1:58
And Kirsten, you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Kirsten Elliot 2:01
Hi, my name is Kirsten Elliot, I use she/her pronouns. I’m currently working in support team and a library in the UK, working with bibliometrics. And I’ve been in that role about two months. So I haven’t worked out quite the right way of describing what it is I do. But similar to Darren, I’ve been working in libraries for about 10 years with a range of roles. So mainly in higher education as a library assistant, I’m pretty well working in a higher education institution, but working on the healthcare side with NHS workers, and doing stuff around systematic reviews and searching for evidence and that kind of thing. And we are two of the three cofounders of fair library jobs, which the idea of it started about two years ago and kicked off properly at the start of 2021.

Emily Weak 2:51
Tell us more, what is fair library jobs.

Kirsten Elliot 2:55
Fair library jobs is an organization campaigning to improve recruitment practices in the library sector in the UK. So our three core values that we’d like library recruiters to adopt are transparency, equity, and respect. We put together manifesto which has some specific recommendations on how we think employers should behave towards candidates. So we’re mainly present online through that that manifesto, aiming to model best practice through that. And we’ve also been very active on Twitter, now X, in terms of responding to existing job adverts practices that we’ve come across kind of pointing out how people could do better and how they could improve. And we’re trying to continue to improve those processes and listen to other voices within the sector and how things can get better. Darren, I don’t know if there’s anything you want to add.

Darren Flynn 3:58
It’s probably just useful to say as part of that – So we do see ourselves as a partly a campaigning organization. So it’s about trying to improve things that we see as being problematic. But then we also see it’s having a bit of an advocacy role as well, for people who may not feel comfortable speaking out themselves about problems that they see in recruitment because of fear about how that could affect their own employability or their own relationships with their employers. And we are, I think, quite deliberately, a grassroots organization so we don’t receive any funding from professional associations or employers. So we do things on a voluntary basis between us, between service, in our spare time primarily in order to try and improve the situation for UK library workers. And with library workers. We are quite specific about that elements as well actually in that. It’s not just about librarians, it’s about people at all levels. I have the sort of library, job market and in all sectors

Kirsten Elliot 5:06
and going Sorry, I just wanted to make sure we give full credit to our third member, Harriet Notman. He couldn’t make it for the podcast recording, but it’s a core part of our team and instrumental. So it’s, it’s the three of us working together and sharing that work out between us.

Emily Weak 5:25
I have a lot of questions. I think so. Um, I guess, just real quick, you did mention that you consider your work to be a campaign and to be advocacy work, does that mean somebody who had for example, seen a job advertisement that was problematic could forward that to you, and you would call out or call in the organization? Whatever you are nodding?

Darren Flynn 5:52
Yes. Yeah, I think sometimes it’s a case of people having seen a job advert themselves that they feel there is something problematic with it. And they may or may not have intended to apply for it themselves, it might just be something they’ve come across. So it could be that they’ve seen something, and then they want us to raise it. And they want to us to speak to the recruiting institution about that. So sometimes it’s in that respect where they’ve raised it with us, and then they don’t necessarily want to critique it, or praise it themselves. But we can do it on their behalf. The other side of it is sometimes when somebody has been through a recruitment process, and they might have particular issues that they’ve experienced at the ballot race and occurs to you. The other you’ve spoken to a few people about that kind of thing before. So anything you want to say about that?

Kirsten Elliot 6:48
Yeah, I think sometimes it’s people who’ve been through or going through a recruitment process, and kind of want a sense check on whether or not something is okay. And often it’s something we can’t or a few times it’s been something it wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for us to say something about publicly. But we might be privately say like, yes, we agree that does doesn’t sound fair. It is we’ve had people reach out to stuff that is really beyond our remit and not something we can necessarily deal with, particularly stuff that’s more could have workplace relations issues than necessarily recruitment. And so then it’s been a matter of partly being a person to be like, No, it’s not you that isn’t a fair way for your reply for you and signposting were appropriately say, typically, to trade unions and the organization I’ve completely blanked the name off that is the workplace dispute, organization, workplace advice organization in the UK. I’m sure the acronym will be cast. But yeah, that’s yeah, I guess. So yeah, sometimes it’s appropriate signposting. People come to us with that kind of thing. So interesting.

Emily Weak 8:08
I feel like I do, or some similar stuff will come up for me because I, you know, I have these surveys that people can answer anonymously, the one that’s for Job Hunters, I get a lot of just terrible stories about people being, I don’t know, called names or, you know, like everything from just sort of things that are sort of problems with the system to things that are problems with the recruiter or the hiring staff. But I really like that, I don’t really do anything about it. Other than I just post the I post, I allow them to say that out loud. But I like that you’ll you will listen to people and also take some action on their behalf. I think that’s a really, what a nice service. I guess that’s not a question. That’s just pretty nice.

Darren Flynn 8:59
Yeah, so I was just gonna say, like, sometimes it is just a, we are just in here. Because at the same time, if somebody’s approaching us with a bad experience that they’ve been through, whether that’s when they’ve applied for a job, whether it’s been interviewed for it, or whether it’s in the follow up afterwards, they’re often doing that with us, because they don’t feel that they can talk to the recruiter about that. which often means if they are talking to us, they want to maintain that anonymity. And it might be that, that means that we, we can’t approach the employer about it, because that would breach their anonymity. Or it might not be fair to the employer as well, because, you know, we’ve heard one side of it. And so we sometimes it’s just providing an ear, sometimes it’s it’s wanting to follow up afterwards. And they do request that we do that and we always take the lead from the person who’s who’s contacted us. And sometimes it might be that they’ve contacted us directly via email so that there is that that element of us being able to read play a few times, we have an anonymous form on our website as well. So sometimes people don’t want a response, they just need to express what they’ve been through, I think I do

Emily Weak 10:10
think a lot of job searching is just lonely, like you are doing something that’s really hard. That involves a lot of rejection, even if you’re sort of the sunniest person, people can feel very alone. So I think that’s wonderful. When you reach out to organizations, you do that both publicly and privately. Is that right?

Kirsten Elliot 10:31
We mainly do it publicly or we have been with there’s some that we’ve done both by email. And publicly, I have to be honest, we’ve kind of at least have slowed down on how much I’m bothering to contact privately from what we started with. Just because we tended to get absolute silence back from lots of employers, we didn’t it didn’t really feel worth it. And we had, I think, one who kind of explicitly were like, we’ve spoken to our lawyers. We’re not doing anything wrong. Don’t contact us again. So which was interesting, interesting.

Emily Weak 11:15
That was when you reached out privately, or publicly? I’m sorry, I

Kirsten Elliot 11:18
think we had that was when we we did buy. That was when we we did buy? I think we have called them out publicly since because they’re still doing the same things haven’t changed their practices. Yeah.

Darren Flynn 11:31
I think it was one of those cases where they said, Well, we meet the requirements of the law. And argument is, well, that’s that’s the base. That’s your base level. Okay. Yeah. That doesn’t mean you can’t do better than that. Yeah.

Kirsten Elliot 11:45
Yeah, they’re not so bad. They could get prosecuted for discriminating against someone. Yeah. But that’s good.

Emily Weak 11:50
You’re doing what you’re supposed to do? Yeah.

Darren Flynn 11:55
But I think I mean, I think it’s worth saying as well, that, that when we are, you know, talk, commenting on things publicly, we do try to do it as well, you know, along with sort of calling people out and saying these are the problems, I hope that the tone we get across is that, yes, there is there is a certain there is an element of critique in there. But actually, what we’re doing is we’re pointing out improvements. And we’re pointing out these are areas that generally a relatively easy to address. And I think it’s just that sometimes, particularly if you’ve not been through a recruitment process a lot recently, you’ve not had that experience that we’re talking about Emily of applying for job after job after job that you can sometimes forget that actually, these these things can really grind it out, you know, not knowing what the salary is going to be not knowing what the days are, or the work hours and those kinds of things. So we do try to make it constructive in that we’re pointing out that the places that could be improved, and then also trying to say when trying to applaud people when we do see good stuff as well. Or if we’ve seen that somebody used to do things one way, and now that they have made a change that we tried to to highlight that as well. So it isn’t just a purely negative sort of account that we’re doing

Emily Weak 13:10
your list of terrible people. That’s I mean, I think it’s like that’s, I mean, this is how we make changes, we keep talking about the things that should be happening until they actually do happen. And I think there’s, I think a dearth of of training or standardization, maybe in hiring. That’s one of the things I really like about your manifesto is it’s a very clear document of here are the things that you can do to be fair, and you’re, you know, things like giving people the interview questions in advance. I feel like maybe five years ago, people were like, what, I would never do that. That’s that’s not you know, that’s not fair. And now more and more, I hear people say, No, this is my standard, we always give interview questions in advance. So I think, you know, it’s how you push the envelope. I guess, let’s see, should we go ahead and move on and talk a little bit about the manifesto? Because we’ve mentioned it and we’ve mentioned the things that people are doing that are bad or good, but what are those things that are bad or good? Will you tell us a little bit about like the key points of the manifesto, what it is how people can find it?

Darren Flynn 14:19
Should I start Kirsten? So, the manifesto is on our website, so the website is sites.google.com forward slash view for slash fellow jobs. You can find the manifesto on there before I forget, because otherwise I’m not going to mention this, but we should say where the manifesto has come from. And because we were very, very heavily inspired by other people and organizations that contributed a lot towards our manifesto. So I start off it’s it’s based on a manifesto from an organization called fair museum jobs and they Uh, really the progenitor of of libre jobs? Because I think you’d seen fire museum jobs first, hadn’t you? So do you want to talk about them?

Kirsten Elliot 15:08
Yeah, so I’ve seen a museum jobs around. And they are an organization that campaigns for fair recruitment and employment practices in the museum sector. So in the UK, and I suspect elsewhere, it’s kind of one of those sectors where there are issues with recruitment and issues with low pay and diversity as well and kind of very similar to libraries. And so they’ve been, they’ve got their manifesto, and they’ve been on Twitter for a while. And there are a couple of really terrible library jobs that popped up that people were going, it’s a shame, we don’t have fire Museum, their library, job equivalent of museum jobs, and people kept being like, someone should start this. And so I eventually decided I kind of was that that someone. So we met with fair museum jobs to discuss it. You know, it was, were we allowed to use their brand. And they’d been like very generous with time and advice in supporting that app. And a couple of kind of other influences there. Jennifer beige, you running diversity, an organization called diversity in the north, and she had been calling out library employers on Twitter who were making statements about kind of diversity in the job adverts, and asking them what they were actually doing as employers to embed equality, diversity and inclusivity. I think specifically around anti racism. We share that information. And then someone else who was kind of work was kind of part of what was really into my brain. Before we kicked off a library just was jazz deathy, who ran intersectional, glam galleries, libraries, archives and museums, and was campaigning around EDA, she’s in that sector and spoke the critical approaches to librarianship conference. Yeah, those were kind of some of the things floating around that that sparked off their library jobs. But yes, it was a five museums manifesto. That was the key key inspiration.

Darren Flynn 17:23
Yeah, so I think once, once we’d had permission from families in jobs, we did use their manifesto as our sort of basis. So we looked at what they’d written in theirs. And I think what was really useful in theirs is the way that they’d sort of structured things in terms of these the the sort of really useful, like verbs in the way that they describe stuff in terms of things that employees must do people things that people should do, and then recommendations, and then that’s been quite useful for us, because it helps us to sort of think about how we talk to employers. So most of the things that we think there’s an absolute imperative, that that people should do these things. And job adverts that don’t include those most we felt like we sort of robustly and sort of comprehensively challenge those things. So most of that would be something like not showing the salary on the job ad, it must show salary, they should items as sort of things that we think there’s a really pressing case. And it’s a really strong argument for doing that. And when we sort of see multiples of those that might prompt us to have comments on a job, but also received them really complied with quite a lot. We tried to praise it. And their recommendations are things that we think are just really good practice, and and really represent sort of the best ways of doing things. So we really try to highlight those and show them when we do see them. So we sort of took that structure as well for our manifesto. And there’s some other points, very similar. I think, in terms of things that we’ve changed some things spring to mind in terms of and I’ve tried to think if you can think of any others, Kirsten, I think some of the major changes were things around voluntary roles and use of volunteers. In the UK library sector there is particularly in Public Library’s use of volunteers, and use of sort of voluntary roles that are potentially replacing paid roles that I think it’s slightly different in the library sector than in the museum sector where there might be more of an expectation to do volunteering in order to acquire experience for a paid role. Whereas I think in the library sector, it tends to be slightly different. It’s not so much your first step two, then do something else so much as just outright replacing library workers roles, so that I think we had to tweak and we also wanted to separate out things that might be your In work, but you’re volunteering as part of an organization or committee or a professional association, that kind of thing, because we think it’s important that they do have standards for how they do that. But it’s, it needs to be treated slightly differently, if you say, part of an editorial board or something like that. So I think that’s something that stands out for me is something that we had to really change and adapt for the library sector. So anything that stands out for you, Kirsten, that we had to change? That’s just

Kirsten Elliot 20:29
having a look through to see if Yeah.

I think there might have been some stuff that we we added. So I think we might have added some of the stuff about part time hours displaying Oh, yeah, the kind of calculated salary. So just to explain that we advocate that if there is a part time role, there’s as much clarity as possible on what people are going to earn. So what the full time equivalent of the salary would be, and then what the take home is accounted for that number of hours. I think, did we also had the clarity about the kind of days and times as

Darren Flynn 21:10
well, I think we did, yeah, yeah. So

Kirsten Elliot 21:14
that’s another one. So if something is a part time role, giving as much information as possible about what the expected hours are, so is it going to be a regular pattern with particular days? Is there flexibility that the person employed in that position, consent or not, because that’s potentially something that could hurt will determine whether someone can take up the job or not, if they’re fitting around co responsibilities or another job or study, they might be able to work three days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but not Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And knowing that in advance, before they waste their time, applying for a job that I can’t actually take up is really important and save time and both potentially saves people wasting their time applying for jobs they couldn’t do and also avoid unnecessarily pissing people off. Who kind of because they don’t know if they could make it and therefore don’t put put in the effort to apply. So I think that was another edition of ours. I think it was I think it was Darren

Darren Flynn 22:12
I think sort of structurally as well, in terms of of the manifesto, what we try to do, this is in the museum Jobs did it slightly differently, their manifesto, they would do posts, which sort of clarify points and explain it, why this point was in there and why they’d added it in and what was what was the reasoning, because they’d been around for a little while a lot of their points that they had, in their manifesto, add something behind it somewhere that said, Actually, we think you should do this because of the following reasons. Because as was new, when we were putting together the manifesto, we tried to write those to begin with. So when you’re on the manifesto, each of the points, I think the first time I took a draft, I would go at the draft of it. And we were looking at it together it was it was a monster, it was about 15 pages long or something that had all of these very lengthy explanations on every single point. So we had to sort of trim that back. But the way that we’ve tried to do it is it for each of the points, we say what the requirements is, and whether it is one of those sort of must, should we recommend. But then it’s also linked to say actually well, this is the reason behind this. This is why this is how we think it relates to sort of fairness in recruitment. So that actually you can see what it what it is there. But then you’ve actually got our thinking behind it. And that allows us to sort of explain ourselves a little bit, because we’ve not been appointed to say this is what good recruitment looks like but we can show are working and what the thought is behind there. And I think that example of like working hours is a really good example of why you need that sometimes because it puts the human face on why we have that requirement. Most people that work in in hiring managers roles tend to work full time. So you have a sort of expected you work nine to five, Monday to Friday. That’s that’s what most managers do. So it can be a little bit unfamiliar sometimes and thinking about well, a part time worker, the 20 hour week might be spread out over five days, it could be spread out over two very long days or three days. You don’t necessarily have that firsthand knowledge of what it can be likewise as a part time worker, and trying to fit stuff around and think about it. So that’s why we have those long explanations so somebody could get the human side of it of why that point exists, I think and

Emily Weak 24:31
just to tell people who don’t know. So the manifesto is 26 pages in the entirety right now. But the first seven pages are eight section of points and then the rest of it the additional pages are explanation. It feels like you can read it quickly or you can go and like really read it in detail. There are eight sections the first section is qualifications and experience. The second section is salary is no contracts. The third section is volunteers work placements and job shadowing and libraries. The fourth is traineeships and internships. Fifth is voluntary roles within the profession. That’s what you’re talking about with working on an editorial board or Yeah, which I really like that you distinguish that from volunteering, because it is a different requirement and a hidden requirement, I think in some jobs, six is clarity, accessibility, transparency, and communication. Section seven is interview practices. And eight is feedback. It’s really well detailed, I think it’s a, it’s a really good. I talk sometimes to people who are hiring managers, and there’s a lack of things like this, where it’s just a very clear like, here are the practices that will help you, we’ll understand what you want, we’ll make sure that your recruitment is more equitable, will help select the right candidates for you. I think like what you were talking about with part time employees, the more information that you can give departing people, people will self select in or out. And so you won’t have to deal with 30 Extra applications that are people that really don’t want to do your job or couldn’t do your job, because you didn’t tell people what the job was.

Darren Flynn 26:09
And you save yourself those inquiry emails, when somebody emails you say, Oh, what are they working? That is just what we’ve just put them up. Just just tell people, you know, you probably know, a lot of the time these are voted voted rolls. So yeah, you might as well just get it. And this is that point about when we said about the three principles behind the manifesto, we try to sort of link those into when we’re talking about stuff. So when we’re talking about a point, this is an element of transparency, so putting working hours is about being transparent. But it’s also about respecting the person’s time. Because if you’re not going to tell them what the working days aren’t until after an interview process, well, you’ve potentially wasted hours and hours of their time and their emotional well being to go through that whole process to then find out maybe it’s just not going to work for them. And there’s an equity element, because people that work part time, are disproportionately women, disproportionately disabled workers and that experience on the other under-representation. So yeah, if you’re not helping out part time workers, you are disadvantaged in those groups particularly. So that’s the way the equity element comes into it as well.

Emily Weak 27:21
That’s wonderful. Are there in the manifesto? Like, if there was a home organization, they were like, Oh, I can’t I can’t read your seven year 26 pages. I can’t read your seven pages. But I want to make one change, I want to make a couple changes. Do you think that there are like two or three points in the manifesto that you would be like just do this one thing, you would make a great leap forward?

Kirsten Elliot 27:43
I think it depends on where they’re at, at the moment. So I think one is really varies across across sector, but showing the salary. So that’s kind of like public sector jobs, other than the higher levels. That seems to be very standard. But in law, libraries, and schools, interestingly, often don’t show the salary. And I think that’s, that’s kind of a quick win, right? They should have at least a range should know what their budget is, even if it’s a broad range. Like I think having having that is a big straightforward change, that there is lots of evidence behind it feeding into to to equity and fair pay. But also, as Darren was saying, with kind of respect in terms of saving applicants time, is that a feasible job for them? I think, the more ambitious change that I don’t think we have an art manifesto yet, but maybe something is, I’d love employers to be proactively seeking feedback from candidates to like, actually, identify your organization’s problems like create is going to be difficult to get lots. You know, if you’ve been rejected by an employer, you don’t necessarily want to spend time filling in their questionnaires. But I think moving forward, that’s something I would love employers to do. Because it will then give them an evidence base for what potentially is, could be.

Emily Weak 29:12
One of the questions I ask in my survey of Job Hunters is, is not trying to salary a red flag to you. Surprisingly, many people just say that not showing my salary is a red flag. The only thing I ask is like, what are the other red flags in a job advertisement? If you saw those, you’d be like, I’m not gonna apply. And I think it’s for that reason, like people want. And employers do want to know like, how can I get better candidates to apply or more candidates to apply or the right candidate to apply and getting feedback from the candidates that are applying is a great way to improve your process.

Darren Flynn 29:45
I think one of the things with that question not to sort of like to reject the premise of the question, but while I’m rejecting the premise of the question about one thing, and if a recruiter could do if they didn’t have time to read all the man First, I think one of the problems that I think I’ve observed in working in libraries and and doing recruitment myself and seeing other people do recruitment is we often approach it in my experience of, okay, we’ve got to get going, we need to replace this person, somebody’s, somebody’s left, they’ve gone to another job, or they’ve retired or they’re going back to study or something. And we just need to fill in this, we just need to fill in this post as quickly as possible. And sometimes that means that we’re not looking at job descriptions, and person specs in a sort of critical way that we should. And sometimes we’re not being as strategic about thinking about how we’re going to recruit to this role, or what the advert looks like, or what that advert might say about us as an employer, and all of those details, which I think is kind of bananas, really, because your staff are probably one of your if not your highest cost of all, and this person is potentially going to cost you hundreds of 1000s of pounds over the course of their career if they stick with you all of that time. So to not having spent that time before you put the advert together to spend a few hours really thinking about this, rather than just using that template ad that you had from last time or that job description that hasn’t been changed in five or six years, seems really counterproductive to me. And yeah, he would to kick off the recruitment process, the amount of time that He then spent shortlisting contacting, booking out whole two days with a whole panel of people for interviews that you should find the time to really, really interrogate all of those recruitment processes and documents, because this might be the one chance that you get in order to recruit to this place, and this person could be with you for the next 2530 35 years. So yeah, you want to get it right, almost. But I totally understand that need of we need somebody in this job. We need him quickly. We’ve got to get this thing going. It couldn’t Yeah, it’s really hard to make yourself stop sometimes.

Emily Weak 32:00
I think that’s a great point. I’m glad that you reject the premise of the question. This program with the Oregon State University called the search advocates program, and they do a training, which I actually went through and search advocates is a program where they train people to be advocates on the search committee. So they advocate for equity on the search process, both on behalf of people who are on the search committee, so to make sure everybody’s voices are heard on the committee and also on behalf of applicants. And her her initial main point in the training was, we need to slow down like that is how we can be more equitable. That’s how we can widen the pool that recruits that we’re recruiting from as if we can figure out and I think this is in your manifest at to configure out that transparency, like how are we explaining what we want? And are we explaining it in a way that makes sense to the broadest and most diverse amount of people? And are we removing the things that are in there that are vestigial that have been in there before? You know, since the 90s, when we had a different? We needed different things, a different take on what was fair? And I think that’s great.

Darren Flynn 33:07
Good, good.

Kirsten Elliot 33:08
I was just gonna say I think some of the worst application forms we see are when they look like they haven’t been updated since the days when you’d expect them to be printed, and filled in by hand and handed in. And if you have a work document that’s designed for that purpose, it’s often not going to be accessible, and is presumably also an absolute nightmare for the recruiting managers sorting through and looking for it as well. So yeah, I agree that those kind of vestigial questions with digital practices epic Yeah,

Darren Flynn 33:41
I think that just made me think of when you when you talk about sort of vestigial things in it, about job descriptions, and the the sort of person spec that you use, how often, sometimes we will, we’ve looked at, we’ve looked at the person’s back again, and in practice, what’s often had, there’s been extra points added on to it at the bottom, and extra details put on without taking out some stuff as well. And that can be really, really problematic, particularly with, you know, a lot of the jobs, we look at our university ads in the UK, and usually through an online portal, where they often have very limited space where you have to address and evidence every single point that’s on there. Um, sometimes some of the ones I’ve seen have got 3540 45 essential points that you have to address. And the experience of somebody trying to do that in a 30,000 character limit is next to impossible. And it’s because it’s been added to and added to, and sometimes when people are writing job descriptions, something that I think I’ve I’ve seen, I’ve heard and I’ve seen sort of in the job ad that you sort of think you’re trying to replace the exact person who has just left that job. So you’re trying to imagine somebody He who has been doing that job for 20 years, every skill that they’ve picked up, and you’re not going to find, because they’ve been in that post for that long, and they’ve crafted that job around them, and actually need to step back and think, Well, what would somebody need to know on day one of this job, and they’re going to build up those skills in 20 years, but adding in a load of things, it can sometimes be really unreasonable to then put in so many points to do that. And the classic one is the first level of management job. How often have I seen that wait, so you’ve got to have management experience and sometimes substantial management experience. And it’s a first grade manager job, I mean, somebody’s probably stepping up into this. And it’s very difficult for them to to evidence having lied, managed a team because they won’t have done that. So it makes it very difficult to move a very difficult for the person applying for that job to evidence it, which causes a lot of stress and anxiety, I think as well, people feeling that they can’t move on to their career.

Kirsten Elliot 35:55
And I think sometimes people think oh, there’s, you know, there’s 35 things on the job spec, but we know, we’re only looking at 10 of them, or we know, not everyone applying will actually have management experience and they can probably, you know, budget ethics, you know, manage the project, or done a little bit of supervision. But obviously, the applicant doesn’t know that. And might spend a huge amount of time trying I’ve written mammoth epically long personal statements, because I’m trying to evidence every single point on the thing, because that’s what you potentially possibly need to do. And it all say there is evidence about who counts themselves out who’s put off. And that when people from minoritized groups being less likely to apply if they don’t fulfill 100% of the criteria or don’t have experience which exactly matches what’s asked for so then becomes an equity issue. If you’re just getting getting the people who are willing to take a chance willing to put themselves forward. Yeah. Nice.

Emily Weak 37:05
Yeah, there’s a it’s it’s a it’s a women and men Division Two, I think that that men are more likely to leave. Yeah. I’m blanking on the study. I think it was like a TNT edit or something like some or weren’t like a big American company did a study. I was like, wow, I want to we’ve had such a good conversation. And I think we’ve been talking for a while too. So I want to make sure that we talk about things that you want to talk about. I am interested in things like how has it been to not be anonymous and do this work? I’m interested in things like, Are there organizations that are very fair that you can point to that are the that you’re like, Wow, this is a fair library, jobs star organization or stories about changes? Is there anything that you want to round out in the next 510 minutes?

Darren Flynn 37:55
Shall we talk about about about anonymity, because that was something that I think we talked about quite a lot when we started the started the group and about whether we were going to do this anonymously, or whether we were going to put our our faces and names to this straight away and what that process was going to be? Because I think we did have quite a few discussions about listing request. And when we were when we were first starting out and what what we were going to do. So originally, we were anonymous, in terms of we published this, but we didn’t, we didn’t sort of reveal who we were when we first started. And I think there was a mix of reasons for that. I think we in it. Well, I can speak, speak to my reason, I think I felt probably a bit more comfortable being having my name associated with this from the get go and for people to know that I was part of the group. But I realized that I was coming from that from quite a place of privilege, both in terms of like characteristics, but also in terms of I was in permanent employment in a management position where the incredibly supportive sort of management team around me, so I think I felt quite comfortable with that. But I was really thinking about, well, if I criticize somebody out there that want to apply for a job with them in the future, is that going to be held against me? Or we’re gonna have an awkward situation conference or something? So there was that really that element as well. I think that’s what I was a bit concerned about. Yeah,

Kirsten Elliot 39:26
similar. And yeah, I think there was also, we kind of weren’t quite sure like how our own employees or managers were going to take it. But I think on the whole it’s been been been positive. And yeah, we did a kind of sort of soft launch where we did a session, an online conference where which was unrecorded, to people who attended, knew who we were, but it wasn’t kind of global, and have now moved to being fully open. I think that’s partly because actually we haven’t had, we’ve had a little bit of negative pushback, but not Not much. Not really. And we were kind of wanting to have conversations with kind of sticky organizations like siliq, which is the Chartered Institute of librarian and information professionals, I think is sort of the equivalent of La kinda, and it was kind of like, well, if select know who we are, then we may as well be public about this. And I think it’s also got to the point where, for me fairly labor jobs is actually something I’m really proud of. And something I want to talk about and say, like, we organize this thing, we’ve affected this change, we’ve spoken at these conferences, and like putting my name to that. And when we first started, I wasn’t job hunting. And I’ve kind of applied for jobs since. And I kind of deliberately been quite open about it. Because I was job hunting, but job hunting from a position where I didn’t need to leave my job, like I really liked my last job, it was just kind of personal circumstances that matter to to move city. So if I, there was a job that rejected me, because I cared too much about fair recruitment and equality and diversity. And actually, I didn’t really want to work that. And it being that little bit of a litmus test of like, Does my potential new manager go – “Oh, yes, that’s interesting.” Rather than pushing me away from doing it, but as Darren says its, there’s an element of privilege and being able to, to do that. And there’s definitely yeah, partly for me. So I had a long period when I was working as a librarian system for part of that studying a long time for part of that, managing some quite significant health issues, and applying for jobs to kind of try and get into full time work or better paid work. And that was getting a lot of rejections. And at that point, I would not have been confident doing something like this or publicly criticizing any potential employer. But that was the point where I was kind of getting exposed to some of these poor recruitment practices. So that’s part of the motivation as well, for fair like three jobs. For me, it’s kind of being the organization I could have really done with existing five years ago, 10 years ago. And kind of not, not pulling up the ladder behind me as I got into a more secure position.

Darren Flynn 42:21
I think there was a big element, as I think with that anonymity, as well as where it was, I think, actually, we didn’t really receive, I don’t think any real criticism from any of the recruiters that we were we were commenting on or we were calling out, usually if people thought negative, or what was a lack of engagement, not not actively like, like criticizing us, which which to be fair is absolutely fine. You know, if somebody really thinks that they’re doing the best that they can, and they’re doing the things in the right way we can tell them we disagree with that, that, you know, it’s our manifesto, we think it’s best practice some people who follow us think it is, but if they disagree, then, you know, that’s, that’s fine. As long as the meeting what those legal requirements are, we think they should be doing more, but you know, so it tended to be that, but we did get a couple of responses from our online form which was saying, Well, have you thought about your anonymity here? Because this could look a bit like trolling, you know, people? And I’ve, on the one hand, I sort of thought I can see that point. But on the other it was kind of like, well, I don’t think that’s the same way raising legitimate things. I think trolling is a poor choice of words for this. But there was an element where it was kind of like, well, if we’re criticizing other people, does that mean that we should also be saying who we are or where we’re coming from with this? So I think there was that element that made us want to do it, and just to be able to talk about it. Although I don’t think I don’t think you had to be Sherlock Holmes to sort of be able to work out. I mean, every time Fair Library Jobs tweeted and the first like, like, would be Darren Flynn. Harriet Notman liked this, every time. You know, I think I think it was pretty obvious. I mean, at some point, we’ll have let slip anyway with somebody. So yeah, it kind of felt good to be able to be more open about it. But that meant we could talk about it at a different things as well, which is good because it means that we can explain points better and people can give us trust us with their ideas and their feedback as well. I hope

Emily Weak 44:22
Yeah. I’m so glad that it hasn’t been a negative experience to be non anonymous because I think it’s a for all of those reasons you list. It sounds like a great choice. I’m happy to be able to talk with you here and name your names and look at you in the face and I don’t know have a couple people in ski masks or voice modulation. Maybe that would be an exciting podcast. Is there anything else you want to share while we’re here? Do you want to tell us your favorite book or something found that your cat did your SoundCloud

Darren Flynn 44:53
My cat is a terrible recruiter he I mean he’s picked two owners very, very well. But as an employer, he, he does not treat me fairly at all. I have to say,

Kirsten Elliot 45:07
I don’t have a cat, the cat that visits me, and then coats me and all of my stuff and white cat hair, and then start scratching something and gets kicked out.

Emily Weak 45:21
Sounds like you have a cat,

Darren Flynn 45:23
You have a part time cat. Or you don’t have a part time cat. The cat has a part time human that’s how it works, right? Yeah,

Emily Weak 45:34
yeah. Yeah. Did the cat give you hours? Do you

Darren Flynn 45:40
I will require you between the following hours, you need to provide the following things for me to go?

Emily Weak 45:46
Well, yeah, this has been really a really nice discussion. I’m so it’s very generous of you to give some of your time this afternoon to tell me about the work that you’re doing and to tell listeners out in podcast land, who hopefully will exist at some point, what you’re doing

Darren Flynn 46:05
Well, that’s great. I mean, I hope I hope the manifesto I hope our work is is useful to other people. I mean, I know, recruitment practices in different countries are, you know, really can be really different. The way that we do it in the UK, I think is fairly specific. I don’t think it’s the same. You know, I know from talking to, you know, library workers from other countries, they do have their own processes and systems. So I hope there is there is nuggets in there that that are useful. And if anyone wants to take all our stuff – It’s, I think we did for a Creative Commons license. Kirsten, I think Harriet made sure that we did. Yeah. So that people could take talked about that.

Emily Weak 46:42
Yeah.

Darren Flynn 46:46
We did.

Kirsten Elliot 46:53
Yeah, but yeah, if anyone wants to reach out and find out that he’s thinking about doing something similar, then do talk to us. Yeah. And we’re happy to answer any questions about it.

Darren Flynn 47:06
We want more fair job organizations. Fair Family. I think there’s an archives one now isn’t there, Kirsten? Is it archives or galleries as well?

Kirsten Elliot 47:18
I think it was publishing,

Darren Flynn 47:19
publishing that was it. Yeah.

Kirsten Elliot 47:22
Publishing. And I’m really keen for fair academic jobs, to crop up. Yeah, I think that that would be really useful. And obviously, a lot of the players, we’ve talked to you our universities, so lots of overlap, but all of their academics in the UK are engaged in industrial disputes. So I’m not sure anyone has the time.

Emily Weak 47:54
Like, as an American, it, it is very applicable to the American job hunting process. Especially the you know, if you think about the, especially as you thoughtfully included this explanation of why your principle is there really about and you can translate it to the surface, things might be different, but the general principles of be transparent, you know, that applies anywhere in the places where you might be transparent.

Darren Flynn 48:20
I knew we needed all 27 pages, I knew it couldn’t be any shorter.

Emily Weak 48:30
I had been like, what else? Would you want to add? Or like what? Okay, I have more questions for you. Maybe we can talk again, at some other point. Once I figured out how to edit all of these and put them together. But I think I think we should say goodbye or I think yes.

Darren Flynn 48:49
Oh, we should we should we should plug our sub stock as well. Yeah. We talk about things that aren’t directly this, but are adjacent to this. So yeah, people should people should subscribe. Well, there is a link on our website. And we have lots of other random posts that have to do with library recruitment and work experiences and stuff like that. So yeah, some good, yes. Yeah, it’s new. But I think we’re getting some interesting stuff on there.

Emily Weak 49:15
And I can include all of those, too. So awesome. So

Kirsten Elliot 49:19
I think the one of the questions we didn’t get to or that you asked and neither of us ended up answering, was who’s doing good stuff out there. What’s positive things in recruitment? I think the last update post was summarizing stuff we spotted that we thought was positive steps. So that’s kind of our last Substack post if people are interested in seeing examples of good practice out there.

Darren Flynn 49:41
Nice. Excellent marketing there, Kirsten. “I’ll tell you, but only in our substack”

Kirsten Elliot 49:48
It is free.

Darren Flynn 49:50
It’s totally free.

Kirsten Elliot 49:50
So it’s not that we’re trying to get money for it

Emily Weak 49:54
It’s a labor of love for everyone. Okay, all right. Thank you so much

Thank you for listening to the third ever hiring librarians podcast. Our website is HiringLibrarians.com Today’s episode was hosted by me, Emily Weak. My guests were Kirsten Eliot and Darren Flynn, two of the three founders of fair library jobs. You can find their work including the manifesto, online. Audio editing was graciously provided by AJ Somers. The theme tune was written and performed by Matthew Travers. And you can see more of his work on MatthewTraversMusic.com. Finally, this podcast and the hiring librarians project are and will remain free. However your contributions are appreciated. Head on over to patreon.com/HiringLibrarians