Emily Weak is the founder of the blog Hiring Librarians. What started as a personal project has achieved fantastic results, breaking down for applicants what really happens in library recruitment and engaging hiring managers in the process. I ask Emily about the blog, her reasons for running it and what lessons, if any, learned along the way.  

Emily Weak, Founder, Hiring Librarians

 

1. What is your blog Hiring Librarians all about?

Hiring Librarians is primarily short survey-based interviews with people who hire library and other LIS workers. I also post other hiring and LIS career related features. This has included everything from profiles of websites, such as Library Returners, to interviews with job hunters to summaries of hiring-related research or books.

Opinions and advice abound when it comes to LIS hiring. One of my goals for the blog is to provide a broad perspective on library career advice. By showcasing a variety of voices and resources, I can help my readers make informed choices about whose guidance to follow, and what career paths might best suit them.

2. What made you interested in starting the blog in the first place?

I have actually started it twice – I guess you could say I am a blog returner!

It originally ran from 2012-2016. In 2012 I was just under a year out of library school, I had been laid off, and I was really puzzled and frustrated by my job hunt. The market  was really tough then but I also didn’t really get how library hiring is different from corporate hiring. I was looking in both public and academic libraries, and they both seemed to have these impenetrable recruiting rituals. There was also this seemingly contradictory piece where everyone had advice, but it felt really scary to actually ask the people you were trying to work for to provide more information about what they wanted. How could I know that the advice I was getting was good advice? I was interested in informal research (and informal communication of research) so I thought I might send a survey to some folks who did hiring and see if I could learn more about it. The first month I got seven people to answer the survey and then in the second month I had 101 responses! 2012 wasn’t the height of library blogging, but it was still a pretty popular thing, and I had a lot of good engagement from all kinds of people.

I ran it for about four years. Then in 2016 I had been working steadily full time for a while, so I was less invested in hiring. I was also navigating a divorce, so I was reassessing my work-life balance. I decided to let the blog go.

I restarted it this year because I’ve again changed my work and my life. Like a lot of folks, COVID spurred a lot of rethinking for me. I quit my full time job (to be honest I’d been burned out on it for a while). I moved from the West Coast to the Southern US and am now trying to put together more of a consulting-type career. Putting these together means: I have a lot more flexibility in my time, I am personally invested in hiring processes again, and I am looking for ways to engage with more LIS folks in a wide geographic region. Hiring Librarians seemed to fit in well with all that.

3. What do you think you have learnt from doing the blog? (e.g. have you changed your job hunting practice in any way or any other practice?)

I have learned so much! It’s really hard to name or quantify all that I’ve learned, and much of it has been on a philosophical or belief systems level. For example: I had a popular yet controversial survey about what was considered appropriate clothing for interviews. I had unwittingly put it together in a way that was very gender-normative. The criticism I received helped me better understand certain gender issues. And actually, there was a change in practice as part of that – I work to be a lot more careful and inclusive about the way I frame things.

Some other things that I have put into practice that are specifically related to the way I job hunt:

• If I include a cover letter, I always, always, always tailor it to the job ad, addressing as many of the requirements as I coherently can. However, I don’t bother creating a cover letter if I’m applying for a job that doesn’t ask for one.

• I won’t write thank you notes (and I used to). Sometimes I will send an email, but it’s usually only a quick note – and I know this almost certainly will not affect whether or not I get a job. This is part of conserving energy during a job hunt – I want to be careful and complete about the things that matter, and let go of the things that don’t. Job hunting is tiring.

• I am much more sanguine if I don’t get a job – in practice a lot of hiring is about fit, and fit goes both ways. Sometimes you’ve dodged a “bad fit” bullet. (However, fit is also a highly problematic concept in hiring! It can be short-hand for “someone like me” and it really contributes to the continued monoculture in our profession.)

• I don’t stress too much about traditional expressions of professionalism – I want to work at a place where I can be authentic. And because many of our ideas about professionalism reinforce our whiteness, our gender conformity, our generational ideals, etc., it’s worthwhile to question them anyway.

• I make sure I research the organisation and the job before I go into an interview, so I can ask questions that both give me good information about what the job will be like and so I can better express what I would bring to the organisation.

In general, I have really learned to consider myself an equal in the hiring process, not a supplicant. I consider the organisation, just as they are considering me. I also know this doesn’t work for everyone – I’ve been lucky to never have been job hunting while in dire financial straits.

4. Are you sometimes surprised by the advice the experts provide?

Yes, often. The thing about not writing thank you notes was based on a recent Further Questions, and it was not what I was expecting. I’ve also been somewhat surprised by the level of jadedness I see in some answers – for example, there is a survey where the respondent just straight up said, “Do not go to library school. Librarianship is a dying profession.”

5. List something that you have discovered from running your site that you think may benefit library returner readers in particular.

Since restarting the blog I’ve really been struck by how much more aware people who hire are about candidates’ needs and circumstances. In the first iteration (2012-2016), hiring managers might express understanding about gaps in employment but it was often seen as something that needed to be addressed in a cover letter or the interview. In June I asked if candidates should address gaps in employment and many said (there and on Twitter), that gaps don’t need to be addressed at all.

Even if your readers choose to be more conservative about addressing gaps, I hope they will have a sense that ultimately – your career gap is your own business. You shouldn’t need to justify what has happened in your personal life. Your perfect job won’t care.

About the interviewee

Before becoming a consultant, Emily spent most of her library career in public libraries in California, most recently as the Senior Librarian for Programming, Outreach and Engagement at the Oakland Public Library. In addition to consulting work with organizations such as the Pacific Library Partnership, she is currently the Saturday librarian at Chattahoochee Technical College. Prior to becoming a librarian, she was variously: a circus student, a cheesemonger, and a grocery store manager. She still loves good food (especially cheese) and can do a decent back bend.

 

 

Library Returners would like to express thanks and appreciation to Emily for agreeing to take part in this interview.