How you can get a library job, too

Yesterday was my one year anniversary as a librarian. Since I just completed my first service on a search committee, I thought I would honor the occasion by offering job searching advice. I was pretty much on target when I wrote "How I got a library job" a year ago. I have three things that I would emphasize more strongly than I would have thought before I was on a search committee.

1. There is very little that a job candidate can do for him or herself. It all comes down to the pool of candidates and the ever elusive concept of "fit."

If you make sure that your cover letter and resume reflects all relevant experience, then you have done all you can to make yourself stand out in the pool. I do mean all experience--we did not distinguish between work experience, class projects, and volunteer or internship work. We didn't care if it came before, during, or after graduate school. If it was relevant, we were interested. If you're unlucky enough to not have the top three applications in the stack, you won't get an interview. That is not a personal rejection, just a comparison of your relevant experience with everyone else's.

The people who are brought in for interviews all have experience that's relevant to getting the job done. At that point, "fit" is the primary criterion for selection. It's essentially asking ourselves if this person can do this job in this environment without driving him/herself crazy or driving other people crazy. Here again, there's not a lot the job seeker can do to convince the search committee that he or she "fits" (although enthusiasm, see point 3, is a factor). You can be a wonderful person with wonderful experience and express enthusiasm, and still not fit in our organization. If you are all those things, you will surely fit in some organization but you won't fit in every organization. The silver lining, here, is that you don't want to be in a place where you don't fit anymore than the organization wants you there--although that's often hard to see when you are in the midst of the stress of a job search.

My advice is to find a way to cope with the uncertainty and lack of control in the job hunt process. I realize now that I had even less control than I thought. If you can adopt a fatalist attitude along the lines of "I'll get the job I'm meant to get," you'll be a calmer, happier job seeker. This attitude doesn't come naturally to me, but it works wonders when I have less control over a situation than I would like. I believe I got the job I was meant to get and I believe we hired the person who was meant to have this job.

2. Small mistakes are remarked on, but don't weigh particularly heavy in the decision. I was always terrified that one misplaced comma or missing period was enough to disqualify me from a job. It's not true. We considered people who didn't send cover letters. We interviewed a person whose clothes didn't even rise to the standard of business casual, much less appropriate interview apparel, but that did not ultimately enter into the hiring decision. We brought in one person whose resume was too long by pretty much any guideline and one whose resume was probably too short by some guidelines. We noticed those things but it was experience and "fit" that were the deciding factors.

One of the reasons that I think we all get caught up on the small things during a job search is because we sense that point 1 is true. If there's so little that we can control, we want to control the things we can. My advice is to take that energy and put it into your cover letter. There were at least two times when we were about to reject someone based on the lack of experience in the resume when someone noticed something in the cover letter that seemed to indicate that experience might be there after all. So give yourself that second opportunity to make all your relevant experience available to the search committee by crafting your cover letter so that it addresses how your experience applies to the job description.

3. Enthusiasm. I'm not quite sure how to describe "fit" in any way that's useful, but I am convinced that enthusiasm is a piece of it. As a search committee, we want to see enthusiasm for the job, the people, the place, the organization, and the collection and enthusiasm for learning new things about all of that. If your real reason for applying for this job is that the cost of living is lower in St. Louis, that's probably not an enthusiasm that's going to get you the job--although, you can certainly mention it (it compliments our good sense in living here). I'm sure the same applies if your applying for a job in southern California and all you talk about is the weather. Find some other things to be excited about, too.

Good luck to anyone who is engaged in the search process now.     #

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