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About six years ago I interviewed for a part-time position
at a non-profit. I’d already been through one interview with the man who would
be my direct superior—the interview lasted more than an hour and was congenial,
so I had high hopes for getting the job. The second interview was with a woman
from human resources. She seemed to have a list of questions from a “how to
interview job candidates” book. She asked me what I would say about myself to
convince her I wanted the job if we were in an elevator together and I had
thirty seconds to sell myself. As someone with experience working in
non-profits and academia, I’d never heard this question, so I said: “I wouldn’t
talk to you about myself in an elevator; that would be awkward.”
Then she asked me, “Has there ever been a time when you had
to ‘think outside the box’? Can you describe what happened?” …And I knew, even
more clearly than I knew when I bungled the elevator question with my “outside
the box” answer, that there was no way I would get the job.
“Thinking outside the box” has become such a cliché that
there’s really no easy way to answer the question. It seems to mean, “what kind
of innovation can you bring to our company?” But the people who interview for
jobs in libraries, non-profits, teaching, customer service, and similar
humanities-heavy jobs are probably not great at thinking inside the box.
Every day on the job requires synthetically rethinking the job and how to serve
the patron/student/customer’s specific needs. There is no box. There are
relationships between people.
When I interviewed for the librarian position I currently have,
I knew it would be a good fit because no one asked me questions about my
feelings vis-à-vis elevators or other boxes. There were sincere concerns about
the way the library worked, or didn’t, and how I could help. No one said “innovation.” No one said
“tradition.” They indicated that the system was broken and needed to be fixed.
I listened.
The library had been poorly maintained for almost three
decades, although some serious innovations had occurred—one faculty member had
spent a summer organizing the school archives, the previous librarian had
weeded about 10% of the collection, and the librarian before that had converted
the paper catalog and circulation to an electronic catalog. The collection was
astonishingly out of date; the average age of the collection was 1977 and there
were almost no books purchased after 2000 (I took over in 2011). No one checked
out books, but hundreds of books were “lost” every year. It took a lot of
listening to understand what the problems were and how to fix them. The budget
had been inadequate for years, but the board of trustees was ready and willing
to help. The faculty wanted to be able to use the library for research, but the
collection was too outdated. The students wanted to check out traditional paper
books to read, but the fiction collection didn’t have any of the books they
wanted. The circulation system was difficult to use; the library wasn’t part of
the school culture. The library needed to continue to be a fairly traditional
library, but it needed to be a functional
library.
“Thinking outside the box” doesn’t necessarily mean
“innovate.” It may be shorthand for “the system is broken and needs to be
fixed.” By listening to the population I served, I established that the library
itself needed to be “inside the box” – the straightforward book-based research
library one imagines. I had to “think outside the box” by thinking about the
complex web of relationships between faculty, students, staff, the current
collection, the potential collection, the labor force I had, the labor force I
needed, and the budget.
If I interview again in the future and someone from HR asks
me about a box, I will take a deep breath. Then I’ll ask: what is the box and
what do you need it to do? What do your patrons want out of the box? In what
ways is the box broken, and how do you expect someone in this position to help?
Jessica Smith earned her B.A. and M.A. in Comparative Literature and M.L.S. at SUNY Buffalo. In addition to teaching Composition and German literature, she worked as a freelance archivist for the Poetry Collection and Charles Bernstein's correspondence for the Mandeville Special Collections Library; she also archived materials for NYPL through Internet Archive. She currently works as the librarian at Indian Springs School, a private school near Birmingham, AL. Learn more at about.me/jessicasmith.
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