Big Tent Librarianship, Part 2, by Becky Yoose

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In Part One I talked about to move from one part of the Big Tent of Librarianship to another. In this post, I’ve turned the focus on those on the hiring committee, the ones who decide who can join them in their part of the Big Tent. If you took a close look at your workplace, you will probably find that the majority of your coworkers share similar life and work experiences. They will probably look similar to you too. Unless you have the power and authority to definitively change hiring practices at your place of work, you might be wondering how you can make room for folks from other parts of the library field when you are just another search committee member. How do you sway the recruitment process to venture away from the cultural “fit” default?

A major part as to why you see a homogeneous workplace is implicit bias. Implicit bias is about our attitudes toward stereotypes - both positive and negative - that are held on an unconscious level. While you might have worked on correcting attitudes and stereotypes you held in the past, chances are you only worked on the external bias that you hold, since external biases are easier to spot in everyday thinking and behavior. In short, you are biased, your search committee members are biased - and you all might not even know it. If you are sceptical that you are biased - even after all those hours and work you put in not being actively biased - take the test on the Project Implicit site. Implicit bias is a reflex that takes active, consistent work in recognizing and addressing over time on a personal level. You have probably seen implicit bias mentioned in conversations about race, gender, age, and ability, but implicit bias also plays into someone’s judgement of another person based on their school or workplace.

Combating the implicit bias present in the search committee can take on many forms. The first place to start is awareness - your HR or organization might already have an implicit bias training in place, or have a section on implicit bias in the materials that the hiring committee receives for the hiring process. If neither of those are the case, talking to HR and the hiring committee chair about addressing implicit bias in the hiring process will start the conversation in your organization.

Moving on to the job post that your committee is drafting, pay attention to the tone of the post. Look at any key words or phrases are you using that might turn off qualified candidates from applying. Take this example phrase in a required qualifications section of a job post - “experience in an academic library”. Widening the net and changing the phrase to “experience in a library setting” (or another broad phrase) opens up the candidate pool to those who have the skills but not in the setting of an academic library.

Another strategy to combat implicit bias is blind reviews. This will take some buy in from the committee and HR if your organization does not perform blind reviews already. Usually blind reviews take the person’s name or any gender or racial identifiers off of the application materials, and this is where a good portion of the literature regarding blind reviews focus on. Removing school and employment identifiers is not as commonly practiced as removing name, gender, or racial identifiers; nonetheless some organizations have taken that route. A non-library example of this is with an UK law firm who stripped out the names of educational institutions on resumes to ensure that the evaluators will judge the candidates on their skills and not the reputation of the school the candidates attended. Another company that specializes in the blind review process found that when they removed educational institution identifiers that applications from community college graduates rose 15%.

You might not be in a position to have your HR department develop a blind review process. You might not even have a say in what the job posting says when it goes out to the public. In those cases, when you see candidates who have the skills and experience but not in “right” type of library, advocate! While it is on the candidate to ultimately show that they have the skills to succeed in the position, it is on the hiring committee to evaluate candidates without penalizing for experience gained at the ‘wrong’ part of the Tent.

Further Reading on Implicit Bias

• Is This How Discrimination Ends?
• Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention
• State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2015 [PDF]
• For a longer, related read about how racial bias has shaped our profession - including who is part of the profession - and ways to address this problem, I recommend Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science.

Becky Yoose is the Library Systems and Applications Manager at The Seattle Public Library. This is her second post for LtaYL. The first was "Fitting” into the Big Tent: The Role of “Fit” and Moving Between Library Types She tweets at @yo_bj.

When the Interview is Over

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We recently had a couple of part time openings in my library. If you've never been the interviewer, you have no idea how much work it is. Even more than interviewing, in some ways. For us, the openings were both circulation aide positions. That means the interviews are more about the kind of person they are and the energy they put forth than their qualifications. Circulation aides are the first - and sometimes last - people who are seen by members of our community. They are also the first and last to be seen by prospective students and their parents while on a campus tour. It's easy enough to help someone learn computer skills and library culture, but you can't really teach an outgoing, calm personality. 

It doesn't stop there, either. Sometimes you end up feeling like you interviewed one person but then end up working with their evil or lazy twin, the behavior and affect can be that different. This means you need to dig deeper: you need to check their references. I've skipped that step before, and let me tell you: it's a big mistake. We got left, high and dry, when a night person quit with no notice. We close relatively early as academic libraries go, but I still feel incredibly uncomfortable having someone close the library alone at midnight. I don't even like leaving people alone in the building if I can help it. So more diligence ahead of time is a must.

Now that I am on the other side of a round of hiring, I thought I'd share the questions we asked of the reference given by our recent slate of applicants:

I did solicit input on this, both directly from colleagues and on Twitter, but a lot of this was the work of me and my reference librarian (who is helping me conduct the interviews):

• “What kind of employee was X?”
• “Are they good at asking for help? Can you give me an example?”
• “Would you hire X to work for you?”
• “How would you describe your relationship with them in terms of management?”
• “What one thing could they improve upon? What one thing would you tell her/him to keep doing?” 
• “Are they a good team player?” 
• “How are they at working unsupervised?”
• “Is there anything else you could add that would help us to understand X?”

The truth is, if someone is bad enough, current employers might be tempted to lie to you in order to get rid of them. It's unethical, but I know people who have done it. There is no real way to 100% protect yourself from someone who ends up not working out, but you can do a lot while building up to the job offer. 

If you're an employer, what kinds of questions do you ask when you call references? If not, what kinds of questions do you think you would ask? (Or, if you are at an organization where human resources does this part, what kinds of questions to you send to them?)

Hiring Student Workers

When I first started in my current position, things were a bit hit-or-miss with our student workers. Some of the people we hired were incredibly helpful and worked hard; others, not so much. I don't want to go into details about specific problems we had, since these are real people here, but I will let you know that there was a lack of service orientation. So, seeing a problem, I did what librarians do: I did some research. I...

• talked to people around the school to find what they were doing and to see if they were happy with their student employees; 
• talked to librarians at other schools to pick their brains; 
• talked to my staff about what they wanted to see.

After gathering all that information, I reworked our hiring process. The first change was to create an employment application. The form we use is a pretty basic one, but it gives us a lot up front. We ask for things like availability, of course, since we have certain priorities for front desk coverage. We also ask obvious questions like, "Why do you want to work for the library?" There aren't any wrong answers to that, but when we see something like "because the library seems like a nice quiet environment," it gives us the opportunity to explain how the library isn't (nor should it be) always quiet.

Then there's the interview. We came up with a script that we follow with each candidate:

• How would you handle an angry patron/customer?
• When you use libraries, how do you use them?
• How do you like to learn?
• How do you handle work/volunteer projects you’re given?
• Tell me about a previous job, either volunteer or for pay — what did you love and what didn’t you like?
• How do you respond when you don’t know the answer to a question?
• What is good customer service?
• How would you handle it if the phone rang right as a line formed at the circulation desk?
• What questions do you have for me?

If it's not already obvious, let me point out to you the distinct focus on patron service. These students who work for me are frequently the first person that a patron sees when they walk in the front door of the library. We want friendly and outgoing and service oriented individuals who will work hard. We ask about learning because we are counting on having to teach them the day-to-day stuff. Heck, for some of our student workers, this is the first job they've ever had. We can teach them how to check out books and pull holds; we can't teach them how to be friendly and outgoing.

The results of the new process are easy to see. The students who work for the library are great members of our team who are eager to learn and to assist our patrons. Of course, part of this is also tied to the training they receive, but that's a whole other blog post. Regardless, we're all very happy with our group.

How about you? How do you hire student workers? Or, if you're at a public library, how do you hire pages?