The original version of this post was published on a blog that has since perished. However, as graduation season has come again and hundreds (if not thousands) of newly-minted Librarians with MLS/MLIS/MSLIS in hand are entering the job market, it felt like it was time to revisit this age-old question.

The listservs, message boards and social media groups of Library Land witness a familiar phenomenon every spring as hundreds (maybe thousands) of newly-minted Library School graduates enter the job market for the first time and express their frustration and despair as their dreams of a career in Librarianship collides head on with the harsh realities of the job market in our field. Their struggles are nothing to laugh at. While the job market for Librarians is better than that of Historians (really bad) or Battleship Captains (nonexistent), the annual number of students graduating from Library Schools across the country exceed the number of entry level librarian positions on the market. As such, competition is heavy, on-the-job experience is at a premium and, depending on the composition of your applicant pool, even a strong resume and glowing recommendations are no guarantee of getting a job.

Furthermore, the very application process can be mind-numbingly complex, with some employers requiring a fully-online application, requiring the uploading of a ridiculous variety of documents (including but not limited to resumes, cover letters, letters of recommendation, transcripts, and/or one’s secret CIA dossier). Other employers dispense with the endless online forms, but require an e-mail with all of these items compressed into a single PDF. Still others, including my current employer, required a variety of documents in print, which had to be physically mailed to their HR department. The very process of keeping track of all of the required documentation and generating all of the original submissions such as an original cover letter is enough to drive any applicant to distraction.

However, while submission is stressful, once you’ve sent off your application the worst is yet to come! Now, you get to wait. The waiting is probably the worst, most nerve-wracking part of the entire application process, because now your fate is out totally out of your hands, meanwhile, the bills pile up, the student loan debt looms menacingly over the horizon and your friends and family wonder why it’s taking forever for you to get a job. Finally the rejections trickle in, but why do some rejections come in early, while others take months and still other never even acknowledge your existence? If you do get an interview, why can’t they tell you how soon you’ll know if you get the job? In short, what the hell are they doing with your application?

Allow me to pull back the curtain for you. While I can’t explain the hiring processes for Public, School or Special Libraries (sorry, I don’t have any experience there) I’ve spent 11 years working in Academic Libraries and been involved in numerous hiring decisions. So allow me to navigate you through our rather Byzantine process of hiring a new librarian or library assistant.

First off let me clarify a point for you, there is no single person who decides who does, or does not get hired for a position in an Academic Library. The Dean may have ultimate say over who to offer the job to, but they do not review the applications, nor do they determine the applicant pool, this work is done by the hiring committee. When an Academic Library is allowed to fill an open position (a process that we usually have no control over, funding to fill openings, or new faculty lines for new Librarians are determined and approved at the campus level) a hiring committee is appointed composed either entirely of members of the department that is hiring or with representatives from the several groups (faculty, staff, reference, public services) who will interact with the new hire on a regular basis. Service on a hiring committee is voluntary and usually involves a significant time committment from the committee members.

Before the job opening is ever posted, the committee has to agree on the language of the announcement and the required and preferred characteristics for the position and decide where to post the announcement. Then, our decisions have to be approved by the campus HR department in order to ensure compliance with the edicts of the Elder Gods that ensure the job application process is as soul-destroying as possible. Just kidding! HR does have to approve the announcement language, but that to ensure compliance with Federal law regarding non-discrimination. Then the post goes up, and usually stays up for anywhere between 30-90 days (this depends on the institution, YMMV). During this period the hiring committee doesn’t see any of the applications. We don’t get access until the cutoff date. At this point HR takes all the applications, sets aside the ones that didn’t include bribe money, or weren’t submitted by close friends and/or relatives and promptly trashes the rest. Once again I kid! HR does indeed discard some of the applications, the ones that were incomplete, or failed to provide all the required documentation, which brings me to my first piece of advice:

ALWAYS MAKE SURE TO SUBMIT A COMPLETE APPLICATION PACKAGE!

Seriously, if we say we want a copy of your transcripts, it needs to be there. If we say we need 3 letters of recommendation, they need to be there. If you don’t have a copy of your resume attached in a downloadable PDF, the application is going to be flagged as incomplete and we’re never going to see it, you’re going to lose before ever getting to plead your case. So check, double check and make sure everything is attached before you submit!

Once we get all the completed applications, the committee members take them and sacrifice a crow to Bookulthu, dark lord of Library hiring and determine how to score them by the patterns of blood spatter. Ok, maybe not. Actually at this point the “required” and “preferred” qualifications become crucial, as does the Cover Letter. You see, when we score an application we score it according to a rubric based on those required and preferred qualifications and your overall score is determined by how well you meet each of those qualifications. How do you “meet” them? Well, this has to do with my next two pieces of advice:

MAKE SURE YOUR RESUME AND YOUR COVER LETTER HIGHLIGHT HOW YOU MEET THE QUALIFICATIONS LAID OUT IN THE JOB ANNOUNCEMENT!

USE YOUR COVER LETTER TO PROVIDE US WITH SPECIFIC EXAMPLES ABOUT HOW YOU MEET THOSE QUALIFICATIONS!

I know the “tailor your resume to fit the job requirements” thing has been done to death so I’m not going to dwell on it, but basically, if we say you need a MLIS/MLS/MSLIS from an ALA accredited school, it needs to be somewhere prominent. If we want 2 years of professional experience, it shouldn’t be hard to find on your resume. If you’re applying for an instruction position, make sure we can see you’ve spent time doing instruction.

Furthermore, don’t neglect your cover letter. Yes, it’s all in your resume, but your resume is a dry summary of your professional life, it doesn’t go into a lot of detail. If you have specific experiences that are good examples of how you meet the qualifications, tell us in your cover letter. Also, if one of those qualifications reads something like “effective written and oral communication skills” guess what? Your cover letter is my first indicator of how effective a communicator you are, it gives me a sense of what emails from you might be like as a colleague, so try to be clear, and concise, touching on the required and preferred qualifications in a way that makes it easy for the member of the hiring committee to read.

The reason for this last point is a dirty secret of all hiring. If I have 30-40 applications that I need to look over in the next two days, in the midst of all of my other duties, how much time do you think I’m going to devote to each one. Loathe as I am to admit it, it’s probably not going to be much more than five minutes. This isn’t a reflection on how we feel about you as an applicant, but rather a reflection of too few hands for too much work. So, the easier you make it for us to connect the dots between your experience and our requirements, the more effective your application will be.

Finally we meet as a committee and compare notes. We create a ranking of all our applicants. Usually no more than the top ten (and sometimes no more than the top 5) scored applications are selected for a phone/skype interview. Of those usually only 3 progress on to the in-person interview. Which is why the wait for even a rejection notice can be agonizingly long. You see, during this whole period people drop out of the process because they get a job somewhere else, they get sick, decide they don’t want to continue the application process, etc, etc. Under such circumstances, the applicant just below the cutoff may get called up for a phone or later an in person interview and as members of the committee lack clairvoyance, we will not know who will drop out ahead of time, so we cannot just dismiss people we haven’t immediately chosen to interview. Furthermore, in many cases policy requires us to wait to send out rejections until a final candidate has been approved and accepted the job offer.

So why does it take so long? Sometimes it doesn’t. My current place of work took about two and a half months between my submitting an application (on paper no less!) and providing me with a job offer, which at the typically glacial pace of academic hiring, was almost a shocking level of haste. (To compare, my previous job involved sending in an application in November, having a Skype interview in late January, an in-person interview in early April, receiving a job offer in late April and not actually starting my position until July!) Generally though, the problem is one of scheduling. Committees have to meet when everyone is available. Skype/phone interviews require the presence of the whole committee. In person interviews are even worse as every department and group that will interact with the new librarian need to be present and available, this includes the Dean, who often has a packed schedule and considerable travel. So just getting everyone into the same room can take weeks, if not months. Which brings me to my next bit of advice:

RELAX. NO, REALLY, RELAX THIS TENDS TO TAKE A WHILE.

I realize this is cold comfort as the bills are still coming due and you have to eat, but worrying about this won’t make it move any faster. So feel free to play the field, send out as many applications as you can to as many institutions as you want, application is a skill, and the more cover letters you write, the better you get at them (take it from someone whose written nearly 60). Oh and while you’re at it…

IT’S OK TO “RECYCLE” RESUMES AND COVER LETTERS, JUST MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE NAME OF THE INSTITUTION YOU’RE APPLYING FOR CORRECT!

While I will admit that it provides a moment of much-needed comic relief when an application comes through that mentions the wrong university on it, it’s also a sure fire way to get rejected right out the gate. I’ll admit, we take this a little personally. Either we’re not your institution of choice but rather your rebound (and no one likes being the rebound) or you just couldn’t be bothered to make sure you sent the right application to the right school. We all know what happened, we’ve all recycled application materials (so long as the skill set is comparable it’s more efficient that way) but failing to get the name of the school right is just sloppy.

Let’s say you’ve done all of the above and despite your best efforts you get the dreaded “we appreciate your application for the position of…” letter or email. We’ve all been there. My first time in the Library market I sent out over 45 applications. I got 3 phone interviews, and two in-person interviews. All told my rejection rate was about 90%. Did I suck that bad? Maybe, but probably not, and neither do you. But after everything else, after putting together your application and pleading your case as best you can there is one element in the job search process over which you have no control and no I don’t mean your astrological sign, or the inconceivable wills of the Lovecraftian horrors from beyond the cosmos that secretly control librarianship. I mean the composition of your pool:

THE ONE THING YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER IN HIRING IS WHO YOUR COMPETITION MIGHT END UP BEING.

Seriously, you might be an eminently qualified candidate, who had the lousy luck to end up applying for the same position as a bunch of people with far more experience and skills, this is not your fault, nor does it make you a lousy candidate, it just means that you got outclassed in the one area you couldn’t control. Conversely, you could be a marginally qualified candidate who just managed to apply to a position that every other candidate looked worse. This doesn’t mean you’re Superman, you just lucked out the other way. Either way, unless you failed to submit a complete application, your application was unclear or you were clearly lying (protip: don’t do this, it’s more obvious than you think), a rejection is rarely just a reflection on you, it’s a reflection on you, and the pool you applied with, and the only person in that pool you got to represent was yourself. So do your best, the rest is beyond your control.

Applying for your first gig is particularly hard. There are a lot of unknowns, and a lot of anxiety. I hope I’ve managed to help you understand a little about what things look like from the other side of the table. As one of your potential future colleagues, I wish you luck,