That elusive archives job

A table of contents

2010-04-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Since anybody coming on to this blog might prefer to read specific sections or have the ability to read it in the written order (instead reverse chronological), here's the TOC. With some brief annotations to help decipher the occasionally goofy titles. The BTP entries represent Between The Posts entries which weren't originally part of the plans for the blog but were inserted because of questions or comments.

The bad news/good news. 1/27/2010. Looking at the archives job market.
Background. 1/29/2010. About the author.
BTP: Costs of a recruitment. 1/30/2010. A math calculation on what a recruitment might cost for the recruiting agency.
Off the rack or bespoke. 2/1/2010. The importance of good tailoring (of app materials, that is.)
BTP: The schedule. 2/2/2010. The rough outline for the blog. Made obsolete by this entry.
Who are those anonymous survey takers? 2/3/2010. A review of the types of archival recruiters who filled out the survey.
Who's the competition and what are we competing for? 2/5/2010. What the surveyed said about numbers of applicants and types of positions open.
BTP: Certified archivist. 2/6/2010. Some lack of clarity about the value of the CA credential.
Elusive advert. 2/8/2010. Where recruiters are advertising.
BTP: In praise of Fairbanks. 2/9/2010. The value of geographic diversity when job-hunting.
A quick look at phrasing. 2/10/2010. Interpreting the language of job ads.
The paperwork. 2/12/2010. What types of application materials you can expect to produce.
Generic--yet still important--advice. 2/15/2010. Thoughts about jobhunting manuals and such.
BTP: Curriculum Vitae. 2/16/2010. How a vita differs from a resume.
Cover letter 1: the long and the short of it. 2/17/2010. The length of a cover letter and contents.
Cover letter 2: what not to write. 2/19/2010.
BTP: The wild west is where I wanna be. 2/20/2010. Mentioning why you want a job in a specific location in your cover letter.
Cover letter 3: good or bad, what makes it so. 2/22/2010.
Resume part 1: volume and arrangement notes. 2/24/2010. How long, what order of elements.
Resume part 2: what to include. 2/26/2010.
BTP: the serial archivist. 2/26/2010. How to handle resume listings for 2 different jobs at the same place.
Resume part 3: that was the University of Where? 3/1/2010. What to do with education/degree listings.
Resume part 4: experienced archivist wanted. 3/3/2010. How to handle the experience listings.
Resume part 5: what not to write. 3/5/2010.
Resume part 6: good or bad, what makes it so. 3/8/2010.
BTP: limited time offer. 3/8/2010. A reader offers up her resume for editing and the rules are set.
That overlooked little document: the reference list. 3/10/2010.
BTP: the candidates speak out! 3/11/2010. A cancelled attempt at surveying jobseekers. (sorry.)
What do they do with those references anyhow? 3/12/2010. When do recruiters call references?
BTP: Education and secrecy. 3/13/2010. Archival education and keeping your job search from your current employer.
BTP: Your chance to edit. 3/13/2010. A reader offers up her resume and cover letter for editing.
Intermission. 3/15/2010. Midway (topically) review and preview.
Interview part 1: the basics. 3/17/2010. The kinds of interviews done and nervousness.
Interview part 2: what to expect. 3/19/2010. Is travel paid for, how long is an interview, are presentations and informal meetings typical?
Interview part 3: what to wear, what to wear. 3/22/2010.
BTP: phone interview tips. 3/22/2010.
Interview part 4: So why do I matter anyway? 3/24/2010. The personality questions.
Interview part 5: oh, that old question. 3/26/2010. Some of the standard questions.
Interview part 6: some more old questions. 3/29/2010. Some of the standard questions.
Interview part 7: canned answers, not so canned questions. 3/31/2010. When to prepare answers, and some of the other questions interviewers might ask.
Interview part 8: turnabout is fair play. 4/2/2010. What to do with "do you have any questions for us?"
Interview part 9: good or bad, what makes it so. 4/5/2010.
Interview part 10: the public speaking thing. 4/7/2010. What to do with presentations.
Meta part 1: could anything possibly take longer than this blog? 4/9/2010. How long recruitments can take.
Meta part 2: follow-up, anyone? 4/12/2010. Following up after an interview and thank you notes.
Meta part 3: Survey generis. 4/14/2010. Some final comments by survey respondents.
Meta part 4: Network blues. 4/16/2010. What is networking and why does it matter?
Meta part 5: More survey generis. 4/19/2010.
Conclusion. 4/21/2010. Thanks, everybody! And other places to get help.

In conclusion

2010-04-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

So that's it. That's what our survey respondents (and me) had to tell you about job searching. Giant round of applause for those who took the survey please? Let me tell you, this was not easy for them to do. The survey was a marathon and since my design skills stink, it was an obstacle course, too. But many persevered, and the most of what they said has been presented in the preceding 49 posts.

One last bit, though. At the very end of the survey I asked if any of the respondents might be interested in doing some one-on-one reviewing of application materials with potential candidates. This was when I was still hoping to make this some sort of a workshop with a practical component. Anyway, those that answered? Most said no. Some said they were doing it already with interns working at their institutions. I've had a few requests myself as a result of doing this blog and my answer has been no. I realize that sounds kind of cold, but in my case, this whole project has taken a large amount of my personal time. If I ever do that level of review again? It will be under one of two circumstances: a) as a mentor in one of the professional organizations or b) as a volunteer at the SAA conference Career Center.

SAA has an active mentoring program and a lot of this type of work happens within it. I've done this with several mentees myself over the past 6 years. I've also volunteered at the Career Center at the conferences for the past two or three years: if you can take advantage of the opportunity, it's a phenomenal chance to have an unbiased strangers with hiring expertise take a look at your application materials in a no-stress environment. If you can't afford SAA and you're in the northwest states, NWA has an active mentoring program. Other regionals may as well, I haven't researched this. Call up one of your profs and ask if s/he knows anybody you can tap for work like this. Call up your internship supervisor. Call up the president of your regional (after you pay your dues) and ask him/her to figure out how to help with this.

Thanks everybody, for hanging with me. I appreciate your trust, your candor, and your responsiveness.

Meta part 5: More survey generis

2010-04-19T08:00:00.001-07:00

And on we go.

Since I've talked only a bit about volunteering, I'd like to give some time to our respondents who addressed it directly in their comments.

Begin "working" as a volunteer. If you're reliable, you'll be first in line for any paid positions that become available.
volunteer, if possible, as that's how we often hire people - by who we know. Otherwise, come for an information interview, and do your homework about us.

Along the lines of being patient, several respondents elaborated on that. I'd like to share those with you too, as I think they might help. If nothing else, this lets you know that the interviewers are aware this is frustrating.

Follow the rules, be patient. There are more administrative rules that seem necessary, but they are there nonetheless...
Careful about asking too many questions about when the offer will come in, it is often not up to the search committee to make the offer they only make recommendations. These recommendations are almost always followed but the committee often has no idea how long an offer will take.
Academic institutions take time. Be patient. Don't call us, we'll call you. Know something about the institution before we contact you.

By the way? That last sentence on that last one is not just a simple add-on. This is essential. When you get that call? You should be at a stage where you could potentially do a phone interview within a couple of days. Part of what is going on is that there's a lot of the time frame that is out of our control, hence the constant comments about "be patient." But sometimes things like scheduling interviews may be under the purview of the committee chair. And when that happens, things can often move along quite quickly.

Do you see now why respondents encourage you to pick and choose the jobs you apply for instead of blanketing? On your behalf, it means you don't have to remember which of the 20 applications you're juggling when the phone rings. Trust me, "who from where?" is NOT a good response to a request for an interview. That and fewer applications means a lot less research for you. Here's some thoughts on that.

Know the job requirements; take some time to investigate our institution so you know the context for the job; be prepared to explain why you feel you and the job are a good match
research the institution, the library, the department via the Web pages to get a basic understanding of the complexity and where the position fits.
Study the website, learn about the set up, see what records we have that we advertise, see what the professional staff are involved in
Study our organization and be prepared to show this knowledge in the interview. Ask questions about the work and the work environment. This emphasizes your interest in working at our institution.
Do convince me that you want this job, in this workplace, with these people. Not just "a job" in this field.

Tailoring isn't just to get you past those all important screening documents and I think our commentators nailed exactly why. Tailoring is to convince us that you want the job we have on offer.

I know some of you are applying for any job that comes open just in hopes of getting a foot in the door. But what I'm hearing from some recruiters is that they think they can spot those people. So make sure that your blanket applying is completely and totally invisible to the people reading your job application materials and interviewers. If you are willing or able to be more selective in applying, step back, take a look at the job ad again, decide if you really are willing to move to that place. Or do that kind of work. Or work for those paltry wages some places still insist on paying. If the answer to any of those is well, maybe not, then save the time to work on the job app that is for the position that intrigues you, that fits well with your goals, that pays you a living wage.

Here's some other advice I hope you'll find helpful. Or perhaps not. It's all a matter of assessing how this might apply to you, isn't it?

Do not focus on one member of the interview team, after deciding that is the member with the power to make the final decision, and treat the rest of the team as if their perceptions of you don't matter.
Dress formally and bring a nice leather portfolio and pen, we want people that make nice impressions and could represent our institution well.
At meals, eat sparingly and be careful of your manners.
Be friendly.
I've seen some list commentary on interviewers not getting back to candidates, and I think they should know - it's not always possible, or may be forbidden by the institution. Complaining about this to an interviewer, or in general, is not very helpful.
Applicants need to make sure they do not bad-mouth their current or past employers. They want to get across that they are wanting to go TO your job, not get AWAY from another. They also don't want their prospective employers wondering if the applicant will be bad-mouthing them when something happens they don't like.
Be professional. Dress as you would for an important day at work. Speak as you would to an important donor.
Re: getting to know the personality of the candidate: in these days when every job posting gets many, many responses, personality really makes a difference.
The ability to write a good cover letter and to speak well (not mumble or fidget--the simple things) and to be knowledgable about the context (institution, area) as well as the job requirements, are very important.

And two last comments from our respondents that I think anybody job-searching needs to remember when making decisions about what to and what not to apply for.

Do not apply for a position on the chance that they will consider you for a future position unless you want the job you are applying for. Interviewing someone for a job and finding out that while they want to work for our institution but not in the open position is a waste of time and leaves a bad impression.
Don't apply for a position that you are completely and obviously not qualified for--if something comes up later that you are qualified for and we feel like you've wasted our time once already it may affect later feelings towards the candidate.

I've watched search committees get candidates like this moved onto a do-not-call-for-interview list. In perpetuity. Most places neither have that ability nor have the institutional memory to do that, but is it worth chancing? Note that the first person isn't saying don't do it, they're saying only do it if you're still content with the job that's actually on offer here. So that's not exactly a no. And that second one? While I still think, "oh, cold" I also understand the reaction. Because chances are, at no point during the process will anybody actually tell you why you weren't hired. The very idea got me yelled at by my HR rep when a candidate asked me for a review one time. So you won't necessarily be told that the reason you didn't get a call back is simply that you were viewed as unqualified. Which is another good reason to have proofreaders who are willing to be very honest when reading your application materials. Because if you apply for a lot of jobs--or if you're looking at geographical boundaries--eventually you may need to apply at the same place twice. And why have this this bias awaiting you if you could have avoided it?

So are you tired of my nagging about proofreading and tailoring? Fair enough. The good news is that it's almost over. The bad news is that I'm sure there's a whole bunch of questions that not only haven't been asked yet, but I'll never be able to answer them.

Meta part 4: Network blues

2010-04-16T08:00:00.001-07:00

First, let me tell you what networking is not. At least amongst the archivists who have been talking to me. I recently received an email from a jobseeker who explained networking as approaching archival management types, providing a copy of a resume or telling the person about his/her skills, and then following that off with a "if you hear of anything, will you let me know?" I'm told that's what a lot of the job seeking guides advise. I've had people (non-archivists) say it to me, too, as part of their job-seeking advice. I've run it by a few archivists and they're saying "not so much." I'm not saying no, but as the jobseeker in question noted to me, it doesn't seem to be working anyhow.

So let me give you another view of what networking might be. Networking is about building relationships.

But, you might say, if that's networking, why should I bother? It's not a direct line to a job and apparently not even a crooked one.

Fair enough. But consider it anyhow. If you build relationships with co-professionals (or soon-to-be-co-professionals) that network you're building here gains you things you can use in the job search. Co-professionals you can use as references. People who--because they're your friends--might remember that you're searching when they see job ads (and sometimes they'll forward them even when you aren't searching). And when you're writing up your job app materials or your interview answers, wouldn't it be nice to have somebody you can call who may work in a similar type of institution so you can tailor?

The archival colleagues I've talked to about networking suggest this: go to conferences. If you can't afford national, go to local or regional. Attend sessions. Propose sessions. Go to social events. Attend business meetings. Volunteer to serve on committees or task forces. If you don't have any conferences upcoming, figure out alternative ways to meet people in the biz. Like volunteering in repositories.

Okay, I was going to provide a long rant on volunteering but since that was only unhelpful, I won't. I'll just sum it up with this. If you're volunteering as a professional development mechanism, at some point take a look at your volunteer work and honestly assess the value of it to your career. If you're doing it for love of the work, good for you, keep it up. And when it comes time to write up your resume for the job, you'll still need to present it as you would any other job experience if you intend to include it.

If you're new to the profession, don't make the mistake I did and not jump on networking opportunities when you can find them while still in grad school or shortly thereafter, just like that survey respondent said in that last entry in the last posting. Your archives profs? Chances are they know working archivists. In my grad program? We took field trips. We had guest lecturers. Some of the biggest names in the biz showed up in our tiny classrooms or we showed up in their offices because, well, I'm still not entirely clear on that, I think Bert Rhoads may have been blackmailing some of them. (That's not a networking technique I'd advise, by the way.) Do I remember any of their names? More to the point, do any of them remember mine? Nope. I wasted some opportunities there. Perhaps it wouldn't have done me any good in the job search. But I'll never know now, will I?

Let's use me as your cautionary tale. Mine takes a different bent from many of you since I didn't finish my thesis for five years after I'd finished my grad school courses, so I didn't have the M following my name for several years. Which limited my search far more than whatever the second initial might be. But the first year I was in grad school, the SAA conference was in a city two hours away. Did I go? No. The first SAA conference (1998) I attended was a full five years after I finished my coursework and put myself on the job market. The first regional? About the same time. So all those years I was trying to get an entry level job? A professional-level job? I wasn't networking. At all. I was working as an archivist in a local county court system and sure, great experience and I made some good friends, but no professional connects.

And when I finally attended, I hated going to those conferences. I went to the first SAA as a presenter--an add-on to a "lite" session where I was supposed to represent the academic side of things. (Yes, I can hardly believe it either.) I knew enough to know that the other people in my session were "names" but that just made me more nervous. And the next year when I went, I didn't attempt to build on those ties, but did the alone thing again. By this point I knew a few people from my home city so I had an occasional person to talk with, but again, not so much.

It wasn't til the third time I attended a SAA conference that I started to finally get the hang of it. Helped along stupendously by one of those co-presenters from that first one deciding that I needed to be shoved out of the nest. To do so, she volunteered me to run for a steering committee for one of the sections. During the election, as a write-in candidate on the ballot. Without telling me first. And either they were short of candidates or her reputation preceded her, but I was elected. By the fourth time I attended, I was getting involved. This is one thing I learned: serving on volunteer committees? It's a great way to meet people with the social pressure off.

But what you should be asking yourself now is what trajectory would my career have taken if I had taken that leap out of the nest either in or shortly after grad school? Again, I'll never know. I lucked out when I eventually entered the networking fray. Somehow I ended up on a session with Danna (don't ever give Arlene a choice) Bell-Russel and Frank Boles. Not sure that Frank really saw anything there, but something made Danna take me under her wing and start introducing me around. And eventually Frank did too, as did Rand Jimerson, who ended up as one of my connects by virtue of being the one who forced me to finish my thesis so I could be awarded the degree.

What I kept telling myself was that it was all financial. I couldn't afford to go to national conferences. When the degree was done, I managed to get a position with the Utah State Archives and they at least were able to help defray some of the travel costs. So a bit of luck there. Not all employers can do that. But money shouldn't have been quite the issue with the regional ones. So what held me back? Not sure. Fear maybe a little, finances a little. Does it matter? Not really other than to lead me into saying this: don't let this be you. Don't rely on serendipity to get you places. It's not all that reliable. And it's really not very fast, either.

Did any of that eventual network get me my job now? Well, probably not, or not directly. Rand did serve as one of my external reviewers when I went up for tenure two years ago. (Thanks, Rand). But because of the efforts of those people, because of the relationships I developed--and continue to develop--with them, I became a better archivist. For me, that's the most important potential of networking. Better-read, better-rounded, better able to figure out the needs of an academic repository within a university library when almost all of my experience had taken place within government archives. My presentation for my original interview here for the reference archivist position in '02? I re-used the paper I'd delivered at SAA the month before. A paper I'd delivered because Danna once again had called me up and said she was putting a session together and I'd better start writing. It was the single most organized and polished interview presentation I've ever delivered. Even if I did start out with a slide of my dog.

But I'm getting off track again, you've probably noticed I do that a lot. What I'll close with is this: even though I can't draw the direct lines between the networks I've built with archival colleagues and any job I've been offered, I still know those lines are there. Even if they're only in my psyche? That's okay. If it settles my nerves, gives me the impetus to spend the time it takes to apply for positions and prepare for interviews and then to sit in interviews thinking "I can do this", I'll go with a perceived effect any day. And even if you don't end up with a Danna in your life who decides to mentor (or shove) you in a non-official capacity, you might just end up with a support network of friends who are dealing with all the same job-hunting and career development issues at the same time as you are. And that's invaluable too. Just do it faster than I did, okay?

Meta part 3: Survey Generis

2010-04-14T08:00:00.001-07:00

Be patient. No, I'm not saying that because I'm about to say something very important, I'm saying it because it's what a bunch of our survey respondents said when I asked them "was there anything else you want your candidates to know about applying to your institution?" Be patient. It takes time. And they're not just saying that to keep you from breathing down their necks during the process, they're saying it because they want to save you some stress during the process. Don't panic or get yourself worked up because the responses aren't coming as fast as you could have wished.

Yeah, I know, not so likely.

So what else have I got that you can do something about? Do your homework. A lot of them said that too. Still not clear on what comprises your homework? Let's hear it. Have some solid advice? Add that to the comments too.

So this is going to be the first of a couple of posts, mainly because I can't fit it all into one. The quotes from the survey respondents are highlighted in pale yellow (or yarrow, as the maniac who designed the paint color that wound up on my office walls calls it) with frequent accompanying commentary by yours truly.

For federal jobs the KSAs are your first interview questions as well as showing how you communicate. Be concise, but descriptive. Merely saying yes is not demonstrative of anything. And y’all spotted that posting—both in the comments and under the job search news link above—about the possibility that KSAs might go away, right? I guess we’ll keep watching that one. If you're not doing KSAs, this still applies. Don't just say yes, I can digitize, mention a project. Provide a URL.

Do research! Maybe contact people you know or a colleague knows at the institution. Find out about the people, structure of org., type of job and work. Apply through the normal channels with a good cover letter and resume. Do not contact me to say you are the friend of so and so and they suggested you write me.   Good point. Networking will get you introductions, maybe, but there's enough people out there who have been burned by the "it's who you know" style of recruitment that they won't follow it themselves. Or, sometimes, the who-you-know may be a detriment. Unless you're very sure of your friend's reputation with the people to whom s/he is recommending you, tread lightly. Use him/her as a source of information if they're reliable, but maybe leave it at that. More on networking in another post (see below).

Make sure you review our web site, and have your own questions.  See? It's not just me. Other people feel this way too.

Be interested, know what makes you stand out and present your strengths. Don't hide weaknesses, but build on your strengths.  The more confident you are about what it is you can do, and what you want to do, the better you'll perform. Spend some of your research time reviewing you, maybe.

Answer every qualification, even if it seems obvious. We have a chart and a 0 can mean elimination even other areas are strong. Don't assume that a Master's in History means you meet the research skills requirement, give me an example. Great clarification there and a nice continuation of what the person above talking about KSAs meant. This is another time that having a proofreader in a totally different profession can be really helpful: they may not know that your masters degree should convey some sort of a skill and so they might catch that you failed to state this specifically.

Stick to the job description. Large institutions have no lee-way in hiring someone with only partial credentials. This is a hard one to hear, I know. And it's not just large institutions. Some hiring types might be able to take some chances, sometimes the candidate pools just work out that way. But even then, you'll do better the closer you match.

Show knowledge of the institution and be able to express why you wish to work with this subject matter.

Look at the website. Dig up background information about who we are and what we are doing. Know thyself. Again, probably several discrete pieces of advice there, but they add up to something together. A candidate who can talk about himself or herself well and relate it to the institution? Terrific.

Don't apply for every position. Be patient and go for the one that you want. This is really hard to follow. I've applied for a few jobs that I probably wasn't all that interested in, just because I needed a job and I figured that eventually it would be a stepping stone. If you blanket apply? Just make sure it isn't apparent to the recruiters.

Personality and a genuine interest in the organization make candidates memorable (in a good way).

Be patient with the process, read the job description carefully and get to know as much as possible about the institution. There's that be patient again. Note this respondent is making it clear that it's not the people delaying things, it's the process. Okay, sometimes it's the people.

And I'll close with the following piece of advice and pick up on the next set in the next posting on this topic. I want to close with this one because I think it contains so many wonderful items of advice and sets them off in a useful context.

Start to network before graduation. My insititution hires interns and work-study students from a nearby graduate program. I can't tell you how many times I have sat down beside an intern in the lunch room and the student doesn't introduce herself . It's not an ego thing--I'm happy to eat my lunch in peace--but as a hiring manager and someone who often sits on hiring committees for different departments (processing, digitization, etc), I'm surprised that these students don't take advantage of these networking opportunities.

I'm going to leave that one alone, for the moment, because I'll be getting back to it in a posting dedicated to networking--next up.

Meta part 2: Follow-up, anyone?

2010-04-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Okay. The next question I asked was: Do you want candidates to follow up with you regarding the status of their application.

Guess what? Bad question--or at least I structured it badly. The short of it is that there's no single answer to this. What will work with one recruiter will clearly not work with the next. Like I said at the beginning of this, there's no surefire way to do anything in a job hunt. There's no perfection here. Answers were mixed from no to yes, it shows interest. What do you do? I don't know. I cannot figure out the answer to this one. Review your observations on the interview and try to recall if they said anything about where the search went from here. But don't assume that their reticence to give you response on a follow-up is a sign of where you are in the rankings. To be blunt, it could be. Maybe you're not the candidate of first choice or top tier but they still don't want to write you off or have you write yourself off, so they're justifiably anxious about saying something wrong to you. I once received a letter after a phone interview where the recruiter said, basically, that I hadn't make the cut to the top tier but she wanted to know if something happened to their top tier, would I still be willing to interview? That was years ago, but I still haven't decided whether I appreciated the honesty or would have preferred to wait for a definite yes/no. But there are other possibilities. They may not know themselves. There's always a good portion of the search where the decision is out to somebody else for approval.

I find this all rather fascinating. Here's some of the other statements they made. For your viewing pleasure.

HR handles, although I can respond to additional questions regarding the nature of the job.
I do not have time to respond; it's not a rule. Because of lack of time, I get irritated.
Thank you/summary after the interview; one follow up if the process takes more than a week or two.
HR handles all inquiries.
There's not a lot we can say.
Thank you note after interview is always appreciated.
Brief follow-ups to ensure application has been received are OK. Aggressive follow-ups have a negative impact.
I wouldn't know. HR does but rarely communicates that to the committee.
They may if they wish
We always let people know we have received applications, we also let people know after a phone interview whether or not we will conduct an in-person; and let all in-person candidates know whether or not we will make a job offer
Doesn't matter to me, really.
Don't care one way or the other
It does not influence me one way or the other
If a candidate has been interviewed in person, they may follow up.
I only mind if the person does it in a demanding way.

So you see what I mean about mixed messages. But since a couple of the respondents mentioned another thread, let me go there. Thank you notes. Do you write them? Is it not worth the effort?

I was taught, and I don't recall when or where, that thank you notes were obligatory. Am I right? Apparently not, or not entirely. 42% of respondents say a thank you is unnecessary after a phone interview. 21% say it is unnecessary after an in-person interview. However: don't read unnecessary as something you should not do. Many of those who said it was unnecessary still filled in some blanks on what type of thank you they prefer to receive or specifically noted that while it might be unnecessary, it was not unwelcome. It may or may not figure into their calculations (probably not) but there's a lot of things that don't figure into the calculations that still needs to be done. With this one, I'd go with the percentages. Either email or handwritten and quickly, not so much phone call. If for no other reason than the strictly practical: if it's a search committee, a written (or email) thank you has the possibility to reach all of them with one effort. With a phone call you can either call the whole committee or you can hope that the person you do reach remembers to pass on the message.

And here's the nice part. From a purely practical perspective, a thank you note allows you to do that follow-up check in under the guise of courtesy and manners and not as a nagging "why haven't you called me yet." Reiterating your interest in the position and availability, that sort of thing. You might not get an answer, but you might not get an answer with a follow-up query anyhow.

So assuming you get an offer, what are the deadlines for you?

If you are offered a position, 95% of respondents expect an answer within a week. 30% of them want the answer within a day or two. Of the three respondents that answered with "other", one said one to two weeks, one said if there's other constraints like children they might be willing to wait a little longer, and the third said that it depends on the job: if something with time constraints it will have to be quicker, if not, it could be a little longer. Keep in mind that some places may have HR rules that only give them a certain amount of time as a couple of our respondents were very careful to point out.

My take? Whatever you ask for, be careful how you phrase. If you want more than a couple of days, have a solid reason for it. You're mostly in the driver's seat at this point, but depending on the institution and the person doing the asking, you may not be.

And since I'm heading that direction, once you say yes, when are you expected to show up? Time frames are scattered from about two weeks to over a month, to "it doesn't matter." Within about a month or so isn't out of line. Some exceptions exist. Sometimes it depends on the candidate (how far the hire has to move, significant others, children, current obligations.) Generally if they have a specific start date required, you will find that either in the job ad or it will be told to you at some point. Some noted that start dates are controlled by outside powers, one academic reminded that start dates are usually predicated on semester start dates (not true for all academic institutions though). And on those with a specific required start date, one respondent noted that if the candidate could not meet the required date, the position would be offered to the next person in line. I hope that, in most cases, a specific start date if required will be made clear to you somewhere during the process.

So guess what? We're nearly at the end of the recruiter survey. I had two last questions: 1) If you were to give candidates any specific advice on how to approach a job search with your organization, what would it be? and 2) anything else you think needs to be said? So that's the next set of postings.

BTP: when I don't follow through

2010-04-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

I owe some of you an apology. About 97 of you, it appears. That's how many respondents the survey for jobseekers had before I shut it down about a week ago. And here's why I owe you that apology. Because I'm not going to do anything with it--in fact, I probably can't do anything with it. So I've wasted your time there, and I am sorry for that.

Here's what happened. I took a sneak peek at some of the answers last week. At least one of the respondents took the opportunity to point out where I'd gone wrong with the survey. And you know what? S/he was really insulted by my failure to do this right--above all, it was just too important to do on a whim. And I stewed on that a while and thought about the objections presented and decided that, for the most part, the respondent was correct. The questions were skewed and it was done more in a spurt of energy and not so much really thinking it through beforehand.

Which is exactly what I've been telling you not to do with your application materials. How ironic is that? At any rate, I've been thinking it over for over a week now. And what I came to realize is that doing the survey was akin to applying for a job I didn't really want. An initial commitment of time that could lead to an outcome of expectations that I couldn't--and didn't want to--fulfil. I started this blog project with the idea of figuring out--and sharing--what it is that archival recruiters want from archival jobseekers. Anything more? was definitely beyond me.

Do I think it still needs to be done? Absolutely. Apparently a lot of you agree with that, especially the person who disagreed with my methodology (or more precisely, my lack of methodology.) Do I think I'm the person to do it? No, I don't. Having said that: you know all those things I've been saying about building your resume? Doing research and writing on archival-specific topics is a great addition to a resume. Here's a clear research/publication opportunity for one or more of you. In the meantime, if you haven't yet found it, here's an anecdotal option. NewArchivist: the MSI Diaries. Check out the "From the trenches" series.

Again, I'm sorry. I wish I would have thought this through and come to the realization earlier that heading in that direction wasn't somewhere I wanted to go. Well, nobody can say I'm not educable or that I won't let go of a wrong position. And next time I get asked in an interview about a mistake I've made and how I've handled it, I may have a new answer. Here's hoping one of you does it right.

Meta part 1: Could anything possibly take longer than this blog?

2010-04-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

And the answer would be a resounding yes and the answer to "what" would be: a recruitment.

Ranges on how long a recruitment takes were from one week to better than six months. The majority of respondents went with three months or higher.

What else about the time frame?

2/3 of respondents leave the job ad out there for 2 weeks to a month. A few do one week, a few do longer than a month, but mostly you're going to be looking at having to respond within a couple of weeks. Other numbers. 70% respondents do the first screenings within a month.

If they're going to do the phone interview followed up by an in-person interview, there's usually 2-3 weeks between those events. Why? If they're paying air fare, maybe they're trying to get beyond that magic 14-day-out rule so many airlines seem to have before their prices start to skyrocket. Is that true for anywhere else? It's been so long since I've flown somewhere that hasn't required an Alaska leg that I don't even know if the airlines have that 14-days rule anymore.

And next comes the time period that interests me most. Nearly 40% of recruiters call a candidate with an offer within a week of the in-person interview. Two weeks bumps it up to 57%. But that still leaves a pretty healthy number of them that are going to take longer. Including a few who may take 3-6 months. I would expect that the recruiter would keep in touch with candidates to let them know the situation is still in flux. If for no other reason than the purely practical: got a good candidate or candidates? Let them sit out there too long without an offer and you may just find that they've moved on to an institution that can act in a timely fashion.

Oh and one last time period. About 20% (one in five) of respondents need about a month til you can start once the job offer is extended. Exactly half need over a month. So even though you might want to start right away, there's probably going to be a delay of at least a month.

One last note. One of the great frustrations is when your application disappears into the ether and you never again hear anything about it. I've had it happen to me and I know how frustrating it is. But apparently this has also happened to some of my candidates: I recently found out that our software that runs the search management stuff hadn't been sending out the basic "sorry" letters to candidates who didn't make it through the first couple of passes. I tend to send out personal notes to anyone getting an interview, at least. So I know I've been a culprit in this too, albeit unintentionally. I think we got it fixed this last go-around and now we know to be on the lookout. This software? It's used by a lot of the universities in the US to handle personnel management and finances. So it wouldn't surprise me if this were happening to other institutions too, unbeknownst to them.

So that's it, for those of you who have been curious about how long this will last. Next up: what interaction they want from you along the way.

Interview part 10: the public speaking thing

2010-04-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

So you're headed off to an interview and when provided with the schedule for the day you're zooming down the list and you spot it. The Presentation. Usually scheduled for anywhere between a half-hour and hour, often with a Q&A time. Sometimes with a clue as to who the audience might be, sometimes not. Sometimes with a clue as to what the topic should be, sometimes not.

I made another giant mistake when doing the survey, I forgot to ask about the whole presentation thing. So I'm going to try and make it of a piece with the comments provided by survey respondents elsewhere.

Presentation wrongs:

Don't wing it. Prepare for this thing like you would prepare for a formal paper at a conference.
Don't run over.
Don't read your paper. They've said "presentation." That means you need to engage with the audience, eye contact, verbal cues, movement.

Presentation rights:

Practice. In front of an audience, if you can get one. Several times. With all of the technology you expect to be using.
Time yourself. Get as close as you can to the suggested length. No more than a couple of minutes either way, if you can.
Consider the audience. Don't assume it will all be professional archivists unless you've been told that. So you may have to provide translations for jargon terms.
Find out what you'll have available when you present. Will you be expected to use a microphone? Will you have a computer and projector to use? Should you bring materials on disc, thumb drive, or other? Will you have net access?

Q&A wrongs:

Vague answers.
Diverting questions. I recently listened to a rant on a job candidate who, when asked policy or procedural questions, would answer those with "well you'd know better than I regarding what works best at this particular institution." And stopped with that. You can maybe get away with it once, maybe, but the reason they're asking is because they want to know how you might handle the situation. If you're worried about sounding despotic, you could say "well of course the needs here might not allow this approach, but..."
Don't start answering the question before the speaker has finished asking it. (This is my single worst habit in these circumstances. I fight this one all the time. I fail, all the time.)

Q&A rights:

Keep smiling, keep the tension and fears inside. If you're shaking like a leaf, hold on to a lectern or clasp your hands.
Watch for reactions from other members of the audience.
Ask for clarification from the questioner when it will help you frame the answer better.
Expect questions that are totally unrelated to the presentation and perhaps even to the job. Some attendees want to know answers to questions that would more typically be asked in a formal interview, which they won't be attending. So if you have prepared for the interview questions well, you should be okay with most of these. As for the totally unrelated, hard to predict those, but take them in stride if you can.
If you can work in something you've learned about the institution that very day, bonus points.

So what should you expect? Chances are the presentation theme is going to be along the lines of "Current trends in X" where x=some major component of the position. Or if they leave it up to you, make sure you make it relevant to the position.

Expect inconsistent turnouts. Some places it seems like everybody in the org shows up for the presentation. Other places it may just be the search committee and what looks like a person who has wandered in off the street looking for a quiet place to sleep.

So what's the point of this anyhow? The presentation, I mean. It allows recruiters to assess candidates for public speaking skills. Writing/presenting/research/analysis/synthesis in ways that really can't be done in standard interviews or short meetings. Can write a coherent presentation? Probably can write a coherent FA or response to a research request.

So you have to be sure that when you present, you keep all the possible outcomes in mind. Why they're making you present. What they might want to learn from you under these circumstances.

And what you can learn from these experiences? Tons. How the people in the organization interact. See, they're watching you. Sometimes when they do that, they forget that you're watching them too, and this can be the best time to really observe how these people function together or if they do. It's amazing what I've picked up about internal politics from presentations and Q&A sessions as a candidate. Things that didn't come out in any of the other forums. Sometimes just in who comes in late, leaves early, and how they go about doing that. The questions are often good signposts as to the personality and concerns of the person doing the asking. And if people from inside the organization and outside the department attend, you can sometimes get an excellent view as to the relationship of the department with the larger organization. How supported the department is. How much people understand it.

So that's an initial take on the presentation. Any thoughts?

Interview part 9: Good or bad, what makes it so

2010-04-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

I think on this one, I'm going to mostly let our survey respondents talk for themselves with some minor editing. I'll put any editorial comments in brackets. And I've color-coded somewhat. Green for the good, blue for the bad, and the standard black for things that aren't necessarily bad or good, maybe a matter of balance, or "disconcerting" which is a term that got used more than a few times throughout the survey results.

bad interview: unprepared to understand the type of institution and nature of work, good interview: has done some background work, ready and able to ask questions of their own
If I have to pull all the answers from them it's a bad interview. If they cannot understand the question I am asking it's bad. Good interviews: someone who seems confident in their basic knowledge and can talk easily on many issues related to the job requirements. Who doesn't seem totally flummoxed by a question but conversely doesn't hesitate to ask for clarification when needed.
good interaction and feel about a person, and impressed with their qualifications
A good interview is one where I am looking forward to eating lunch with the candidate once it is finished. The candidate has said interesting things and I want to continue the conversation and get to know them better.
clear, to the point, short answers [I'm assuming this is good, but short answers aren't, not always. Concise, succinct, yes.]
A good interview is one where the interviewer is able to form a solid impression of the candidate, both professional and personality wise. A bad interview is one where after the interview there are no notes written on the review sheet; lack of questions asked by interviewee is also particularly bad.
the worst interviews are the ones where the we all wonder why the candidate wasted our time, they do not seem interested in the job or us or the institution. The candidate should do a little background research and ask at least a few relevant questions.
Someone who is genuinely interested in the job and its duties and possesses substantive professional ideas and abilities is good [and who presumably is able to verbalize those]! Bad situations include interviews in which the candidate is not familiar with the basics of the institution and collections.
Good: Answers that are full and detailed, but remain on topic. Thoughtful questions from the candidate when given the opportunity, both about specific items and larger programmatic issues. Taking notes, especially for multi-part questions or complicated responses.
Candidate on same page as committee, since we have something specific in mind that we are looking for.
Good interview: very clear communicator with well thought out answers. Smiling. A clear understanding of expectations. HONESTY. Bad interview: Overly short answers with little explanation. Exaggerated and excessively long answers. Evasion.
answers that are direct, to the point, fully address the question but do not ramble.
Someone who clearly has good chemistry with the people they are meeting with. Generally we know from resume, references and phone interview about professional competencies (though interviews can surprise), so the in-person is as much about figuring out whether the person is someone you want to work with or not. How they will fit into the organization.
good interview: person seems interested in the institution, people she meets, and the job. Has done homework on both institution and job. Answers questions thoughtfully. Bad interview: the opposite of all the above.
Complete woodenness; inappropriate informality; evidence that they're just fishing for a raise at their current job or only want to move for the location or until they find something better
Being late---Never be late for an interview! Someone who is unprepared and doesn't know a lot about the institution.
The best interviews are where the questions and answers show signs of starting to flow like the conversation you'd hope to have with a co-worker.
a good interviewer is someone who can clearly communicate answers to the questions without sounding arrogant or too timid.
If by the end it is more of a conversation.
Eye-contact, enthusiasm, some preparation, but an ability to react to questions. Focus on question being asked.
A successful hire. [I'm kind of fascinated by this one: that the eventual outcome determines how the interview is viewed. It wasn't really what I was trying to get at with the question, but I suppose in the end, it's what we're all looking for, so this is a criteria.]
bad interview: unprepared to answer basic questions [the typicals I already mentioned], can't answer questions related to the work described in the job posting, can't provide clear and focused answers to questions
It really annoys most of us on the committee when the candidate won't make eye contact! If they stare at a wall or at the table or something, it's a big turn-off.
The overall impression the candidate gives. A good interview is when a candidate is indeed the person she or he said they were on their resume...and leaves the impression of intelligences and good knowledge. A bad interview is one where contradictions are apparent in answers relating to skills listed on resumes.
Good: has a flow, establishes rapport with panel, has good answers although they may take some refining questions. Bad: hasn't researched the position, doesn't understand the position or institution well, gives incomplete answers, shows frustration, badmouths previous employers or colleagues.
Good: the candidate is engaging and seemingly prepared for the interview. Bad: although it's not always "bad" it is somewhat disconcerting when candidates don't have any questions regarding the position or their potential work.
good: thoughtful complete answers, see some of the candidate's personality and it's an amenable personality, they ask thoughtful questions, they listen to the complete question.
A candidate has to give clear, concise answers that cover all aspects of the question. Long pauses on phone interviews can sometimes be disconcerting. I understand being nervous, but being completely wooden and unresponsive can be off-putting.
A totally unprepared candidate with nothing to say for themselves would be bad.
Its effectiveness in bringing about mutual understanding about expectations and qualifications.
we understand that applicants get nervous and might unintentionally repress their personalities in order to make a good impression but we want to see the real person underneath the interview robot! That doesn't mean that they get to dress as themselves but it does mean that they should try to let their personality and sense of humor shine through as that's the real person we'll be working with.
Good: the interviewers should always have questions prepared in advance, give everyone on the search committee a chance to ask a question, ask the same questions of each candidate for fairness, ask follow-up questions for clarification. [Recruiters on the hot seat here.] Bad: candidate talks longer than the allotted 20 minutes for presentation which shows lack of preparation time that would carry over to conference presentation, candidate doesn't answer questions directly. [note: I'll be getting into the whole presentation thing in the next posting.]
Good: candidate has appropriate background and experience and responds to the questions that are asked. That is, by answers, provides evidence of having listened. Bad: candidate tries to sell us even though their experience is lacking. **Worst: interview makes clear that candidate padded his or her resume.**
A good interview gives us not only facts, but a sense of how the candidate will or will not fit into our team. It also gives the candidate enough information about us to make a decision if we offer employment. The only bad interview is the one in which a candidate succeeds in concealing things we need to know, and causes us to regret deciding to hire.
Give and take, appearance of comfort
Candidate should appear confident, knowledgeable, outgoing and friendly. Candidate should volunteer information, but not to the extent as to be seen as verbose, and should limit personal information to an appropriate level.
Good: listening, interacting with ALL employees in the archives, even those not involved in interview. Bad: lying on resume, badmouthing previous employers, doesn't ask questions, argues with search committee or potential supervisor
Bad: Poor posture, attire Good: OK if nervous but be CONFIDENT, don't answer any questions with a one-word answer

One of the things I find interesting in this is that as I was reading them, it didn't really hit me until the comment about designing a good interview that perhaps our respondents weren't just addressing the interviewees: some of this is within the purview of the interview designers. Flow, rapport, questions that elicit informative answers, much of that is up to the interviewers. I've been through a few badly designed interviews, where the questions were so straight out of the manual that it rapidly became clear that none of the search committee was bothering to note down any of my answers because my answers didn't really matter. They didn't care what I said because they hadn't asked any good or relevant questions. Will this happen to you? I hope not. And if it does, I'd be a little worried when they offer you the position as to what they're basing their decision on.

Keep in mind, these aren't just generic good/bad advice labels up there. This is practice-based. Eye contact and enthusiasm is good? That interviewer has experienced that with candidates and likes it and not only likes it, but has found that it translates well to performance in the job. Argues with search committee or potential supervisor? Again, it means somebody out there has done this at an interview. Obviously, it's happened.

The other part I'd add is pace yourself. I often find we get to the end of an interview and the candidate is almost totally non-responsive. Again, some of that is designed by me and trying to fit a lot into what ends up being a very short interview day. The general interview books will tell you that sometimes it's a test of your stamina. I've not heard anybody in archives admit to that one yet, but I haven't asked, either. If you find yourself fried by interviews, start figuring out coping mechanisms. Like having semi-canned answers to the typical questions so you can trot those out when needed and give yourself the mental break. Figuring out what it will take to get a good night's sleep the night before. Reminding yourself that, most of the time, the committee is asking these things because they're very interested in your responses--they want to hire somebody and you're on that list. Whatever it takes to keep you focused and engaged is what you need to do. I say that knowing that one of my downfalls has always been my tendency to say the very impolitic when I'm tired--I start to lose that censor in my head that says "don't say that!" My coping mechanism for that (very much a work in progress) is to not answer a question immediately, but to pause for a moment. This is when the writing it down thing becomes helpful--it gives me that moment to breathe and think.

One last posting on interviews coming up: what to do with those requests for a presentation. You've already had a hint buried above, we'll go through some of the variables.

Interview part 8: turnabout is fair play

2010-04-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

And now, the classic question. Do you have any questions for us?

First piece of advice? There's a wrong answer to this one and that's No. You need to come up with something. At the heart of it, it shows you're engaged in the process, you're interested in the position enough that you want to really get a good feel for it, and at best? You get really solid information about the institution and the people that will help you make some of your decisions about how attractive the position is to you and in your career path.

The thing is, I get it. By this point in the interview, this is usually the last question or close to it, you're drained. Your brain has decided you need a vacation in the south of France, has left the building, and is refusing to respond to summons. But it's a really important question to answer.

But if you're just exhausted or you don't think you can come up with anything important enough to ask, there's a few ways around this. The first autopilot route is the pre-programmed questions. Those that the job ad didn't quite answer. These are the ones you write before you answer the phone for the interview or walk in the door. If it's a ref position: what's the actual workload? How many ref questions do they handle? How long does an average ref transaction take? How much research will they do for clientele? Who are their primarily clientele? For processing, what's the assumed rate? How big is the backlog? Maybe you even paraphrase the job duties as listed in the description and ask if that's right or what the priorities are. And so forth. You may find they answer some/all of these over the course of the interview. But maybe they don't or not completely. You can always ask for a repeat or clarification.

Then there's the standards about the recruitment process itself. When do you anticipate the successful candidate will start? What's the next step in the process? When is the next step in the process? All fair questions, sometimes with not so fair answers. As some of our respondents have noted, sometimes recruiters simply don't have any control over the time frame--or even knowledge of it.

Auto-pilot route 2 is a little tougher and is dependent on that piece of paper you have sitting next to you where you jotted down all the other interview questions they asked. Have you noticed that though it's a reference job, the preponderance of questions were on your description skills? Maybe it's time to get some clarification as to their priorities. Again, this is a little tougher because you're doing this on the fly during the interview, but it's still doable. Are all their questions about difficult patrons or co-workers? First, ow, think hard about this job, but maybe this is time to ask them what their dream candidate would have in terms of networking, collaboration, or teamwork skills. (That's a nice one because when they tell you, you might even be able to sell yourself in response a little further.)

Consider asking something--especially if there's non-archivists on the search committee--about how the department interacts with the larger institution or what their priorities are for the archives. That's a great one, and speaking as the sole archivist on the search committee (usually) this gives me a chance to pass it off to the other search committee members to answer. And most likely the subtleties of the answer have not been provided to you in the job description itself. I've been asked this a lot lately and I even find it useful as chair: eventually one of the non-archivists will say something that will bring to my attention a concern or potential concern that wasn't on my radar. You can even adapt this to specific search committee members and ask it of them directly.

If you've got a favorite question, one that has provided good responses or allowed you to talk about some strengths or skills that didn't come up elsewhere in the interview, let's hear it! If you're a recruiter and you can share a question you've got that you thought was effective (or the opposite), what is it? And why did it work or fall flat?

Next up, hopefully a single posting on what makes an interview good, what makes one bad.

Interview part 7: canned answers, not so canned questions

2010-03-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

The follow-up to the previous set of seven questions was this: "If you use any of those questions, do you expect the candidate will have prepared or semi-prepared answers for them?"

31% said "Yes, all." 60% said "Yes to some." 9% said no. In other words? You probably should have prepared answers to them. As I noted in the BTP posting on phone interviews, you don't want to sound too glib or over-prepared, but when the first question off the stump is "Why do you want this job?" it shouldn't sound like it's taken you by surprise. An outline is better than a script because you will sound more involved and thoughtful plus you can work in anything you've learned from the interview so far. If you're the very nervous type, it might be nice for you to have a script, just remember that you shouldn't sound like you're reading a pre-prepared statement. For those interviewers who want to see how well you can talk without preparation, trust me, they'll have some other questions throughout the interview to test that. These aren't those questions.

The next question I asked was if the interviewers had any questions with a definite right/wrong answer which they used specifically for a right/wrong answer. About half the respondents said no, a few of them pointing out that they prefer more open-ended questions. I tend to go with open-ended questions myself, but I do have a few where there's still a wrong answer and since I occasionally hear that wrong answer, I continue to use that question as a weeding mechanism. Usually you can spot these questions: they're the non-open-ended ones. "Do you work well in teams?" Or the open-ended where you should know by the very fact that they're being asked that there's a wrong answer. "Tell us about a time when you worked in a collaborative environment." (Strong hint: if they're asking? It's because it matters. "I don't like working in collaborative environments and here's why" is the wrong answer.) The questions about being flexible as to work schedules or environments, the teamwork questions, the questions as to how you take direction, correction, how you might go about correcting others, all have potential to be one of these right/wrong answers. They don't have to be, if you answer them correctly. You can turn these into real and informative answers for the interviewers.

One of my previous places of work had one of these questions on the interview list. I was asked it when I interviewed there and I thought "well, that's a dumb question. Anybody with half a brain is going to answer this way." And after I got the job, I mentioned that to my new boss, about how I was so surprised at that dumb question, it was obvious what the right answer should be and nobody would say otherwise. Her response to me was "the crazies will be candid and give you the wrong answer because they aren't able to figure that out." I later sat in on an interview and one of the candidates gave the wrong answer. And as this candidate explained his/her point of view, I realized that yes, this person was never going to be able to work with others, was never going to take direction. This person couldn't listen to a simple yes/no question and step back and think: if they're asking a question this dumb, it's because this has been a problem in the past for them, and thus if I want this job, I need to answer a certain way. And no, I'm not going to tell you what the question is because I still use it and it still weeds out candidates effectively. Even though I know the candidate with the right answer may be lying because they've picked up on the subtext, I'm still better off with them, with this person who gets the value of being politic or tactful occasionally, than I am with the person who doesn't clue in at all.

For the last section on this posting, I'd like to go over the survey responses to the question "What interview questions do you find most helpful and why?" The answers fell into two categories: general areas of inquiry and then specific questions. Let me go with the general ones first.

questions that encourage candidates to talk about previous accomplishments and challenges
anything that gets the candidate to talk and talk freely and confidently
scenario/situational questions "what if" not for a specific answer, but to see thought processes and how you do with sudden sticky situations
questions that elicit the candidate's intent, goals, interests
questions that elicit work attitude, style, ethic

More specific questions. Several respondents reiterated some of those basic questions and helped explain why they're so important.

What are your weaknesses? That offers the interviewers insight into your thought processes, your self-evaluation, what roadblocks you might see and how you intend to overcome them.
Why do you want this job? It allows the interviewer to see if you have enthusiasm for this specific job, allows you to demonstrate that you've thought through how well you and the job match up, and sometimes it's clear from the candidate's answer that they really just want a job, not this one (that wouldn't be a good answer.)
What strengths do you bring to this position? This allows the interviewer to assess if you really understand the position and sometimes the candidate will bring something to the discussion that wasn't in or wasn't evident from the cover letter or resume.
Why do you feel you are qualified/a good fit? Allows you to match your abilities with job requirements, and as one respondent said: it allows the candidate to make a case for hiring him/her, and if the candidate can't make that case, they're not our ideal.

And some others:

What environment suits you best (managerial, physical, duties, etc)? Sometimes that tells us if you'll fit into our odd place.
Previous experience? Sometimes it's a spot check to see if you match up with your resume (see why I wanted you to have your resume sitting there?) Sometimes it's just another opportunity to sell yourself and match yourself up to the position.
The scenario: stressful, unpredictable, or conflict situations? Those are how well you'll fit questions, how you handle yourself, how you work with people, how you'll treat clientele, your values.

Then there's the one-offs. Maybe not so common, but perhaps after I post them here and recruiters start reading some of these, they may start using them too. I'm already pondering the adoption of some of these.

Provide a scenario in your previous work experience that required you to think fast or demonstrate creativity.
Why you want to be an archivist? (I'm really liking this one.) As the respondent noted, it gives the interviewers a better view of the attributes you bring (or don't) to the position.
A question about current archival literature. Allows them to see if you're keeping up on your reading. Since I'm a little behind, I'm not likely to ask this one, but then again, I might get some good ideas from candidates without having to catch up myself.
How would you organize X collection? Demonstrates your organizational abilities, how you organize and structure your work, and can help demonstrate how much of a self-starter you are.

And in the next posting, that question that always seems to come at the end of the interview. "Do you have any questions for us?" What to do with it, what not to do with it. Coming up soon.

Interview part 6: some more old questions

2010-03-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

As promised, the last two typicals.

#2 at 91% of institutions asking it: Why do you feel you are qualified for this position? Are these questions all sounding rather familiar? Do they all sound like variants on the same question? They are. Have you noticed that despite sounding like variants on the same question, the percentages in those asking them mean that most places are asking most of them? Not just one and calling it good? The interviewers are giving you every possible opportunity to sell yourself to them.

What I find interesting (bizarre, strange, whatever) is that in my experience there's two groups of people who usually do badly with this question and all of its previous variants. The first group are the nervous or relatively inexperienced interviewees. That's more a matter of blanking or not having thought through the possible questions.

If you're one of those, here's some cold comfort. The other group that tends to do a bad job at these "sell yourself" questions? The known quantities. The internal candidates, the candidates who know the search committee and who know the search committee knows them. Not always, but most times I find it's the candidates who know me personally (or think they do) that do not give complete answers to these questions. They speak in shortcuts, assume we know everything they do already. Even if I do? I've probably got somebody on the search committee that doesn't know you or doesn't really understand archives. Remember, you're not just selling yourself the the archivists on the committee but to all the other allied professionals and colleagues and HR types that don't get it. And even if they're willing to assume knowledge on your part, you probably just lost some serious points for your communication ability. If the committee keeps asking you to elucidate? That's a giant hint that you've not hit the mark. And you'll get that if you're lucky. Most committees don't bother to follow up on missing pieces. If you didn't say it the first time, you may not get another chance.

Okay, and the single most popular question at a whopping 98%: What strengths do you bring to this position? Wow. Yet another sales opportunity. Remember back in the cover letter section where I said "Look over the job duties and requirements again. Do you have a special ability in one of them? A combination of some of them that would make you stand out from the crowd in some way? Some sort of compliment you received on a review that you could quote?" This is it. This is not only your chance to sell your abilities, but to prove that you really understand the job on offer. That you have a basic understanding of the needs of the position, the needs of the institution.

So how do you figure that out? Homework is the first part. You should have, by now, taken a look at their webpage. Mission statements, collection policies, collections lists, what types of guides they provide, what they highlight. The second part is the interview questions they've asked thus far. This will be hard if this is the first one coming out of the committee, but if you've already been asked a few (or for in-person have been around for a part of the day) you should be catching the subtext. Are they asking a lot of personality questions? Or questions about your ability to deal with problem patrons? Chances are, they have problem patrons or coworkers and if you're good at talking people off the ledge or teambuilding, emphasize those skills. That's, I think, one of the best reasons why you should always write down the interview questions as they ask them. Not just so you can steal them when you do interviews eventually, not just so you can make sure you're answering all of the question and all of its bits, but also so you can assess as you go for subtext and repetition. If they've asked you a lot of specific questions about task-oriented skills or your detail orientation, then you know to emphasize that in this.

Related to that, it's sometimes hard to catch the search committee names and titles as they go by at the beginning of a phone interview, but if you can note that as well, it can be helpful. The composition of the committee might (might not) tell you something about the hiring priorities. Preponderance of ref types? Probably they're seeking somebody who is more outgoing, does well with the public, and so forth. A few people from outside the immediate department or even the larger department? Probably looking for somebody who can work well in a larger environment and build connections. And that's also a hint that you should avoid overly jargon terms and not make assumptions about archival comprehension when answering the other queries.

Oh, and on that strengths question? I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that while 98% of interviewers are asking it, only about 60% are asking what your weaknesses may be. I think it's fair to say that this is another piece of the tendency to give you every available opportunity to sell yourself. They're not just trying to trip you up on the negative. Having said that, I've had candidates give me bad answers to the strengths too. Traits and skills that didn't matter much to me. What that told me was that they didn't do enough research or maybe they don't really understand the job.

To close off this entry, a look at some of the other "typical" questions that our survey respondents added. "Tell us about your experience relevant to this position." A little more specific there: not so much "I'm detail oriented" or a "quick study" but jobs and duties. This is a really good time to have your full cv sitting in front of you so you can reference it. If you mention something that you didn't include in your resume, you can always explain that. And don't just mention the experience, be sure to tie it in to how it will help you do this job successfully.

Other typicals. "Describe a difficult work situation and how you handled it." Many variants on this one. A loaded personality question, that. They're looking for descriptions of your professional judgment, your ability to work with others, that you can defuse bad situations instead of making them worse. This isn't necessarily one of those "never say die" questions--I've had one candidate describe a situation so bad that walking away from it really showed the best professional judgment. But be careful that your description of this bad situation doesn't come across as whining, blame-placing, or anything that could possibly sound like you have any tendency to complain about your job or co-workers because if that's what the interviewers hear, they're going to think that maybe you'll do the same to them if hired. This is one of those queries where it's extremely important to think about your answer before you provide it.

"Time management ability." This a professional judgment query. How you juggle, what you use to determine what has the highest priority, what gets your attention first.

Oh, and one of my personal favorites. "What would you need to learn, and how, to do this job?" I think there's two possible wrong answers to this question. The first wrong answer is "Everything." The second wrong answer is "Nothing." That's one of the benefits to an archives job: since every institution has unique collections, if you're blanking on other specifics, you can always talk about learning the collections. Or the procedures and policies. This question still gives you the chance to show off your homework such as the collections you've read about or to talk knowledgeably about how their workflows might differ (depending on what projects they're engaged in) from what you're currently doing, and so forth.

Next posting: some of the maybe not so typical questions. The questions used for specific purposes, the questions that our survey respondents really like, and how much prep work are you supposed to do anyhow?

Interview part 5: oh, that old question

2010-03-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Now that we're through the personality-specific stuff, let me back out a little and take a look at the typical questions you might be asked and how many people were asking them. I came up with a base set of seven, you probably know them, you've probably heard them before. If anybody reading this has another take on the value of one of these questions, will you please chime in on comments? I'll take them in reverse order of popularity:

#7 coming in at 21%: Why would you consider leaving your current position to take this one? Okay, I'll admit, this result has me stumped. I think I've been asked this at every job interview I've ever had. Only one out of five people ask it? I really did assume it was one of the typicals. So why does it get asked? And, apparently, mainly of me? Sometimes it may get asked out of fear: if the candidate dumps everything they hate about their current boss/job/whatever the interviewer can hear the giant screaming alarm bells that say "do not hire this malcontent." But I think it may get asked out of hope too: it's a chance for the candidate to reiterate or explain why they really want this job and why they're suited for it. If it helps, I've given some really stupid answers to this question. "Getting out of SLC prior to the Winter Olympics" was probably not my best option for an answer in late 2001. (Though it did get a laugh and I did go on to answer the question more seriously. I probably should have foregone saying it at all, though. I won't identify my interviewers who were smart enough not to hire me, but I'll take this opportunity to apologize. I am sorry.)

#6 in a giant response leap up to 51%: Why do you want this location/institution? Seems an obvious question and an obvious answer. I use this one, threw it in on the first set of interview questions I ever had to devise, mostly as a time-waster and a chance to put the candidate at ease at the beginning of the interview: something obvious to answer, right? And then the answers started rolling in. And I realized this not only was not a time-waster, it was enlightening. A huge portion of applicants answer this question very badly indeed. They focus on one piece of the job ad, demonstrate how little research they've actually done on our institution by telling us something wonderful about our institution that simply isn't true, tell us they like the location, tell us they want a job (and nothing else), and so forth. I've had several take this as an opportunity to deliver a diatribe on how much they hate their current job. Nobody yet has come out and told me that they're applying because of the salary we're offering but it's probably just a matter of time.

So what are you supposed to say? The interview guides will give you help with this one. Since I'm sure most of you aren't running off to the guides at this very second, I'll give you my take on it and then you can go running off. My best advice on this one would be two part: a) remembering that this question isn't really about your wants and needs and b) balance. To do that, take your opportunity to talk about what elements (include as much as you can) appeal to you, couched in terms of why you think you'd suit the position, and make sure you don't focus too much on any one piece of it. Show that you've not only read the job ad, that you've read it recently and that you have done some research on the institution--mentioning things that weren't listed in the job ad but are still clearly important to the institution and then demonstrate why and how you match up.

#5 at 58%: What are your 5 or 10 year career goals? This one, like the first one, could be a question places use out of a certain amount of fear. If the candidate tells us they want a job that's diametrically opposed to the one we have on offer and there's no connect that would let us see how we're anywhere on that line from point A to point B, well, maybe this should be a warning to us. The books will generally tell you that you want to show some ambition but not so much that the interviewers will come to the conclusion that you'll leave again six months later. On the other hand, a colleague of mine once impressed her interview committee by telling them that she wanted to remain the rest of her career in the job they had on offer, but they were specifically looking for somebody who would stick, be stable, and not going to jump ship on a whim. It was a chance she took, one that worked out for her. I wouldn't necessarily advise it unless a) you really do want to stay there til you retire and b) you're reasonably certain that they want somebody like that too. Mostly I don't find this one helpful--or not helpful enough to use when I could use other questions that would elicit more--so it'll probably be on its way out of my rotation. Don't worry, I'll find something heinous to replace it.

#4 at 60% of respondents using it: In terms of the position requirements, what are your weaknesses? Usually they allow you to talk about strengths too, but if they do, and you don't talk about the weaknesses, they're going to catch that. Hit the books on this one. Look for the advice on how to turn a weakness into a strength but remember not to make it glib. "Sometimes I get so caught up in a project that I lose track of time and I end up putting a lot of my own time in on projects!" Most interviewers (I hope) are going to see that answer for what it's worth. (If you're still wondering what's wrong with that because we should like free labor, I'll give you a hint: burnout is just the start of it. That kind of behavior can also seem as if you're showing up co-workers which doesn't help much in the workflow, either. Oh and the worst possible reason is because there's a chance that the candidate may just be flat-out lying to us.)

#3 90% of respondents say they use this: Why do you want this job? Again, a question that asks you what you want when maybe that's not all they want to hear. As I've said countless times, we'd prefer people who want our job specifically since it makes so many things so much easier for us. But I've had people answer it only on the surface: I really want to work in an academic environment. I really want to do reference. I enjoy processing. Fine answers, but terribly incomplete and if you don't complete them, it may work against you. You can answer it in the spirit of the question itself, telling the interviewers what about the job appeals to you, but like question #6, make sure you provide evidence of why you're suited to it and make sure you don't get caught up on one element of the job only and fail to address others. It's another easy way for you to remind the interviewer what is so special about you, your experience, and your skills and why you're the match they want.

And I know I was trying to get through these and it's not fair to you all to keep you hanging, but I just can't write more in this entry today. It's already way too long. So hang in with me please, I'll give you the first runner up and the pageant winner next time. Along with some other typical questions that the survey respondents reminded me about when they took the option to fill in the blank line. Besides, don't you want a little time to digest this?

Interview part 4: So why do I matter anyway?

2010-03-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

The personality questions. I threw a few queries about this in on the survey because I'd recently been chastised by somebody (not one of my candidates) who thought they shouldn't matter. All that should matter was their ability to do the work. And I'm going to try and keep my opinions out of this--as much as I'm able to anyhow, which probably won't be much--but you will see them creep in so let me get my bias out there and get on to what the survey respondents said.

I ask the hated personality questions though I will admit, they're sometimes cleverly disguised as experiential questions, and my ones that are clearly personality (if you had one word to describe yourself) aren't often so much about personality as they are about whether you can keep your answer short or how you react to weird things out of left field. At any rate, whether you can tell if I'm asking a personality question or not, I listen just as closely to the personality subtext as I do to all the information you're providing me in your answer. I've worked in more than one place that had long-time baggage of employees having gone postal. Suicides, violence against co-workers, restraining orders, involuntary commitment to treatment centers, harassment lawsuits. (I wasn't involved, okay? In fact, most of it happened before I came there.) It's not just a matter of working with the public, it's a matter of working with colleagues and supervisors. Even the little problems and disagreements that we all have sooner or later, those put huge dents in productivity, not just of the people involved in the dispute, but amongst everybody else who witnesses it. And it sticks around, affecting morale, for years. To sum up: the job is never just about the work. There are very, very few archives jobs that isolate a worker to the extent that you will not have contact with others regularly.

Okay, enough of Arlene. Let's go on to what others had to say.

First question was: In an interview, do you ask questions that are intended to assess the personality of the candidate? 82.5% said yes. Chances are? You're going to be asked the personality questions. 8 of the 10 people who said no were from academic institutions, 1 from corporate, one from federal governments, so pretty much a representative sample from most of the types of people who filled out the survey.

So for the ten people who said no, why not? The options were: it's irrelevant, it's unnecessary, it's unfair, and then a fill in the blank. They could choose multiple responses. Nine of them answered the question. One said it's irrelevant, and left it there. One said it's irrelevant and unnecessary, and left it there. Three just said it's unnecessary. One said it was unnecessary and explained that it was so because the all-day interview process provided plenty of observation opportunities. More on the others in a moment, but I'd like to point out that if you read the answer to the previous question, 17.5% of respondents not asking personality questions, to mean that 17.5% of respondents don't attempt to assess personality, you'd be a little off. The two that said irrelevant? Probably they don't assess, but that's only 3.5% of our respondents. The three that said it's unnecessary with no other explanation? They could go either way. Either they don't feel it applies to the job or they agree with the one who said it was unnecessary because they could assess personality through other routes. For the remaining three, one noted that s/he does try to gauge personality somewhat but tries not to let it influence decision-making much since that could be unfair, one said they were watching out for legal restrictions, and the last said that they assess, but not by direct questioning and talked about the other types of questions in the interview that can provide this information like problem-solving experiences and so forth.

Not a one of our respondents--even the one that said in the comment that s/he felt it might be unfair--took the opportunity to check the survey response of "it's unfair." Bottom line? Your recruiters don't think it's unfair to assess personality. Even if you do, you're probably stuck here. Best to accept that you're going to have to deal with questions like this, no matter what your opinion of them, and figure out how to deal with them instead of letting yourself be surprised by them.

But let's look quickly at those that said they do ask personality questions. Here's the options I provided:

To ensure the candidate can work with the public, donors, or others outside the immediate department.
To ensure the candidate will fit in well with co-workers in the department.
To ensure candidate responds well to supervision.
Other

Respondents could select as many as they liked. And boy, did they ever. 86% of them said it was to ensure the candidate can work with people outside the department. A slightly different 86% of them said it was to ensure the candidate can work with co-workers (and one of those stressed the value of teamwork), and 76% said it was to ensure the candidate responds well to supervision. Most people chose more than one answer, and the vast majority chose all three. Three of those that chose all three decided to add some more information as to why else they might ask such questions: to see if the candidate can handle criticism and face complexity, to see how the candidate might fit with the institution, and last, to see if the candidate is passionate about the subject focus of the institution.

One respondent added a comment which I'd like to follow up on. "I don't think questions targeting personality are successful. Better to catch demeanor, ask for experiences with donors, coworkers, etc." Honestly, that's why when I ask the "use one word to describe yourself" question I'm not actually looking for the answer. Unless the person describes himself/herself as rude, or obnoxious, and then I might actually pay attention to the content of the answer. That's why I ask questions like "tell us about a time when you worked on a collaborative project" which is, essentially, a question about experience and I do want to know the experience, but I also want to know how you did with that kind of experience: how do you do in teams? What role do you play? And so forth.

So chances are, that your interviewers are going to be looking for personality information. How much this will figure into their decision-making is going to vary.

So what role does personality play in the hiring process? Obviously, it matters to our recruiters. But how much? Tough to say, not just because I failed to ask. I won't hire somebody just because they've got a great personality. But if I have two semi-equal candidates and it's clear that one is going to fit in really well in the institution and the other isn't, it may very well work its way into the hiring decision. And if I have somebody who isn't going to get along with anybody else, isn't going to take direction or isn't going to be able to work with others, no matter how good their experience and credentials, I'm probably not going to hire them. I have the ability to bring that into the search because of the nature of the positions I have. All of mine are faculty and to be faculty means you have to participate in the university and community, usually via committees, and if you can't deal with others you can't function well on committees. If you can't meet the service obligation of your workload, you're not going to make tenure or past the reviews along the way to tenure.

And again, if these things are important to the job: working well with colleagues, a service mentality, the ability to take direction, if these things matter to the job and they're not things you want to deal with, this is your opportunity as a candidate to assess whether or not this is the right job for you. If they're asking a string of questions that you don't feel are at all relevant to the position and are maybe indicating that these people are a little weird? Perhaps it's time for you to pull out of the search.

I'd also like to point out that a lot of the personality I'm evaluating for--and apparently so are our survey respondents--is based around how well you function with others. Other personality traits? Not so important. I don't care if you're shy, if you have an obsession with Lost (though please, don't subject me to the blow-by-blow plot descriptions: you know who you are), if your sense of humor runs toward Little Britain instead of Jeff Foxworthy. Not so important. Are your co-workers going to feel comfortable working with you? Are they going to be able to rely on you to be fair, to hold up your end of a joint project, to ask the right questions because they're the right questions not just because you enjoy being contrary? Can they rely on you to be flexible and maybe cover a ref desk hour or two that wasn't on your schedule because they've just had a family emergency? It's little stuff, often heading toward intangible, but it matters in the workplace.

And although it's impossible to predict exactly how somebody will fit within an institution--personality-wise--the recruiters still assess this because sometimes it is possible to see how a person won't fit within the institution. And then the recruiter has to figure out if that matters and if it does, how much.

Next up: something a little more straightforward. The standard interview questions (or what I thought were the standard, anyhow.) What are the questions you can expect to be asked?

BTP: phone interview tips

2010-03-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

I'd originally had this buried in another posting but one of our faithful readers (mid-career: bless you, good to know this all is applicable on up the line!) emailed me and asked for something specific. So here goes.

Have a phone interview? Want to do it absolutely right? Or as right as possible, anyhow? When you pick up that phone, this is what you are going to have in front of you.

Something to write on (like a notepad, whatever).
Plenty of writing implements--even a few extra in different colors.
Your full cv.
The job ad.
Copies of all of the application materials you submitted.
A stack of papers that will be comprised of answers to questions (more in a moment)

This is what you're going to have done at least a day in advance:

Reviewed the job ad
Reviewed the institution's website paying close attention to:

mission statement
collection policy
functions
survey of collections list
structure of site (which may tell you something about their users)
any departmental reports that may be posted
employee list
placement of the archives within the larger organization (is it in the business wing? the admin wing? in with the RM program?)

Re-read your application materials
Written the info on the stack of papers that I'll be talking more about in a moment

Okay, so that stack of papers. What does it have? Postings over the next two weeks will have a list of the standard and not-so-standard questions you may or may not be asked. You already know a bunch of these because you've already been asked them. Take one piece of paper for each of those questions (and others of your personal favorites), headline the paper with the question, and then write down the answer, either in outline, bullet point, or full script form.

Why? Because it's unbelievably useful. I'll get more into some of the justifying stats later but in the meantime I'll tell you this. It reduces the nervous quotient. It means you're not as likely to forget important points (really important for those of us who aren't so good at speaking extemporaneously). If you're an internal candidate, it will help you avoid the sinkhole of incomplete answers (the single classic mistake for internal candidates). It allows you to present a more audibly polished performance which will usually translate to your audience as professionalism as you use less ums and ers and likes--but avoid the opposite extreme of sounding too rote! And even if that exact question doesn't get asked, you may still get asked something related and then guess what: you have some talking points already written! How great is that?

Giant disclaimer: You ARE going to be doing this every time for every different interview. Remember all my nagging about tailoring your cover letter and cv? Did you really think I was going to stop just because we'd moved on to interviews? Seriously? Well, aside from the whole "tailor because no two jobs are the same" reason, here's the other reason you tailor: those answers you had written from the previous phone interview two months ago? Obviously didn't get you the job. You need to do something else.

I've done this answer-writing procedure once, mainly because I was an internal candidate and didn't want to make that classic mistake of not talking enough. (Talking too much is another problem, but it's a little less common). In review? I'm going to do it for every job interview I have for here on out. It was so absolutely worth my time. I was astounded at how helpful it was. And it really didn't take that much time to do. This particular interview was full of hidden traps for me because I was an internal candidate and because I had to be extraordinarily diplomatic in some of my answers and there was no way to predict those problem questions ahead of time. The canned answers gave me the luxury of paying attention to context, subtext, phrasing during the interview, moreso than I would have had I not had some of it pre-written. I didn't really use much of it verbatim--the subtext and the traps inherent in the question might only become apparent as the question was being asked--but at least I had the content piece of it answered so I could concentrate on the presentation end of things.

Now so what're the blank paper and writing implements for? First, for catching as many of the names and positions of the search committee as you can. Writing down the questions. Making notes about your answers to them. Sometimes before I tell the committee that I'm done answering, I'll take a quick glance over my notes about what I've already said to make sure I've covered everything I intended to cover. Not for doodling. (If you have a tendency to doodle, just be aware of why you do it and what the outcome might be: there's a vast difference between doodling on lecture notes and doodling while being the person who is talking. If you're a doodler, maybe consider a laptop--not hooked up to the net--instead of paper and pen.) The multi-color writing implements are for highlighting important points, maybe crossing out stuff you've already said (do you really want to repeat that story about the discovery of the Lincoln signature three times?)

And why the cv? And app paperwork? You're probably still going to get that question or two out of the blue that none of the above helps with, but if you're at all nervous, sometimes just having the paperwork in front of you will help. So if your memory deserts you and you don't recall how long you had that job at the pickle factory, you can flip open the cv and check. And you won't tell them 3 years when your resume said 2.

And remember, always remember, that your audience is relying on verbal cues to figure you out during a phone interview. If you're not sure how you'll do on that, practice. Don't practice in-person, practice over a phone call. Give your victim some questions, let him or her make up some more, and let him or her know what s/he should be listening for. Besides, if nothing else, it's a good test for the location and the phone you plan to use in the phone interview. I just realized as I typed this that I'll never be able to do a phone interview from my current place of residence. One of my neighbors has a badly-trained Jack Russell terrier named Stella. Not only does Stella bark incessantly when outside, she also doesn't respond well to voice commands and her owners don't keep her on leash. And though I find it absurdly amusing, I can't count on interviewers to have my warped sense of humor at background noises such as the dog's adult male owner leaning over his balcony railing screaming "Stella!" So use that test run with a friend to test out all the variables: how you perform, vocal intonation, background noises, interference, static, phone quality, and so forth. Probably you can't do anything about mid-interview earthquakes, tsunami or tornado alert sirens, fire alarms, or other unpredictable acts of nature, but get what you can under your control. And then you can stop worrying about that, too, and pay closer attention to what the interviewers are asking you.

Interview part 3: what to wear, what to wear

2010-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

I threw this in as a gimme. I really had no idea what to expect. And since I didn't have any idea of what to expect, I just did a fill-in-the-blank question. And let respondents have at it. The majority of answers fell along the lines of business or business professional. I'm not certain if that means something specific to you. Business professional would mean suits to me but apparently it didn't to some of our respondents. 53 people answered this question. I was going to try and define this in numbers and what I quickly realized is that almost none of these people who provide definitions are using professional or business professional or business casual mean the same thing by it. So maybe this is a more anecdotal type of answer rather than a statistics type.

So for those who mentioned professional somewhere in their answer, here's description where provided:

Professional (with no further explanation): 5 counts
Professional and neat: 2 counts
Neat and professional, but business suits not expected/required.
Professional attire-doesn't have to overdress but neat and professional. To me a tie or business suit is overdressing.
I assume professional attire and demeanor. (This isn't entirely about clothes, is it?)
Professional, even if the job only requires business casual on a daily basis, the person should put their best foot forward and show that they are taking the interview seriously
Professional. Need not be formal business attire i.e. men do not necessarily have to wear ties, and women certainly do not have to wear skirts, but the attire worn should be businesslike as well as neat, clean, and otherwise presentable.
Professional, it does not have to be overly formal but it should look as if they care about their appearance and making a good impression
Professional. Men: suit or at least slacks and nice sweater. Women: ladies suit or nice slacks/skirt and sweater. Personally I like to see a little personal pizazz in there--tie reflective of his personal style or a fun scarf for her--but that's just because I want to see their personality and that they can be both professional and individual. Certainly not a deal breaker though.
Professional, better than what you usually wear to work, if you're hands-on
Professional, but does not need to be too dressy
Professional, but logical for the weather, length of interview, and location.

The professional/business combination:

Business professional (with no further explanation): 4 counts
our professional business attire which includes shirt and tie, jacket optional. I expect the candidate to find this information out for themselves. That lets me know something about them if they take the time to find out that info on their own.
Business/professional - we are in a corporate setting.
business professional - suits for men and women
Professional business attire, no exceptions

Business without professional or casual mentioned (that's coming in a moment):

Business (with no further explanation): 5 counts
business attire (tie & button down shirt for men, suit-coat optional).
Businessy but can be more creative than corporate.
Business attire. While the workplace is fairly casual dress, the interviewee should be their best dressed.
Business attire for women. Jacket and tie for men.
Business attire. Jacket, not necessarily suit.

Okay, can you see why I'm having a tough time doing counts? Looks like some of the ones who want professional attire consider suits to be business attire and some of the ones who want business attire consider suits to be professional attire. I swear, if I ever do this again, I'm going to find drawings of people in several different modes of dress and ask respondents to click on the ones they'd accept.

And on we go. For the ones who mentioned casual in some fashion as okay:

Business casual (with no explanation): 2 counts
At the minimum, business casual
As all of our hires have been graduate level students, I expect the candidates to wear, at the very least, business casual attire.
Business casual - as they would wear to the position on a meeting day. Formal suit/dress not required, but should be well groomed and neatly dressed.
professional casual. for a woman, pants are fine. for a man, khakis and tie are fine.
business attire to high-level business casual
We have a casual atmosphere so attire is less important but we would expect the person to be dressed in nicer clothes rather than street clothes but casual dress clothes are ok. I think this is highly dependent on the institution, work environment and the position. I wouldn't recommend casual to job seekers.

And last but not least, the very few that didn't mention business, professional or casual specifically:

dress respectfully. don't show a lot of skin. cover tattoos. remove facial hardware from piercings.
Smart, clean. Tie not required for men, but makes a better impression. No jeans.
We assume the candidate will never look better than on interview day.
Dressed in a suit or jacket.

With the exception of the third line in that last section (never look better than on interview day? Yikes. That was coming out of a private non-profit, by the way) and a few who were willing to accept casual, looks like most are aiming for you to be fairly well dressed and nobody is going to ding you too badly for being overdressed. The person who said a tie or suit was overdressing was one of our respondents from an academic institution, but then so were all the ones who wanted men to wear a tie. I don't know that we had any respondents from couture houses or fashion magazines: all bets could be off in a situation like that.

I typically wear a suit to interviews, or a jacket/skirt combo that can pass for one usually in fairly moderate colors. I have a terrific chartreuse suit that I will never wear to a job interview (though I have worn it to SAA a couple of times.) I'm more comfortable in skirts--which for me translates to greater psychological security during the interview--but I don't assume that candidates will wear skirts. Especially since it seems as if we've been doing our recruiting and interviews in winter and pants really are much more suitable to the climate. I've worn high-heeled pumps (no open toes or sandals ever, no matter how terrific the pedicure) to less than temperate locations, but I got more than a few strange looks and I ended up having to explain my rather peculiar coordination issues (I'm safer in heels than flats) which was probably more work than it was worth. I'm somewhat amused by the fact that I usually have to explain my tendency to wear heels--somebody eventually says something or worries aloud about the distances we're covering--when there was a time that the assumption was made that female candidates would be wearing such footwear. I'll also note that I too tend to assume that candidates will wear flats or low heels for the comfort and longevity factor but I'm not going to assume heels are overdressing. I suspect most of the rest of our respondents would disagree with me on that.

Whatever you decide on your shoes, they should probably be of a piece with the rest of your outfit (no trainers with suits, please) and in good condition. Sandals for men or women probably aren't sufficient. Same for any other accessories you might be bringing such as a laptop bag or such: the hot pink backpack that's so nice for the plane ride probably isn't the best option for hauling around at an interview. Is it going to matter much? Probably not, and from my perspective, any place that decides not to hire you because your attache wasn't leather probably isn't a place that you--the non-leather-attache-owning-candidate--would be comfortable working at.

Conclusions? I'm not sure I have many. Dress well, dress neatly. Only take chances with your attire if you're fairly certain it will be accepted or if you're certain you don't want to work at a place that couldn't deal with your fashion sense. Any of our recruiters who are doing the voyeur thing want to add anything? Any applicants have a specific outfit they want an opinion on?

Next up, heading into the interview questions section. And the next one is the entry for which writing it scares me more than any other single topic in this blog: the personality questions. Let's see how many people I can offend, hmm?

Interview part 2: what to expect

2010-03-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

What to expect. This was really more of a meta question. Maybe not so advice-oriented, but I was curious. If people conducted in-person interviews, were they willing to bring people in from a distance? What costs would they cover? How long would that in-person interview be? Would they have informal meetings during the course of it? Is having to do a presentation of some sort a given?

At my place we are generally willing to bring in distance candidates, we cover air fare and room and board, and these are all-day interviews which translates to a certain commitment of personnel hours for the search committee and other colleagues. In other words, kind of expensive. So I didn't want to assume that others would always go to that extent. So I asked.

2/3 of respondents were willing to bring in candidates from distant locations. So if they're willing to do this, are they willing to pay? For the most part, yes.

Personal note: I once went on an interview--for a position with a corporation that was not having money problems--and paid my own way. Post interview I did a thank you note, sent in a requested writing sample, and never heard from them again. It taught me a lesson--one I distinctly couldn't afford at the time--and I will never again interview with a place that expects me to spend serious money for an interview. Doing interviews at a conference where the candidate was planning to attend anyhow, that's a different matter. If the candidate offers, that's a different matter. Candidates: Unless you've got a contract in hand that says they'll hire you regardless of the outcome of the visit, think this over, and over again before paying your own way to an interview. A recruiter that parsimonious is either very close to the edge financially (i.e. you may want to keep searching because they're about to go insolvent) or they may not be the most employee-friendly institution to work for. And no, I'm not going to tell you who that corporation is because a) they are still around and still very solvent and can afford very expensive lawyers and b) it was over a decade ago and maybe they've learned their lesson.

Okay, I'm sorry. I've just attacked two of my respondents (non-corporate, by the way) and I'm willing to admit that maybe there's extenuating circumstances and that I'm just a little judgmental because of my own previous experience. One respondent does interviews that are two hours or less which does negate the need for overnights or food, maybe, but how do you justify asking the applicant to cover airfare? So if you're reading this and maybe you're not a respondent but you are from an institution that brings interviewees in from a distance and doesn't help out with the costs of that, help us out. If this investment is going to work out in the candidate's favor in the long-term, please explain it because I'm at a loss here. Is it simply that your definition of "from distant locations" means only a few hours by car? I'm willing to allow that my definition of distant, being in a place that's about 1500 miles by air to the next state, is probably different from that of a Bostonian who probably considers Vermont to be distant. It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?

Several of the places that don't interview distance candidates still spring for food and such, so kudos to them. I'd also like to add that some of the respondents indicated that they didn't hold in-person interviews for distance candidates precisely because their institution wouldn't pay for travel. And on the paying for distance thing: don't be surprised if the interviewing institution works on a reimbursement basis, at least for the airfare. When I interviewed here over seven years ago, they were still arranging flights for candidates. At some point this policy switched (I keep hearing rumors of an expensive flight that wasn't refundable when the candidate canceled out, but nobody has confirmed) and we do generally ask that candidates make their own flight arrangements and then we reimburse later. This isn't all that unusual. In fact I suspect it's fairly common for people traveling by car since most places I've interviewed at usually pay on a mileage reimbursement basis.

And this is what the interview lengths look like. I didn't do this one as a pie chart, because some institutions conduct more than one type of interview. Of those that conduct multiple day interviews, all were academic. I'd assumed that maybe those were headed for management types of jobs, but they seemed a blend of the options. What was even more interesting to me was the level of position they were hiring into. Again, my assumption would be later career. I have no idea why I'd assume that, and I'm clearly wrong. They're also mixed, leaning toward entry level/early career. (and this is why Arlene is not egotistical enough to assume she speaks for the profession.)

On the other side of things, the shortie interviews, the two-hour-or-less types, are an even mix of job types, mix of institutions, mix of levels. So I guess there's no predicting what you're in for until you get that call arranging the interview. Keep flexible.

The last bits I asked on this question were whether or not candidates were expected to do a presentation and if any of their meetings during the course of the interview were informal. About 30% said they expect a presentation and 43% said they do informal meetings. Both can be things to watch for. Those who hold informal meetings? Heavy on the academic respondents, more so than the general survey population. Those who require presentations? All academic with a couple of them representing both academic and state/local government. Looks like if you're going to be interviewing with a private non-profit or corporate, you're probably going to be doing a more focused q&a type interview rather than the alternatives.

Why watch out for informal meetings? I tend to put them in, mixed throughout the course of the day, partly because I'm going to need a break and I know the candidate will. But I do still watch what happens and I suspect some recruiters may be watching these very closely indeed. In my case, I do want to see if the candidate can handle the more casual moments with a certain amount of professional aplomb while still remaining approachable and casual, but I suspect other recruiters are simply looking to see if you're able to retain your professional mien. So while you might not be "on" at quite the same level as you would be for a panel interview or presentation, you'll want to be careful not to relax too much.

And I was hoping to cover the clothing thing in this one, but this is already a little long. So next posting, hopefully, will be a short one, just on that topic. Up in a couple of days.

Interview part 1: the basics

2010-03-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

Okay! You've done everything right with your cover letter and resume and you've won that coveted spot on the next level up: an interview. Judging by the survey results, that's probably going to be a phone interview, at least at first. They may go straight to in-persons. I didn't spend a lot of time asking survey respondents specifically about how the differences between phone and in-person interviews may play out for them so I'm not always going to differentiate in the upcoming posts between the two types.

But let's take a quick look at some of the requirements of a phone interview. With the phone type, they can't see you, you can't see them. Body language is going to be invisible. So you don't know if that funny comment you just made irritated them or made them smile. Difficult, no? Hard to know if you're on the right page with the committee when you can't see their responses. So how do you get around those types of things when you don't have all the visual clues you're accustomed to seeing? Communication is one. If you're taking a moment to write down the questions so you make sure you answer them completely, let the interviewer(s) know that. And hopefully in return they'll also assure you of the same thing--that when it goes dead silent on their end the phone connect hasn't necessarily stopped, but they're just madly writing down all the brilliant information you just provided.

Oh, and about the whole phone thing from a more logistical view. Aim for using the most reliable phone you can find in a quiet space. If your cell connect is less than pristine, go find a landline. If your dog barks or your cat meows maniacally when you're home? (been there) see if you can borrow a friend's place. If you're currently employed? Don't use your office line, borrow a good cell and go sit in your car in a quiet parking lot somewhere. Not a lot of interviewers seem to care so much about this anymore, but it does keep you from making the suspicious types like me from wondering if you might--if hired--use their institutional resources for other personal projects.

And you know how you can't tell what they're thinking since you can't see their faces? Same goes for them. What is your voice telling them about you? Nerves aside (more on that later) do you tend to go monotone when speaking? Find a friend who is willing to be very honest, assure them that you won't hold their answer against them (and keep that promise), and get them to assess your vocal performance in public speaking engagements. Find out if you tend toward a quavery voice, monotone, emphasis in weird places, sounding like you're not taking anything seriously. Practice, possibly with the same friend, to counteract. You want to sound serious, professional, warm, and engaged. Come to think of it, that's probably something you should do for the in-person one, too.

I'm going to wait for the comments to see how much we need to develop the above, but let's dive into the basics. What kind of interview can you expect?

Apparently you can expect an interview because nobody answered none. I did some number crunching on the type of institution and that didn't help with predicting whether you're going to have phone, in-person, or both, sorry. So I did some number crunching on type of job and same thing. Which I find a little odd. I figured there would perhaps be some correlation between perhaps back-of-the-house oriented positions like cataloging or sole processing and maybe not a focus on in-person interviews, but not so much.

What was interesting, albeit not particularly scientific, were the comments. For those that did in-persons only? Four respondents clarified. One respondent clearly hates phone interviews as much as most candidates do: s/he said: "Phone interviews are very difficult and tend not to benefit either the candidate or the committee." One said that s/he does some "screening calls" and then in-person interviews the finalists. One said that if an in-person proved a hardship for the candidate, they would do a phone or web interview (more in a second) instead of in-person, and the last clearly leaned toward hiring locals because s/he said they would do a phone interview only for an exceptional candidate.

On that web thing. One of the respondents said that they'd done a Skype interview with a distance candidate recently. I'm starting to really ponder that as an option, not to replace the in-person interviews, but to replace the phone interviews. It saves us from some of those non-verbal communication miscues. In fact, for my last set of in-person interviews, I brought in a project processing archivist we have working for us who resides in Stuttgart (yes, this is a very bizarre experiment) via Skype since she is part of the crew here and we wanted to have her interact with the candidates as well. What I noticed was that the person on the other end of the Skype connection became the focus which wasn't my aim in this case, but I could definitely see how that would work as a replacement for a phone interview with the candidate on the other end of a webcam from the committee. So I suspect that candidates may see some growth in this type of initial interview, presuming we all can afford all the technology. I assume that an interviewee will have access to a phone, I don't yet assume they'll have access to a webcam and broadband. If all potential phone interviewees were able to support that, I would definitely switch over (assuming we had HR permission, of course) for the phone interview.

Other generic comments from people who didn't select any particular type of interview: those comments tended to fall along more practical lines. Like if all the candidates are local, we may skip the phone interviews. That sort of thing. Presumably if you're one of the candidates on the interview list, the recruiter will be clear about that. And if you do get a phone interview but aren't sure what happens after that, most interviews give you a chance for asking questions and it's totally fair to ask what form the process will take from there on out.

And one last thing on nerves. For the most part, interviewers will expect you to be nervous. But most will only accept that to a point and for some, it's a way of judging how well you handle yourself under pressure. Many will do what they can to put you at your ease but in the end, you do need to handle this. They will expect that shows of nerves will decrease over the course of the interview--whether that's a half-hour phone or a two-day in-person. (and in the case of the latter it's often more a matter of exhaustion than the actual nerves disappearing.) If nerves are an issue for you, if you giggle incessantly, go wooden, flop sweat, go blank, you're going to have to figure this out. Most of you who have met me probably wouldn't tag me as shy. But I am. And I get stage fright, especially when the outcome of the event is really important to me like, say, at a job interview. I'm not 100% successful, but my coping mechanism is this public persona I put on--it's almost like an acting job. It's not a severe change in my personality, it's just me, only more out-going. Other people find practice makes it better. So if you're reading this and you've got some advice for what works for you, let's hear it. Comments, please.

All right. Once again I've gotten way more wordy than I'd intended so I'm going to close off this entry. The next one we'll go into two things specific to in-person interviews: what you can expect and what appearance (you knew I'd get back to fashion eventually, didn't you?) you should present. Any thoughts on the above? I look forward to your comments.

Intermission

2010-03-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm hoping at this point we're over half-way through. Okay, more precisely, I hope I'm over halfway through because you would not believe how much time I've spent writing these entries. I promised myself I would start posting the blog entries once I'd written at least half of them so that I could be sure they'd be released on a regular basis and still give myself some ability to walk away from the project for a while if other professional duties got in the way. [ed. note: And did other duties really get in the way! I feel like I'm time-traveling. I think I wrote the first draft of this posting in early Feb. Now I find I'm writing nearly daily just to keep on schedule! Good thing I got that head start.]

Here's my plans for the remaining: a bunch of entries on interviewing and a bunch of entries on more macro topics like how long does a job recruitment typically take and so forth.

Since I am topically at the halfway point I'm going to take a break and reiterate a few things. If none of the specifics I've provided stick with you, I ask that you grasp onto the tailoring and proofreading parts. The odds/statistics/what-have-you on any specific piece of advice are not guaranteed, of course. We're seeing too much discrepancy, perhaps too much individuality? among our respondents. Nobody will conduct a search exactly the same way and you simply cannot be expected to predict every possible ingredient the recruiter might add to the mix.

Having said that, that doesn't mean that you can stop trying to predict, stop tailoring, stop proofreading. Even if you might find the one recruiter who cares nothing about the information you provide so carefully and spend so much time crafting (I think I worked for that guy once) I don't think there's many of that type out there. And if they don't care about you or the information you provide, sure, you might still get the job, but is it a job you're going to want? Perhaps so. I'm--if you haven't figured it out yet--really goal-oriented when it comes to my career. I know what I want to be doing, I know where I want to be doing it, and every move I've made job-wise thus far is working me toward that eventual goal. Even if a few of them have been lateral passes. You might not feel the same way about a job. You may just be looking for job security and have no particular interest in what the job is. Here's my thoughts about that: while passion for and interest in the work isn't sufficient for me to hire you, if you don't exhibit it, there's a good chance that lack could take you out of the running especially if I have other equally qualified candidates who are able to express their interest in this exact job. Again, I want somebody who wants the job I have on offer, not just any job. Not all employers will feel the same.

I'll also take this opportunity to thank all of you who have jumped into the discussions. I'm clearly not omniscient here and so I really appreciate the follow-up questions. I've only seen a couple of commenters who I'd classify as recruiters so far but a few of them are paying attention and adding their thoughts which I also appreciate (cf. the "not omniscient" thing mentioned earlier.)

On with the show. Ready for interviews? That's up next. In the meantime, don't forget to take a look at Amber's resume and provide commentary attached to the post about Amber here.

BTP: Your chance to edit

2010-03-13T20:41:00.000-08:00

**Update: Weds 3/24/10. Here's Amber's cover letter too. Start in with the comments please!**

Just as I requested, Amber sent me her resume. Below is the job ad. Probably not redacted enough since I can't imagine there's too many of this type of organization out there, but since to redact it further would wipe out all the solid information you'll need to provide edits to Amber, so be it. It's not like it wasn't a public ad in the first place.

As you might recall, when I agreed to post this I told Amber she was going to have to do some self-editing too. No free ride! So here's her comments about the resume she submitted.

The section of my resume that I believe needs the most work is the first section, which is my archival experience. I have 3 different positions at the same institution listed separately, and I don't list whether any positions are full or part time. I'll lay out that info below for you. There's probably also a few jobs I could completely eliminate from the resume, but I'm not sure how to do that without leaving obvious gaps. The 'Leadership, Recognition, and Awards' section is probably unnecessary at this point, since I'm no longer fresh out of school. And overall, I am a little uncomfortable with the length of my resume. I think 2 and a half pages might be seen as too long for someone who is still entry-level.

Now all of that's fair game. Amber also noted that she thought applying for the position was also a stretch but since I haven't read either in-depth yet, I can't comment on that. Here's what I'm looking for from you. Please provide any edits you think would improve her resume WITH an explanation of them. Feel free to tackle the topics Amber has already suggested. If you want to do a edit/reformat of the whole document, email me and let me know and I'll arrange to add your version online in the GoogleDocs area where I'm currently hosting Amber's resume. I've put Amber's resume here.

I will note a couple of quick things--first, I converted Amber's word doc to a pdf since for some bizarre reason, GoogleDocs did more damage to the doc view than it did to the pdf view. So the pdf is closer to the original, though not exact. Second, in messing about with it (sorry Amber) I removed her header from the first page of the resume. It's on all the rest though, so that's okay. So Amber, that would actually be my first suggestion. All your contact info is already on the first page of your resume so you don't need the header on that one. Having said that, I'll give you two more quickies that I picked up at a glance. My second suggestion? Rid yourself of the GPAs. Nothing makes you look like you're fresh out of college than having a GPA after your degree. You're justifiably proud of them, but pretty much the only people who care about that would be anybody at the grad school where you're applying for a doctoral program. Employers at the grad level, not so much. Third: Put page numbers in the header while you're at it.

Okay, that's it for me on this one for the moment. The field is open for the rest of you. Next weekend I'll post her cover letter. And the blog will continue on with its regularly scheduled programming...

The Job Ad:

[Music-Related Institution]
Assistant Archivist

[Music-Related Institution] is currently considering applicants for the position of Assistant Archivist. The Assistant Archivist reports to the Archivist and is responsible for assisting in the archival activities of the Library and Archives, including appraisal, arrangement, description, preservation, reference, and digitization. He/she assists the Archivist with determining departmental needs and advocates for issues relating to or affecting the archival collections; works with the Archivist to set priorities for collection processing and for digitization; participates in the implementation of EAD for encoded finding aids; identifies and refers items as necessary for conservation treatment; submits regular reports on archival processing; and assists with reference and reproduction requests. In the absence of the Archivist, he/she supervises the activities of certain student employees, interns, and volunteers.

Required:
Master's degree in library science, archival studies, or related field; minimum of two years processing archival materials in an academic or research library setting; background in archival appraisal, arrangement, and description; experience working with various physical formats, including paper, sound recordings, video materials, and photographs; working knowledge of current metadata and descriptive standards, including DACS, EAD, and MARC 21.

Preferred:
Additional degree in music or related discipline; knowledge of rock and roll and related popular music genres; conservation experience; supervisory experience.

[Music-Related Institution] is a nonprofit organization that exists to educate visitors, fans, and scholars from around the world about the history and continuing significance of rock and roll music. It carries out this mission both through its operation of a world-class museum that collects, preserves, exhibits, and interprets this art form and through its Library and Archives as well as its educational programs. The Library and Archives of [Music-Related Institution] will be the most comprehensive repository of written and audiovisual materials relating to the history of rock and roll. Its mission is to collect, preserve, and provide access to these materials for scholars, educators, students, journalists, and the general public in order to further their understanding of rock and roll, its roots, and its impact on our society.

For consideration, send resume and cover letter detailing your qualifications along with salary history to: [Music-Related Institution]

BTP: Education and secrecy

2010-03-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

Okay. I've had a couple of things percolating around in my head this week and one of them I've already promised to write about. So here goes. You all should have figured out by now that I'm doing my best to support your job searches. So I usually try to come in on the side of giving all of you the benefit of the doubt. Here's where that ends.

First. For those of you who are reading this because you want to be a professional archivist but you don't have a masters degree. Please. Stop reading this now and go get your master's degree from a school with an archives track or accept the fact that it's only going to get harder if it isn't already impossible to get professional-level jobs as an archivist. If you're enjoying that job you have that just asks for your bachelor's level and it pays you enough to live on? You'd better hold on to it. Mostly what you're looking at are archival tech positions and your ability to move on to higher jobs in future is going to be severely limited without that masters. Maybe grad ed isn't an option for you, or not right now. I understand that. But when I see multitudes of people with graduate archival ed applying for any given professional position, you have to realize that your search is going to have some serious limitations. And like it or not, there's a lot of recruiters out there just like me who will continue to insist our hires have the Masters level degree. We're not going to back off of that. The graduate schools are hardly likely to start producing fewer archivists. We don't need to back off of that and pretty soon, nobody else will either. At least for the higher-paying jobs or the ones that have some sort of official professional rank.

Yes, there's plenty of archival work out there that doesn't require somebody with a masters to do (or doesn't pay enough for somebody with a masters to do.) I suspect mostly in small, local institutions. If that's your dream, great. Go for it. Those institutions need you, and from my vantage point, they need you badly. Please go attend some workshops and take a look at the SAA publications list and start reading the basics manuals. As much as they need you, they need you more with a solid background in the theory and practice of archives. And good luck with that job. I've worked for that place. It paid $1.50/hr over minimum wage and took every bit of archival education and experience I had. I was the only professional (all but thesis) they've ever had working for them, the only one they probably ever will have. But going into credit card debt just to survive wasn't my idea of a fun time. And so I had some strong motivations to polish off that thesis and get something ranked and paid as a professional job. If you can afford to take that job, do it well, and to stay there, more power to you.

On to subject 2. Secrecy. I'm just going to be Ms. Popular today, I can just tell. Deep breath.

For those of you who don't want to tell your current employer that you're job seeking? Get over it. If you're lucky enough to have other recent supervisors who can act as references, that's fine. If in avoiding people from your current place of employment you're left with a references list of only professors or people who supervised you over two years ago? With nobody who can address your recent experience and skill levels? Good luck with that. You may be fine. You wouldn't be fine in my pool. Nor would you have made it to a job offer in any of the other searches I've served on in the past 10 years (and hey: not an Arlene-only-bias: in many of those searches, that standard was set by somebody other than me).

Here's some alternatives. Do you have a volunteer job? Can you use somebody from there? Do you have a current co-worker you can use? Unless you're in a two-person shop (you and your supervisor) somebody must be around who can do this. While I'm willing to say okay, maybe you can keep it from your supervisor, but keeping it from everybody? You're going to tie yourself into knots keeping this one secret. If you don't have a coworker you can use? If you've got an insane supervisor? A loose cannon? Somebody who will punish you for your disloyalty? You're taking some pretty severe chances by using this person or even telling them you're searching? Guess what? It's not going to get better. It's not going to get easier to tell this person. They're not going to become any less of a loose cannon. And your other references are getting older, and farther away, and less and less relevant.

I've forced a few of those reference names from applicants. Want to know what I heard when I called? "Well, we were pretty sure s/he was searching. We knew we wouldn't be able to keep him/her forever. But s/he deserves a much better job than this one and if we were you, we'd hire him/her." And a few of them I didn't hire and I have kept in touch with some of them and maybe a few lingering aftereffects, but nowhere near what they were worried about. Guess what? The sheer relief of how easy so many things become once you've fessed up to searching can often outweigh the stress of anticipated retribution. No more hiding, no more coming up with fake excuses about why you're going on a three-day vacation to Thief River Falls in January.

Okay, so if I do give you the benefit of the doubt and you do have that insane boss who will fire you or start to harass you the second this person gets a glimmer of the fact that you might be jobsearching and make your life so awful you'd be committing career suicide to tell them, you'd better find an alternative. Start volunteering. Or developing close professional relationships with others in the field. Start collaborative projects with people from other institutions. Or just take your chances and provide a references list without anybody from your current job. And hope that you aren't up against a tie-breaker with somebody who did provide current references. Because while I'd call you up and give you the opportunity to provide that current name, not everybody will.

what do they do with those references anyhow?

2010-03-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

I decided to ask if recruiters followed up on references you don't provide. Or more precisely, what I asked was: might you check references other than those provided by the candidate? One quarter of respondents said yes. One of those respondents explained that they do a full security check before hiring (and presumably you as a candidate would be aware of that) and another said that if they knew somebody who'd worked with the candidate before, they might call that person. Aside from the security check person, that means that nearly a quarter of these recruiters are willing to call people other than those you have provided and I start to wonder if they're necessarily going to let you know that ahead of time. I know our HR rules wouldn't allow me to do this formally and I would never take a chance of creating a grievable situation by straying from the formalities, but I still think that there's enough respondents saying this that you should be made aware it's a possibility.

So when do they check references anyhow? How soon do you need to provide a heads-up to the people on your list? Obviously, the sooner the better. You should really be asking the people you're using as references if you can do so. I've worked with one individual who has twice used me as a reference for positions and I've known nothing about it until the phone call came from the chair of the search committee. This is really NOT a good idea. I don't intentionally do it, but I do occasionally say really stupid things when caught off guard (anybody who's ever heard me do a Q&A at a conference session can attest to this) and that's probably not going to work in your favor.

On the flip side, 8% of respondents noted that they only check references when they have a concern about a candidate. I find that a little high, but maybe their other recruitment policies are so strict as to not make references matter much.

Do references matter much? Obviously for some they do, some they don't. Most of the people I've talked to regard them as being of limited utility. Depending on state labor law, the reference may not be able to provide you with anything beyond dates of employ. I think it's a fair assumption that candidates are probably only going to list references that they're sure will be positive about them so that can result in limited utility too. However, I've had references come clean about a candidate in ways I never expected and so I'm willing to give it a shot. I vividly recall speaking with a friend/colleague/candidate-approved reference quite a long time ago about a potential candidate of whom the reference said "not ready for the adult world yet." Not only "ouch," but very, very accurate as it transpired. We were pretty much aware of it already, but having a reference confirm it forced us not to ignore it as a possible misperception and also allowed us to include it in the justification to hire another candidate.

Alaska state law actually protects the supervisor as long as the candidate has signed the appropriate form and thus allows me to be completely forthright about employees who have worked for me. I'm told that's not typical and even when state law may allow, HR policies may not, so if you're concerned as to what a supervisor can or cannot say about you, a quick bit of research into state law and your institution's HR policies might be in order. That is, if you've got something to worry about whether it be something in your own record or a previous supervisor who is, shall we say, less than stable. At any rate, a bad reference can wipe you out of the pool but I don't hear many of those. Mostly I'm watching for the answers to a few specific factual questions and a different perspective on the candidate. Sometimes with otherwise equal candidates these might feed into the mix more strongly.

And do give your recruiters a little credit. They can often recognize a crazy person or somebody with vengeance issues when they talk to them. Let me tell you, over the past few years I've grown a lot less worried about the crazies I might use as references than I am about the sane-appearing ones. As both candidate and recruiter, I've found that the perfectly stable supervisors or colleagues are the ones who usually end up being loose cannons. Who--because of their good relationship with you--often relax a little too much into the reference call. I wouldn't call it common--most people understand what they should and shouldn't be saying here. As a recruiter, when I hear something off from an otherwise excellent reference, I'm going to pay far more attention to it than when I hear a bunch of things off from somebody who is clearly a loon. And even better, when the loon gives me a solid reference for the candidate, I'm likely to think "wow, this person even won over a crazy person. S/He'll do great on the ref desk!"

Back to when they call references.

20% call before they do any interviews, 25% between phone and in-person interviews, and over half will call just before they hire. Now the interesting part about that half who wait, that suggests to me that the reference check is really a pro forma thing more than something that could affect your decision-making between candidates. Should you bet on that? Probably not (that's just barely over half which does leave the remaining nearly half who don't wait.) But if you're keeping in touch with your references--like I argue you should--if you find out they've been called it can give you some idea of where you are in the process and how serious they are about you. That can be really reassuring at times. Given how long job recruitments can take, I've had a few that were suddenly resurrected for me when one of my references let me know that they'd been called: I'd pretty much written off the job since it had been so long since I'd heard anything.

On a related matter. I think it's safe to assume that unless they specifically ask for letters of recommendation, you probably shouldn't include them. I know this isn't necessarily fair: one of my good friends was jobhunting a few years back and her best reference/immediate past supervisor died shortly after she'd submitted her application for a position. If I remember right, she had a more general letter of recommendation from him and the recruiters weren't willing to accept that. But that's extreme.

The problem with letters of recommendation are all the same problems you have with any other application document: if it's not tailored to the job at hand, it's not going to do much good. I have a set of questions that I ask references and while some of them are pretty basic, at least one is not typical and given the response I get on the phone when I ask it--dead silence--I'm fairly certain that no letter of recommendation would typically include that piece of information, and I can promise you that I really do care about it. And since you're curious, I'll tell you. I ask if the candidate has ever had any disciplinary problems. This comes from an ancient place of work that had more than its share of workers who went postal. Trust me, it matters to me. Most people don't ask that one judging by the look on my HR consultant's face when I told her I wanted to ask about potential for violence. I suspect that question went all the way up to the University Counsel for approval and wordsmithing.

Last on this before we get to move on to the interviewing thing. Remember how I suggested you give your references a heads-up? I also asked to see how many recruiters cared/noticed/whatever if the reference knew about the job description when the reference call was placed. Since I do--well, not so much care as think it sends a good signal about how interested the candidate is--I was curious to see if anybody else had this preference as well. For the most part, not so much. 16% expect that your reference will be familiar with the job description, 28% say no, they don't expect that. 9% go so far as to send the reference the job description ahead of time (saving you the work). Here's the graphical interpretation for those of you who work better that way:

My conclusion? Well, since I've already revealed my own personal bias I may as well take the chance to advocate for it and suggest that you consider sharing the job description with your references before they get the phone call. Can't hurt. But if you've got limited time and ability to do all this, this is probably one of the steps you could skip and have it hurt you the least.

BTP: the candidates speak out!

2010-03-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, so last week some time I promised my rant on the current ratio of jobs to job seekers. Well, I just can't do it. I just can't subject you to it. I don't think I'm wrong about a lot of it, but I do know it's the written equivalent of spitting into the wind. So here's my compromise decision. You get to do it. Well, at least partially, anyway. I'm not really going to allow rants since mostly people stop listening to them. Let's get them with numbers instead. In lieu of unheard rants, what I have done is created a survey for those of you who are job seeking for that first archival professional job or are have gotten it (within the last 10 years) or who have given up on it. Know anybody who fits that category? Strongly encourage them to fill out this survey so we can get a semi-current look on the state of archival job searching today and in recent past.

Click here to take survey **Survey is closed. Details upcoming in a later post.

I'll tell you up front, I am working from one giant bias in this and that is the archival education thing. (okay, I'll do a little rant). Graduate archival education is available and I'm most interested in hearing from the people who have sought it out and obtained it, no matter what the programmatic context for it is. Primarily because you're mostly likely the folks who are archives career-oriented and who have presumably paid a lot of money to prepare yourself specifically for an archives career. At the moment, you're the ones I want to hear from.

I'm leaving the survey open til the end of April because I'm fairly sure that's about how long it will take me to get through the rest of the basic postings and things I want to cover on the job search process. And hey, if there's a slight gap? Trust me, I could use the vacation. And then we'll switch gears to what you think about this all. So that's your deadline to fill it out. 4/30/10.

that overlooked little document: the reference list

2010-03-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

You ready for this?

So again, Arlene the non-statistician really may not be providing good stats here. But the first question I asked was: Should reference lists contain only three names, no more, no less? Here's the answers.

I know, of limited utility. Bad question or rather, bad options for answers. But you can expect that you're probably going to have to come up with three names as references and it's not a bad idea to remember that some people don't want more.

On to who you pick. Sometimes the job will say: must include a supervisor or work references, if they say "professional references" you may have a little more leeway in heading for colleagues in the field than for co-workers. More about who in a moment but first I want to give you a peek at something I found interesting: here's the line-up on whether or not you should be stating the relationship of you and your reference.

Not a single respondent said "don't include this." I have to admit, I hadn't really thought about it. I've rarely done it with my own apps and I've even more rarely seen it done with apps I've read. But now that somebody brought it up, the lightbulb went on for me. This would be very useful indeed. I may just say "names of three references" and it may be that I have to ask them all the same questions, but this can tell me something about the candidate. For starters, if somebody provides more than three names (which is generally all I call) I can choose the names of individuals that I think can best address any concerns I might have for the job or for the candidate. Or if the references include instructors from an aged degree and no work references, I may have to follow up on that.

So on to who you should include. I provided four options as to type and four options as to importance. Type was supervisor, current supervisor, co-worker, and professional colleague. Importance was: must include, can include, doesn't matter, and don't include. Here's how that worked out.

Let's look at some of the specifics. 46% of respondents (nearly half) insist you include a supervisor. But only 14% insist it be a current supervisor. So for those of you who don't want to let your current place of employment know you're looking, you might be off the hook. I will point out though that even though I don't demand applicants include a current supervisor, if it does come down to a tie-breaker between two candidates or if I'm finding that the references provided aren't all that recent, I am going to ask for current supervisors.

I think the more useful numbers here are the "can include" bits which give you some idea of what the recruiters would like to see without coming right out and demanding it.

The other interesting piece is who they don't want to see. 4% don't want you to include professional colleagues and 8% don't want to see co-workers. I'll admit, I'm a little puzzled by that. I'm even more puzzled by the fact that the 4% who didn't want professional colleagues? They were half of the 8% of respondents who didn't want co-workers either. Note that they did insist on supervisors, but not current supervisors. So I'm trying to figure out who is left. 3 previous supervisors? Maybe, but that could result in having to put in supervisors for non-relevant work for those of you in the entry and early level years. Maybe that's okay with them. Or maybe I've just totally left out another category of potential references. College instructors, I guess, and that's the only guess I've been able to come up with in the month and a half since I started looking at this question and trying to suss out what I might have left out. Any other thoughts?

I suppose if all you had were professional colleagues or all you had were co-workers, I might want a better blend of references. But since I don't know where our respondents were going with that (and well aware it may be simply my bad question formatting), I'll leave it alone and hope we get some commentary on the topic.

Oh, and last on the contents of this list of references: 82% of respondents expect that you will provide full contact information for your references: name, address, email, and phone. Some will let you get away with email or phone only but none said don't provide full contact information. I'll let you draw your own conclusions and simply add that I like full contact information because sometimes people don't pick up phones and sometimes emails go astray. If I haven't heard back from a reference that I want to speak with, I need to be able to try alternate means of contact. Even with apparently perfect candidates I'm still a little suspicious and so I do make an effort to follow all possible information routes. If I can't get one of your references to respond I might wonder why, and again, my getting to wondering is not always the best outcome for a candidate.

And since this is getting long (again) I think I'll break here and leave the macro look at references for the next posting.

BTP: Limited time offer

2010-03-08T22:56:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's been publicly suggested now, so the brainstorm I was delaying putting into practice has been verified as useful by at least one other person. For those of you who haven't been following the comments (and why not?) Amber asked if I'd consider doing a before & after take on a resume, apparently specifically hers.

Well I am.

And I'm not.

As you all know, or should have figured out by now, I do not think there's any such thing as an all-purpose resume. Or cover letter. So just taking on a resume is, to me at least, of limited utility and would potentially encourage you to do the exact opposite of what I've been saying about tailoring. Plus, quite honestly, I'm a bit overwhelmed at work at the moment. Lots to do so I need not to take on any additional tasks for a few weeks. So I'm going to alter the suggestion a little.

So here's the offer/gauntlet/whatever. I'm willing to dedicate a few off-day posts to the idea. We'll do the resumes first. Amber has first crack at it since she was first to bring it up and because she's already said she's willing. Amber, if you want to go for this, you need to provide to me (by Friday 3/12/10) the following:

1 job ad with institution-identifying information removed. Can be old, can be new, you can take your chances using one you're actually planning to apply for if you think it's worth the risk letting your recruiter potentially see the help you've been given.
1 resume, redacted. By that I mean if you'd typically include a phone number, you don't include the phone number but instead of removing that line entirely, you write "phone number" in the location. You can redact name information if you like.
1 suggestion for a substantive edit of your resume (no fair adding an egregious mistake just so you have something to take out) with an explanation of why you should do this

Here's what we'll do with those. I will post both the job ad and the resume in a BTP posting. Since this is supposed to be a learning experience, I'm going to hold off on responding for a bit, because I want to see what all of you are learning or have figured out on your own. There's also a potential bonus in this for those of you who want us all to take on your resumes--because I will consider extending the offer to others but only to others who have participated in the edits of Amber's application materials (and I reserve the right to quit what could be a neverending saga with little or no forewarning--I would like to finish writing the rest of the planned entries, eventually.)

Amber, there's another due date associated with this. Friday, 3/19/10. I want your cover letter for the same job by that date so we can post that once the edits to your resume have been done and we can then edit the cover letter to go with this resume. I realize your volunteering wasn't quite for this level of work, so if you're not willing to take this on, let me know ASAP? Oh, and for the rest of you, please don't start inundating me with requests as Amber-understudies, I've already got one or two people I'll be tapping for this tryout if Amber can't do it. Amber, the first piece of the gauntlet is finding my email address. Really, I'm not that hard to find out there. Not too many Arlene Schmulands in this universe. (none others, that I've found). Please put "Elusive resume" in the subject line.

Oh, and by the way, thanks everybody for your patience lately. And thanks to all of you who have taken the time to let me know what's working for you here. Not to get too soppy, but I've had a few moments recently where I've wondered if maybe the fact that nobody else has ever really taken on a topic like this at this level should have told me that maybe I shouldn't be doing it either. You know, where angels fear to tread, Arlene stomps in with her stiletto heels... I do that sometimes.

But I finally came to a conclusion this week after I'd taken a few light hits for my perspective on this whole thing and my conclusion is this: job hunting stinks no matter how the applicant/recruitment ratio works out. The applicants know it, the recruiters know it. Sometimes the wrong people get the jobs. Sometimes the right people get the jobs. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. But that kind of a judgment is not my prerogative (except when I'm wearing my recruiting hat) and truly? None of that really matters and it shouldn't matter. I mean that. What I can do--insofar as I can do anything to make this system easier for all of us, applicants and recruiters alike--is to get everybody to a point where we waste as little time as possible in the recruitment process. So applicants are providing good application materials with solid information in a usable form and recruiters can rely on that so they can spend less time wading through confusing documents and more time evaluating applicants on the things that really do matter to them.

Maybe if we can all get a little closer to that stage of perfection, recruiters will relax a little and applicants can stop letting job searches erode their egos and well-being. Sound reasonable? Here's to hoping.

Resume part 6: Good or bad, what makes it so

2010-03-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

Here we go. Some repetition from earlier sections, but also some different perspective and phrasing that I find useful. Some of our respondents just said this is good, others just said this is bad, or they just gave descriptions of what you should be aiming for. Part of the problem with many of these is that your success in achieving or avoiding them can be very subjective. I know what I consider a bad read (Tom Clancy and Charles Dickens are usually at the top of that list) but a lot of other readers may assess the quality of your work differently. And to make matters even more unpredictable, it may not be good/bad based on their own internal standards but good/bad based on how you compare to the competition. That, at least, is something you can probably do nothing about unless you happen to be functioning as a proofreader to somebody else applying for the same position in which case you have some moral and ethical choices to make.

And since I've just brought it up, again, proofreaders. They'll be very helpful in assisting you with providing some subjective judgments about how well you've achieved the good/bad thing. By the way, I'm not the only one harping about having proofreaders. Save me the complaining that you don't have time to get it to somebody else before you send it off for the application deadline. The reason that doesn't work with me? I'm one of those procrastinators who does this and I know from my own experience that when I claim that I don't have time to have it proofread, two things are going on. 1) I've not been as efficient as I might be about the whole procedure and 2) I know my docs are full of problems and I just don't want one of my friends to see how badly I can mess things up. Worse yet, from my experience two things are about to happen: 1) I'm not going to get to interview stage and 2) I've just showed how badly I can mess things up to somebody who might have been willing to pay me a lot of money to do a job I'd really like. At least my friends who serve as proofreaders are somewhat duty-bound to forgive me especially if my mistakes don't affect them, potential recruiters have no impetus whatsoever to do so. I've been there, I want to save you the pain of self-inflicted job application injuries.

But enough about my bad example. Let's go on to the bad examples of others.

This is bad:

includes too much minutia. Recruiters won't read the whole thing, and will miss the points where the candidate shines
too sketchy to know if the applicant actually can do the job we have
dates not specific enough to be able to add up time to meet minimum requirements of experience (including whether position was full time or part time and how many hours)

This is good:

gives me the sense that you can identify salient accomplishments/responsibilities and communicate them well
that you've researched the position and highlighted positions that are relevant
easy to read, not too long
describes the former positions in a way that makes me want to ask the candidate questions about the job
presentation that allows quick understanding and finding of needed skills and experience
clarity of presentation; easy to find the most important information like education and professional experience
good is organized, clear, easy to pick out connections to qualifications, standard fonts and layouts
clearly laid out and easy on the eye - reviewers are looking at mounds of paper. briefly but clearly lay out job duties, with numbers where appropriate, and exceptional achievements
clear, organized, and detailed yet succinct. Longer is generally better than too short and therefore missing critical information and relevant skills
organization. Find me a job that doesn't ask for organizational skills--here's your chance to shine!
Type large enough to be read by middle-aged middle-managers (I have to admit I'm charmed by this one. But I would suggest not heading for the 26 point type.)
comprehensive without being too wordy and is always proofread to the hilt (see? It's not just me)
well organized, brief/to the point, NO MISTAKES

More generic criteria:

how well it is written
credentials and experience match position being sought
easily readable, sufficient white space to be able to rest eyes, only as long as it needs to be
shows how the individual meets the criteria for the job - both minimums & preferred requirements
readable/scannable format
effectiveness in demonstrating a career and educational path leading to this position
I should be able to verify what you are telling me. Give me the necessary information to do so, please (i.e. if you say you're detail-oriented, give us something in your past experience that will prove it)
Organization, word choice, positive presentation of individual - what do you know about them from CV/resume

Note all those "clear, clear, clear" requests. I think clear may outnumber the relevant requests here! That's where the subjective can definitely creep in. Hint: Mostly I bribe my proofreaders with homemade chocolate chip cookies. If you're not a baker, I'm sure you can find something else to bribe them with that doesn't cost a fortune. Or you can make vague promises of payment in the future--I've fallen for that one a lot. Thus far I've copy-edited at least one published book, a few masters theses, and a couple of peer-reviewed journal articles and a ton of successful job applications on the strength of friendship and promises of undisclosed payments to be made at an undisclosed date. But I may be distinctly more gullible than your friends, so you can't count on that. And sorry all, I don't do it for anybody who isn't a close friend.

Oh, and an addition to that one about scannable formats. Some automated systems are set up so that the initial choices are made by an automated scanning system checking for specific keywords. These things are pretty sophisticated these days and can cope with a lot, but a few of them are running with old systems that still really only deal well with Times New Roman. Keep it simple. You won't confuse the automated systems and though I do have a certain aesthetic appreciation for interesting fonts, I'm more than happy to see TNR in job application materials. If I were interested in your desktop publishing experience or personal creativity, I'll be listing that in the KSAs.

Finally, the ones who said "this is good and this is bad" because I think the juxtaposition tells you a lot about where the lines are--what you need to do to reach a balance between these competing demands for structure and content.

A good cv is concise and descriptive, a bad one is just a list.
walks the fine line between too much and not enough information
good resume - highlighting especially relevant qualifications and down-playing weaknesses. I noticed quite a few resumes that did not highlight great experiences that would have been an asset in the position so it was difficult to separate out those qualified candidates Bad resumes - too many bells and whistles and not enough substance. A nice font color is not going to get you a job.
Good: concise, clear, organized, no weird funky fonts or bizarre layouts. Bad: typos, disorganized, attempts to be "clever," unless the job is one that requires that skill!
good is clear, concise, easy to read. A bad resume leaves you with questions. Why is there a gap in employment, why did someone leave a good job for a lesser job
Bad: Messy, typos, strange formatting, grammatical errors, lack of uniformity, irrelevant information Good: Resume or CV that is geared towards the position description

Wow! Overwhelmed yet? Two more postings on the application materials themselves--this the references--and we can move on to interviewing.

Resume part 5: what not to write

2010-03-05T08:00:00.000-08:00

The direct advice from our distinguished panel of survey respondents.

First relevancy. I can see you're oh, so surprised. So why am I being so repetitive? This can't be enforced enough. If it's not relevant to the job ad, don't include it. They don't want to see it and they're making that very, very clear. They don't want to see irrelevant publications, irrelevant courses, irrelevant jobs. This is why you have a master cv/resume from which you are culling materials for when you submit an application. This is also why you have people with a strong interest in furthering your career--even if they don't understand thing one about your career--proof-reading your resume. Occasionally you might include things that to you are very relevant indeed. But that less-informed proofer is your guard against those items that aren't so clearly relevant. You will be asking them to point those out. And when they do, you'll need to do one of two things: remove the entries or clarify the relevance. Either in the cover letter or in the description of the item within the resume. Personally? I love having somebody who I know doesn't really get what I do as a proofer. Because I know when I've written it well enough for them to understand the connect, I've written it well enough for either a computer program or a person visually skimming my app at high speed to pick up the keywords that will get me through the initial requirements screening and potentially through the ranking screening level too. And then if the readers have a little more time to spend with my stuff, it'll still be easy for them to read. Not such a bad goal.

And on we go to the other things said by our panelists.

Under the heading of TMI: Personal information

marital status (3 counts)
age (2 counts)
children (2 counts)
ages of children
hobbies (9 counts)
religious affiliation
community affiliations (2 counts)
photograph
sexual orientation
life goals
family information

What's up with the hobbies? That's a pretty high rate of people mentioning this or as one respondent said: "Stupid unrelated hobbies, like knitting or kayaking (unless the archive's collection is related to these things, of course)." I didn't think I'd seen that many people mentioning these in resumes--a few, sure--but this kind of response would suggest that either a lot of people are including it (just not on mine) or it really, really irritates the reader. Note, though, that one respondent did clarify that to allow for the inclusion of related hobbies. i.e. if you have some strong photography skills that are related to the position in question, it could be mentioned.

Oh, and by the way you know that isn't me classifying knitting as a stupid hobby because I have a lot of friends and family who knit and as such I know better than to publicly insult individuals who have with them long sturdy skinny pointed objects that could be wielded in an offensive manner against my person. Plus they also make me things like shawls and I'm not about to cut off that pipeline.

And since I'm not in a classifying frame of mind today, let me just share some of the other things they said not to do. In order of appearance.

lengthy lists of publications and classes--can make it seem as if your interests are in yourself or in teaching, not in us or our job
lengthy descriptions of professional society involvement--can make it appear that you're too outward focused
institutional training done for compliance (sexual harassment, diversity) though these can be included if related to the job (i.e. HIPAA training if applying for a position with medical collections)
any mention of a religious affiliation unless volunteer experience that directly relates to the position
graduation dates
every single job (I'll get back to this one in a moment)
any reference to non-professional interests
listings of undergraduate activities
too much experience in things other than what the job requires
listings of basic computer programs and software with which you are familiar (again, unless it's been stated in the requirements)
slang
graphics
humor
huge blocks of text

Taking a closer look at the "every single job" thing. A lot of the recruiters specified that they didn't want to see your part-time retail jobs listed. I'd amend that with "unless relevant." In our last job search, I required customer service experience. For those applicants who had done archival reference, they could use that to meet the requirement, of course. But many of our applicants did not have that but might have had some jobs over the years whether as waitstaff, counterstaff, or other retail sales. I'm guessing that some of our candidates who were weeded out for not demonstrating this experience in their resumes may indeed have had the experience, but have heard this warning so many times that they automatically left it out in this application. It all gets back to the tailoring to fit the job description and requirements, doesn't it?

There's also a part 2 to that and that's how to deal with gaps in your resume. Sometimes those non-relevant jobs are the missing pieces. So where's the balance? Not sure I've got the answer, but hopefully our respondents can make some suggestions in comments. You could consider summing up the gaps in the experiential listings with a statement in the cover letter.

A few more things. Please don't get creative in naming the sections of your resume for which we have some expectations. Calling the experience section of your resume Experience, or Related Experience, or Professional Experience, or similar is okay. Calling it "Challenges" is not. If I saw that as a section title? Even if I was willing to accept that these were jobs you'd held, I'd be hypothesizing about your success in those positions, and that hypothesis would be that you hadn't met the challenge, or hadn't met it well. Again, you don't want my brain to go there because sometimes it doesn't come back.

And last but not least, a couple of respondents pointed this out and I not only agree, but I've heard it verbally from a lot of other people. Don't put in an objectives statement. As one respondent pointed out, these are either silly or obvious. If you have to submit a cover letter? That's effectively your objectives statement and it gives you the opportunity to say it well. Whether or not you've submitted a cover letter, the fact that you're applying for a specific job (and presumably somewhere on some piece of paper or online form the connect will be made), that fact tells us you're applying for the job. Don't repeat it in the resume. Honestly, if I can't tell from the contents of your resume that your objective is the job I've got on offer, you've got vast problems far beyond anything that can be cured by an objectives statement.

Next posting is the broader look--with a few specifics tossed in--at what our respondents think makes a resume good or bad.

Resume part 4: Experienced archivist wanted

2010-03-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

What should those experience listings include? What should they look like?

I don't have a huge amount of "write it this way" type of advice but I do have some intriguing little bits that I think you'll like to see. Let's start with the things where survey respondents had a decided preference.

First: never, ever list your previous salaries/pay scales. Not a one of the recruiters wanted to see it. One of them noted "salary is always a mistake!" For the very few times I've seen it in an application, I've noticed that it was substantially less than we were planning to pay which simply gets me wondering if we could get you more cheaply. Okay, so we have union pay scales around here that won't allow me to offer you less than a certain amount, but I could see others without that restriction going for it. Do you really want us thinking that way? (Note: that's a rhetorical question.)

And now on with the strong preferences.

70% want you to define what is volunteer and what was paid. Now, not all. One respondent noted that experience is experience, paid or not. I think what we may be looking at here is an assumption--fair or not--that volunteer experience is not of the same level as paid professional experience. Okay, okay, I can hear all of those of you who have been nearly killing yourself taking on volunteer opportunities so you can build your resume, I do understand that this isn't necessarily fair. (Though it might tell you something about the types of projects some of these recruiters assign to their volunteers...) For some, I suppose it's possible that their own hiring guidelines rank volunteer experience as different from paid. If I'm paying somebody for a job, they have deliverables. If I'm not paying them, I'm less likely to get fussed at non-completed projects. How about this for a compromise: if you do list a volunteer job, do those things that were mentioned in the posting about what to include in a resume: provide quantifiable outcomes like "processed x collections of y cubic feet, here's the URLs for the finding aids". I haven't often see that sort of description on the many resumes from applicants with volunteer experience, so that may be why I sometimes wonder if volunteer posts are equivalent to paid.

Let me switch over quickly to that other kind of experience: part-time. 63% of respondents want to see if that job was full-time or part-time. It's not that they necessarily care, but, let's face it, a year's worth of part-time work is not, nor should it be comparable to a year's worth of full-time work. This matters in two ways: first is in direct comparisons between candidates. If quantity of experience is that important to the recruiter, somebody with the full-time job will get ranked over somebody with a part-time job of the same duration. The second way in which it may matter: at my institution? Technically we're not supposed to hired people in at assistant professor level without two years of full-time experience and internships or pre-degree experience doesn't count. So if you claim you've worked for a place for two years, I do need to know if that was full-time or not because it could affect my ability to hire you if an auditor got to looking.

I think one respondent phrased it nicely: "Full-time paid assumed. Indicate if otherwise."

Keep in mind that though it looks like you may be taking a hit to fessing up to a job being part-time or volunteer, that's not necessarily the case. A lot of recruiters relish seeing volunteer experience on a resume. It tells us that you have such a passion for the profession and for the work that you're willing to keep your hands in even when it may have been easier and more profitable to pick up a job waiting tables. And we get that sometimes this is the only way to accumulate experience. Some of us have had to go this route too. Plus, you've probably forgotten this point already (I don't even recall in which early post I wrote it) but if you're applying for a position appropriate to your level of experience, you're not necessarily going to lose the chance at it to candidates who are over-qualified. Some recruiters are going to be taking a closer look at the super-duper-overqualified candidates and asking some hard questions about why they'd be considering such a step career-wise.

Tied at 66% each (that's 2/3 for those of you who prefer fractions) are the styling comments of wanting bulleted lists and wanting textual descriptions. Yeah, I'm not sure what to do with that either but that's a fault in the question as I wrote it. I think more useful is a direct comparison between the 66% who wanted bulleted lists and the 27% who wanted paragraphs. I think we all like the easy to read organizational style of bulleted lists but since job titles are so rarely effective descriptors, we need some explanation, which means some heavier description. See what you can balance. Shorten what you can, use the bullets as a stylistic mechanism to provide order and arrangement to the structure of your resume. And that may be where the 66% who want textual description come in: whether you use bullets to organize the experience section of your resume or whether you use paragraphs or some sort of combination of the two, you do need to provide detail. I've seen a few resumes where the person did just list job titles and honestly, some of them told me nothing about what the person did. In some cases, I suspected they were even misleading. The short of it was that the candidate may have had some experience relevant to the job requirements, but since they didn't spell it out and I wasn't willing to assume, they didn't get credit for it. Out of the pool.

By the way, 24% said they wanted job titles or similar only. I think I really messed up on the question here but I'm still not certain how the respondents read it, because 3/4 of those people also wanted textual description. Which would seem to be contradictory to me. If one of my survey takers is willing to fill me in on this, will you? The comments button is somewhere around here.

And before I mention some closing comments provided by respondents, I'd like to look at one last preference. Not a big preference, only 44% said they prefer it, but it is something to consider. More than just year spans. It feeds into the same kind of ranking thing that the part-time/full-time thing does above. If you tell me you held the Archivist Sine Qua Non position from 2008-2009, you're essentially telling me you had that job for two full years or near to it. If I find out that you held that job from November 2008 to January 2009, I'm going to regard it as misleading on your part and I'm going to get very very skeptical about a lot of the other details in your resume which is exactly what you don't want me to do. I don't think respondents are looking for exact dates (I'd be in real trouble because I'm certain I don't know those for my own career history) but month would be nice--especially for your shorter term jobs, and by that, I mean 2 years or less. One respondent said 1 year or less. If you've had something for 8 years I'm thinking a month or two in the large scheme of things is probably not going to matter to most of us.

Some last closing comments. One respondent pointed out that style (bullets, paragraphs, whatever) preferences can differ even across a committee. This is a really good point because what it tells me and should remind you is that there's no such thing as the perfect resume. Any given resume will result in different responses, depending on who is reading it. You can try and spend tons of time trying to play the "guess the style they like" game or you can spend your time on making sure you're targeting the content they want and presenting it in a clear fashion, no matter what fashion you choose. I suspect even the people who really really want paragraph descriptions of your experience are going to like your clear, concise, succinct and informative bullet points over a candidate who has provided long paragraphs about how their summer project in rural Alaska really taught them so many things about themselves and how what they really want to do is bring meaning to people's lives and that archives can do that. (Don't smirk too hard, I've obfuscated all the details but I've seen more than a few that follow those content lines.)

One last really helpful comment from one of our respondents. Use specific, clear verbs such as: produced, managed, wrote, published, programmed, taught, etc. I'm still not sure on the past/present tense divide in describing experience--I tend to go with present for any job I still have and past for the ones I don't--but I failed to ask that of our respondents. So if you're reading this and are a recruiter and have a preference (unlike me, who doesn't care one way or another) please tell us in the comments and explain why. Thanks!

Next up, what not to include in your resume. I doubt this will be as fun as the what not to include in your cover letter, but no doubt just as opinionated. Our survey respondents are a great bunch, aren't they? I'm just overwhelmed with how responsive and sharing they were with their opinions. If you're one of those people, thank you, so much!

Resume part 3: that was the University of where?

2010-03-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, time to get specific. Since education and experience are the two elements that everybody--or almost everybody anyhow--seem to agree should be included in whatever your application materials might be, let's take a closer look at what our respondents think about how those should be structured, what they should include, that kind of thing. You know, the information you've been hoping I'll provide as I've tortured you with the rest of the blog postings.

And of course, there's no spot-on perfect way that we all agree on. You knew that was coming, didn't you? But let's see if we can get something out of what our respondents provided.

I was going to do education and experience both in one posting. In fact my original intro to this section read: Let's do education first because that's the shortie. But as I started writing it, I realized that this wasn't short at all. I once read a novel's introduction where the author admitted that her characters had taken off on her at some point and she never managed to write the novel she originally intended. I'm beginning to understand how this could happen with surveys... So much for reaching the half-way point, guess we're not there quite yet.

On to the question. Here's what I asked: In the description of the candidate's educational background, do you prefer (check all that apply): degree initials only, full degree name, list of relevant courses, undergraduate degree, undergraduate degree major/minor. And I gave the respondents three options on each: prefer, prefer not, don't care. I also allowed for additional comments.

So first with the master's degree thing. 50% said initials are good, 11% said initials weren't good and 39% didn't care. So let's take a closer look at what they said about providing the full degree name: 30% said yes, spell it out, 20% said no, don't, and 50% said don't care. Not terribly helpful that, is it?

So playing with the numbers. Of the 50% who said they prefer initials, how did they feel about spelling out the whole version?
So what does this tell you? Only a small portion of the people who prefer initials also want full versions of the degree name. Almost half don't. And a good portion either don't care or didn't care enough to answer the other question.

And from the perspective of that 30% who wanted the full degree spelled out, here's how they came down on the side of the initials:
Okay, so I may not be a statistician, but I do know enough about math to realize that the graph I just gave you is of no use whatsoever. It doesn't help. So why did I include it? Because it made me laugh--looks like the international peace symbol to me. Which is vaguely ironic given how opinionated our survey respondents apparently are on this topic and the struggle I'm having trying to find generalized advice with their answers. So let me take a different tack and concentrate on the negative: for those 20% of respondents who distinctly did NOT want you to spell out the full degree names, most did want initials.

So generally? Looks like initials alone are going to be slightly more fine than spelling out the full degree name. Which gets me to wondering what's causing this little disagreement on something you would never expect would be a potential trap for the applicant. (I certainly didn't: in retrospect I'm a little surprised that I even came up with this question since I don't much care one way or another.) Could be because those of us who are doing the screening/ranking process need to confirm that you've got the required degree but don't necessarily give you a weighted score on that? So we want to see it and move on so why waste the space? I suppose that's as good a guess as any until some of the recruiters read this and comment with what they want and why. Now you could read that bit about seeing it and moving on and interpret it to mean that where you got the degree doesn't really matter so you don't need to say it. Bad idea: one commenter noted that a candidate who'd failed to list the degree-granting institution didn't get an interview for that very reason.

Since I'm not getting anywhere fast with that one and am hoping the commenters will take over with help, let's move on to the other elements of the education chunk of your resume. And one more unhelpful chart on whether or not you should include course listings.
Lots of non-conclusions to be drawn from that, isn't there? So I went back and factored in the type of repository represented by the respondent. Sorry, no help there. Well, except that the government archivists either said include the course list or we don't care if you do, none of them said no, don't do it. I got a little more help from the comments section for this question where respondents leaned toward including courses if you're closer to entry-level and one noted that you could put relevant courses in the cover letter too, though given the other responses on what people wanted in a cover letter, I'd say this may not be your best option.

Here's my thoughts on this one. I require an archives-specific masters degree. Sometimes that can be clear with the initials and the college name. Do you have an MAS from UBC? Obviously you have an archives-specific masters degree. (By the way, thanks to our UBC colleagues for creating and continuing to use that degree title. Wish I had it.) But sometimes it isn't that clear. I've seen applicants from a few schools that have an archives track and during the course of events I discover that maybe the candidate only took one or two courses in that track. For me, it's important to know that because that candidate does not have an archives-specific masters degree. S/he has graduate archival education, sure, but not an archives degree. Oh and related to that: I'm not just discriminating against candidates from archives schools who only have one or two archives courses, I'm discriminating against everybody from any school who has only one or two archives courses.

Let me explain: the degree is required by my institution's promotion and tenure criteria. I've gone to a huge amount of effort in my library to get a "terminal archives degree" statement into the criteria--to argue that such a creature even exists. Whether you agree with me on that, this means I really can't even hire you if you don't have it--I'd be breaking our own rules for faculty qualifications. But I also go the extra mile in my ads and emphasize the degree qualifications by mentioning that I expect graduate level archival education. If you see somebody that is that precise and redundant in their requirements listing for your education? You may want to pop the course listing somewhere in there. At least for entry or early-level positions. Or offer a transcript. Because at the ranking stage, the more grad-level archives courses you can demonstrate, the better ranking you'll get.

Until that blissful day when all our schools with an archives track come up with a specific name for the degree you get when you graduate so all of us recruiters are able to tell at a glance, I think we're stuck. In the meantime, when doing the "has degree" check on applications, I generally just factor in several hours of websearching to go off and look at various degree programs to see what I can tell about the degree held by the candidate. Here's a note to all my archival instruction colleagues out there: Shape Up Your Websites. For some of you, it's impossible to tell what courses you offer, how many you offer, what I can reasonably expect that graduate to have taken. That's assuming I can even find a section on what the degree/program is/offers. If you don't do this for your students, do this for the people who are expected to hire them. Come to think of it, that's doing it for your students. Okay? You have been told.

Some other things before I close this section out, since hey, it's been just so useful thus far. This bit is hopefully a little more conclusive. Undergrad. 85% want to see it, 15% don't care. No one said don't show it. As for undergrad major/minor, 75% want to see it, 21% don't care, 4% don't want to see it. So a clear preference there.

And next, what should those experience listings include and what should they look like? Not quite as contradictory as this section, thankfully.

BTP: The serial archivist

2010-02-26T23:27:00.000-08:00

Matt asked: what to do when you’ve got two jobs back to back at the same place? How do you handle those in a resume? Depends on circumstances, as you might expect. Are both related to the job for which you are applying? Does the more recent show that you were promoted? Did one stop when the other began or was your workload simply increased?

Let’s take that last case first because I think it’s the simplest and it demonstrates a format I think might be helpful throughout. Here’s my story. When I first started working for the Utah State Archives & Records Service in January 1998, I was hired as a “Patron Services Archivist.” For most of us at the time, that meant about 80% processing, 20% reference (probably a little lower on the processing once you threw in the “other duties as assigned.”) We all took at least one day a week on the ref desk with two of our crew taking more: two of the guys put in three. One of the three-day-a-week reference guys was more or less the reference lead: not exactly a supervisor, but he’s the one who made sure the reference tracking system was always working and up to date, developed procedures, did the filing, and balanced the cash register, did training and served as the go-to guy on general reference matters. Well, he left in December of 1998 and I took over from him. So while I remained a Patron Services Archivist (and spent my two days off desk continuing processing) I had a format change in my job and a number of additional duties. Then a couple of years after that, we lost our cataloger (he passed away, tragically) and the decision was made not to replace him with a full-time cataloger but to assign those duties to someone else. Guess who?

So here’s a rough outline of how I chose to handle these changes in my resume. I decided this arrangement allowed me the minimum of confusion with the maximum of information. I never really underwent a title change, I was always a Patron Services Archivist, I just added the Cataloger title in there too. Ignore the formatting, blogs don't do so well with set tabs. Or at least not when I'm writing in them.

January 1998-October 2002 Patron Services Archivist
Utah State Archives and Records Service
Salt Lake City, Utah
• Relevant blah blah blah
Primary Reference Archivist (January 1999-October 2002)
• Ref lead responsibilities blah blah blah
Original Cataloger (April 2000-October 2002)
• Cataloging duties blah blah blah

This format/structure/organization showed that I was getting both promotions and additional duties, that ever important “demonstration of increasing responsibility” statement that you sometimes see in advertisements.

Now, let’s look at my current position. This is one where when one job title ended, the other began. And since my title is multi-layered, I chose to put the dates here first. If submitting this for a resume, I'd figure out how to make these two sets of experience match in structure (either dates first then title or vice versa). Having to switch around finding the basic information from entry to entry in a resume can be quite annoying to readers!

November 2002-present Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, Alaska

June 2007-present:
Head, Archives and Special Collections
Associate Professor of Library Science
• Relevant duties blah, blah, blah
• Promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor, July 2008
November 2002-June 2007

Reference Archivist, Assistant Professor of Library Science
Duties included:
• Relevant blah, blah, blah

I could have chosen to format these as totally separate positions and I have done so for my full CV. It would have been easy because of the clear title and level of responsibility change. However for a resume, I often choose to combine them under one locale heading but as two separate positions delineated for one primary reason: I’m far enough along in the experience to be worried about how much space little things, like employer info, will eat up and this allowed me to not have to repeat the employer’s name. An additional benefit? Combining them under the same employer also adds context. It subtly helps promote that concept that you’re growing and becoming more responsible professionally. Most recruiters reading your resume are going to pick up on the same employer, different job thing if listed separately but I think this helps make the connect easier to spot.

Now, this happens to be what works for me with the way my work experience has panned out. If you had two jobs with the same employer but with different titles and drastically different responsibilities, you could consider listing them separately. Especially if one is much more closely related to the position on offer than the other job might be. This would allow you to go further in depth into the relevant one and lesser on the non-relevant without quite so much of a side-by-side comparison between the two. And if you aren’t as worried about how long the document was getting, it might be a reasonable approach as well.

But what if there’s a gap bridged with something else? Same employer for two positions but another employer in between? I’d list them out separately. I really prefer the chronological listing personally as it makes it easier for me to spot gaps in the resume. Hey—don’t try and hide gaps this way because I’m going to find them anyhow and then I’m just going to be less than impressed at what looks like a deliberate and sloppy attempt at a cover-up on your part.

I have exceptions to that “list separately” suggestion.

If you were employed by the same org for a great length of time and somewhere in there was a less-than-one year job elsewhere, I might just go with a single listing for the one employer and note the exception on another entry. In that case, the bracketing job would come first (most recent first) with the gap represented in the date span, followed by the other filling in that gap. Just be aware that if you do have this on your resume, you might be called upon to explain it. Make sure you can avoid the worst possible construction on this (leaving to take a job which turned out to be an utter failure so you went running back home to the safety of your previous position) if you are asked about it. Oh, and you do have to list the interrupting position even if the job duties don’t relate. That could be in the resume or perhaps in the cover letter. Personally, I’d hesitate at doing so in the cover letter because it seems to highlight this non-related bridge position more than I’d want.

The other exception in this scenario would be if there was a significant difference in title or job responsibilities between the bracketing employer that would justify putting them in as separate entries. Which could look, of course, like you’d left a position and they missed you so desperately that they offered you a bunch of concessions to come back to work for them.

In general, straight chronological might be problematic for those who have non-relevant jobs in between relevant ones. You could list all positions and just provide duties detail on those that relate to the job to which you are replying. But I’d be tempted to leave the non-relevant out altogether, label the experience section “Related Professional Experience” and throw an explanation into the cover letter that makes it clear that you didn’t just sit waiting for months or years between relevant jobs. (For those of you still in school, you have a built-in excuse if you have a time gap between internships or paraprofessional but related positions: it’s assumed you were concentrating on school instead of working. How lucky are you? The rest of have to make it clear that we weren’t dealing with an involuntary incarceration.)

Again, the structure I’ve chosen is what I find simplest and easiest to comprehend when I’m first glancing through my resume and then later reading it in more depth. If yours only ends up looking confusing to you, you might want to consider reformatting to show the flow of positions better. And yes, go find your proofreaders and get their take on it too. As we continue through the blog postings on what to do or what not to do with your resume, I hope the information our survey respondents provide help you make some of these calls for how to structure your own resume. And guess what? It’s entirely possible that you might follow different structures depending on the job for which you’re applying. I’m hoping that for the moment my structure stays stable—I’d much rather amend the content in the job description section to match the position than be facing a situation in which I need to totally re-organize and reformat my resume. Remember this is pretty much my take on the way to do it. Other recruiters may feel differently. Let's hope they comment, right?

Okay, this is far too long and I’m fairly certain that had this been National Novel Writing Month I could have completed my entire monthly allotment of verbiage based on the various and assorted reports I’ve had to write this week alone, so I’m quitting for now. Plus I need to write one more report before I crash tonight so I can confer at some annoyingly early hour tomorrow morning with an employee reporting in from Stuttgart, Germany. Think long and hard before you apply for those administrative positions, everybody. Even if you love them, they’ll occasionally try to eat you alive.

Resume part 2: what to include

2010-02-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

For starters, take a look at the bullet points in the previous posting. In many of them I've given you an idea of how many people aren't all that interested in seeing them so you can decide for yourself how you think those apply to your own record. Again, the relevant point applies. If it's a grant-funded processing project, your own ability to write grants may not be something you'd include. I'll save you the trip back and summarize them in order of what our respondents generally found was most valuable:

Beginning: Degree & credentials, professional experience. Followed up by professional development/continuing education. Then publication record, presentation/teaching record, and grants obtained. Lastly, professional affiliations.

To follow up, I asked: What are the most important elements of a resume/cv? A more open-ended question, perhaps too open-ended. The benefit to asking a question is that while yes, I received some repeats of the info I provided to you in the previous posting, but this gave respondents the opportunity to emphasize or to provide a more over-arching view of it.

Here goes.
For starters, close to 1/3 used the word relevant or something that equated. But as to specific elements, 27 of the 51 respondents (53%) said some variant on "education and experience." Again, a chance to emphasize what they felt most important. Of the remaining, 16 said experience (31%). So I think you can assume that a lot of our respondents felt the need to emphasize that. Many of these and the remaining 8 elaborated further on specifics.

Here's some of what they had to say, style-wise. We'll get deeper into this in a couple of posts when we talk about what makes a good/bad resume, but here's some bits. Well-organized, easy to reading, articulate, chronologically complete.

Content-wise: detail is important. Don't just list your job title (more about that in the next post). Some respondents want to see outcomes: if you hired for a processing position, how many finding aids did you complete? How big were the collections? Many respondents liked to see development over your experience which almost requires that you go into detail as to job duties.

Here's some of the more specific comments that I think you might find useful as you develop your resume.

Depending on level applying for: Entry-level, education, basic experience (internship, volunteer), areas of interest. Mid-career: experience, projects, professional development, service.
Professional experience and (less so the further one is into one's career) educational background. Evidence of professional involvement and development efforts is nice to see, too.
Details, especially for the experience component. How big were the collections? What subject areas or types of records were they? Easy to read and well organized. Don't assume we know you have a skill, especially if it's in the announcement--write it down.
Where you have been & what you have been doing.
Education credentials, previous experience, publications, committee work
The specific job duties performed. It's how we tell what qualifications and experience they really have and how that will translate to our job.
Work experience and education are the two most important elements to me. Though other elements could be elevated in importance depending on the position. For example, a director would need good experience in writing grants or a reference librarian may want to demonstrate instructional experience.
Practical experience; I want to see what they've done themselves that prepares them to do the requirements listed for the job. If there are huge gaps in employment I would like to see them acknowledged and some explanation given.
work experience and education with demonstrated commitment to professional development (e.g. attending conference, presentations, etc.)
What academic qualifications and professional experiences qualify the person for this particular job?

Next up? A closer look at the experience and education components: what the recruiters want to see. Can you believe we're half-way through my proposed set of postings? We'll see about that since the first half is already about 5 posts longer than I anticipated. Thanks for sticking with me so far.

Resume part 1: volume and arrangement notes

2010-02-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, let's get this one thing out of the way before we go anywhere else. This is where we really seem to disagree with the standard resume manuals. I said: "how long should a resume be?" And provided the options of 1 page, 1-2 pages, 3 pages or less, 3-5 pages, doesn't matter as long as it's all relevant, shorter is better, and other. Respondents could choose more than one response. Not a single one of them--not one!--chose 1 page. Okay, so a lot of them went for the shorter options (not so many on the 3-5 page option) and a lot also noted that shorter is better, but a large percentage (58%) also said that it doesn't matter, as long as it's all relevant.

I think we can conclude a few things. Like cover letters, don't include the extraneous (unless it isn't extraneous and you're about to explain why in your cover letter.) Keep it as short as possible. The resume length should probably be proportional to the job level: i.e. entry-level is closer to one page, higher up proceeds accordingly. Corporate types didn't lean toward shorter. The 1-2 page types were evenly divided between state/local government and academic institutions, with a couple of private/non-profits thrown in. Take what you will from that.

Now that we've got that taken care of, on to the arrangement. Now this is a little hard to do since--hey, I'm not a statistician--I really didn't do a good job on structuring the options. I basically listed a bunch of typical elements of a resume and asked respondents to put them in order. It's not that I came up with unusable data, it's more that I have to do some more work in interpreting it. But I'll try and keep that invisible to you.

First? 72% of respondents wanted to see your degree and credentials first. I found this one kind of interesting, myself, because prior to this I would have assumed that if the job were above entry level, the readers would be more interested in my experience than in my degree. But that's because I wasn't thinking of the first few reads being in the nature of check-off lists. But now that I'm doing the reading? I want to see the degree (which I require) and check it off so I can move on and start with the assessment/ranking of the resume. Oh, and those that didn't put it first? Another 12% put it in second place and 10% put it in third place. That's 95% (including rounding of a few decimals) of respondents wanting it somewhere very close to the beginning.

Let's take a moment out to consider what else might go in first place. The vast majority of those who didn't put the degree/credentials first? They put professional experience in first place. Some respondents put both interchangeably.

As you've probably noticed, I generally don't pay a lot of attention to survey results that get only one response. Unless I happen to agree with them. However, I'd like to take a closer look at one person's "other" response because I think it bears some investigation. What that person asked for was a summary list of skills/experience as extracted from the positions list and that individual wanted that first thing. I also know that a "relevant skills" listing is what a lot of resume manuals and career guidance types are advising these days. But I've talked to a lot of archival hiring types (myself included--yes, I talk to myself all the time) who detest this practice. It takes up a lot of valuable real estate on the front page of the resume and, more to the point, isn't attached to any sort of proof. When I'm past the initial check off list and on to the scoring piece? It doesn't help me to see a "relevant skills" list that doesn't tell me how long you did this task, how often, at what level.

Balancing act, again, and I really do appreciate the way our anonymous respondent phrased this because s/he nailed it. Anon said: "as extracted from." Read this to mean that this is not living out on its own without any connect to the experiential section of the resume. And I think that's probably why those of us who hate these feel that way--sure, you say you've got digitization experience but unless it's attached to Job A from Date A to Date B (or Course B or so forth) I'm not going to give you credit for it. I've seen a lot of these lists. And with few exceptions, I've not seen anything else in the resume to substantiate the contents of these lists. If you're going to follow this route, you must, sadly, get repetitive. The skills will be effectively listed in two place: in the summary, and in the appropriate section of the resume that documents the experience with job or course titles, date spans, job or course content descriptions. If you're going to spend the extraction time, make it good, make it connect. And consider doing it in the cover letter since a lot of you will be doing it there anyhow. If you don't submit a cover letter, then maybe doing it in the resume isn't such a bad idea.

Since I structured my question badly, let me list the elements I provided and give you some views of where people wanted them more generally in the arrangement. Not everybody wanted them in these orders, so I'll provide the percentages to help where I can.

Degrees and credentials: beginning--1st, 2nd, or 3rd place. 95%.
Professional experience: beginning--1st or 2nd place: 95%.
Professional development/continuing ed: a semi-bell curve there. I'll give you the diagram on this one so you can see what I mean. That column to the left is the number of respondents who gave that answer.

Publication record: looks similar to the professional development/continuing ed on, skewing more heavily to the back of resume. Only 12% wanted it toward the beginning.
Presentation/teaching record: about the same as publication record, but picking up one more person who didn't care to see it (10%). Oh, and by the way, for the individuals who wanted to see it toward the beginning? Not so many academic types: this skewed more to the private non-profit or corporate types. Same for the publication record, by the way. I'm not sure what that means, but I do find it intriguing. If anybody has an explanation, let's hear it.
Professional affiliations: 96% included it, but none in the first or second slot. 9% put it in slot 3 and a full 1/3 wanted it toward the end. 7% didn't care about it.
Related experience (professional or otherwise): 74% wanted it in the beginning, the vast majority of those wanted it at the end of the beginning (secondary to direct professional experience).
Grants obtained: toward the end. Here's the visual.
I'd also like to note that one respondent clarified that simply working on a grant project didn't count: you had to be the author, manager, or director of the grant. That could probably be clarified by entitling that section something like "grants obtained" or "grants managed" or similar.
Other: no real numbers to play with here, but some comments that may prove useful. Computer skills (though many as you'll see in later posts do not agree), languages along with degree of facility, and standards. Again, adding in the caveat: if relevant. Don't list elements if they're not requested and you're not absolutely certain they're relevant. For example, I receive a lot of resumes that list language skills. I haven't asked for it and in our case, I'm going to assume--perhaps mistakenly and that's a reasonable objection--that it means you didn't do your homework and/or you didn't tailor your application because if you've looked at our collections list at all, it should be obvious that most of the materials we have are in English. I'm a little more willing to forgive people who list languages that could reasonably be assumed to be relevant to my part of the globe since I'm not totally insane and don't expect homework at the application level to include reading 3/4 of our finding aids which often don't mention language anyhow, but it's something to keep in mind. You're understandably proud of your reading knowledge of obscure Portuguese dialects, but best case scenario is that I ignore it, worst case scenario is that I start wondering why you're applying for my job since it's obviously not something matched to your interests or skills.

Next step, what should a resume include?

Cover letter part 3: Good or bad, what makes it so?

2010-02-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

Before I get into the details of the good/bad traits of a good/bad cover letter, I want to share with you one of the answers I got to this question. I think it's the final justification on why producing a good cover letter should matter to you.

The cover letter is the ultimate "writing sample."

Even if they haven't asked for a writing sample, they're going to be judging this with that in mind. And chances are, somewhere in one of the screening or ranking documents or somewhere along the way, you're being judged on the quality of your cover letter and it will have an effect on your passage through the process. Thank you my anonymous survey responder, your succinct and concise explanation did a much better job of explaining than I could. On to the data.

Now this was interesting. 81% of the respondents answered this question even though I made it totally open-ended which meant they'd need to spend some time, they couldn't just choose from pre-written responses. They really do want to share this with you.

The other interesting thing about the responses to this question is that despite the impression you got from the previous blog post on what not to do, these are almost universally positive. Some of them did address the bad side, but almost all of them addressed the good side. So they've not been burned out which is good news for the applicant as it's hard to please a cranky recruiter.

I'll compile for you. In this case, I'm not sure percentages and numbers really matter. Some of these could be a little nebulous like "something that will catch my attention," but I think most of them are not so much. These are things that even if you can't gauge your own writing on, one of your proofreaders (yes, I said "one of" suggesting more than one is good) could probably assist. These are the basic traits of a good cover letter, all of which speak to your communication ability--and that's something a bunch of survey respondents specifically stated. (Note: if you don't see why communication ability matters, let me know please. I didn't think I needed to go there but maybe I do.)

In tone and style: Professional and to the point. Easy to read, well-written, with good grammar and punctuation.(Note: good grammar and punctuation? Shows attention to detail, generally considered a good thing in our profession.) Congenial, shows personal/professional writing style without being overly informal (that doesn't mean informal,) displays enthusiasm and some personality, well-organized, fact-checked, and polite. Simple. Concise, possibly even brief. Provides quick access to pertinent information. Reads like a well-written piece of expository writing - had a introduction (with engaging topic sentence), support paragraphs, and effective summation. Addressed correctly. Polite.

In content: Specific, relevant, and tailored to the position for which you are applying. Touches exactly upon the qualities that we desire, e.g. a project archivist cover letter should mention things like project management skills, benchmarks, etc. (there were several variants on this phrasing). Makes a good case as to why the individual is a good candidate. Exhibits research skills (often in finding out about the institution), explains concisely how the applicant is a match for the position even if the resume doesn't match exactly, and tells how applicant can use their experience to the institution's advantage. States what you're applying for. Expresses a desire to advance professionally. Draws direct connections to the open position, might even acknowledge areas where the match isn't perfect and establishes the candidates interest in the specific job.

Oh and for those hard copy apps? Make sure you use good quality paper.

As for the traits of a bad cover letter, you can basically flip the above. A few respondents had some additional points that I think really are worth mentioning and some explanations/clarifications about the flip side. So quickly:

in every recruitment I've done, there have been applications from individuals who were obviously just applying for every available job at my institution. Those people clearly didn't understand the nature of the job (hence the emphasis on tailored applications)
nebulous terms like "works well with others" and "positive spirit"
forgettable, impersonal, generic, and boring
presumes on existing relationships
odd fonts, colors, strange paper, food stains (for some reason this one really charms me though certainly I wouldn't be so amused if such a paper app landed on my desk)
poor continuity and flow
too general--could be for any archives job
flip of the expressing desire to advance professionally: not to the extent that their willingness to perform entry level work or accept supervision is in doubt
obviously unqualified applicant stretching to get an interview because s/he is desperate for a job
explains to me why you want the job even though you know you are not qualified for it (remember my talking about how tricky it is to convince the recruiter that something else substitutes just fine for one of the requireds that you don't have? This is what happens when it doesn't work.)

Oh, and most who mentioned it, preferred prose to bullet points. Bullets were okay by some people, but they had to be judiciously used. Might be best to avoid, or use only sparingly.

You ready for it? Let's kick into resumes next.

BTP: The wild west is where I wanna be

2010-02-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

(Apologies to Tom Lehrer. I couldn't resist.)

So this was Amber's question in a comment on the last entry: I've always thought that if you're applying to a job in another part of the country you SHOULD mention that you want to live there in the cover letter, so that the hiring agent knows you're not just blanket applying to every archival job in the world. Not the case?

Before I start to get into this, I'm not addressing those of you who cannot be flexible in location. You've got enough limitations on your job search without worrying about this one.

So what about the location affinity statements in a cover letter? Especially when your return address is somewhere else? In or out?

Mention it? Okay. Make generic statements about how people there are better workers than people anywhere else? No. (It figures that somebody would pick up on one of the only two entries I added to that list of no go items in the cover letter. I'm still not telling what the other one is.) Balance it? Yes. As I noted in the previous posting, you need to make sure that the reader doesn't walk away from reading your cover letter with the impression that the only reason you're applying is because you want to live there. I've seen a few 3 paragraph (1 page) cover letters where the applicant dedicated a full paragraph to their interest in our locale. Too much? Yes. Especially since that paragraph could have been used to put in some details they missed. Especially since in every one of those cases the candidate failed to provide some other information which was very important to me. So that's the answer that I think is generally applicable. Balance.

Now here's my own take on this one. To be far more blunt than I should be. If you apply for a job I have, I'm going to work from the assumption that you're okay with the location. You don't need to state it. I don't care if this is your dream city. That doesn't tell me anything substantive about your potential job performance. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some potential effect, I'm saying that it doesn't have enough to catch my attention at this time. Saying that isn't going to get you past my requirements checkoff list, isn't going to get you any bonus points on the ranking sheet which is limited to the requirements and preferreds, and I don't include "must be willing to live in Anchorage" in my requirements listing in the job ad. So it does zero for you at the first two steps in the process. The earliest you'd really need to say this to me, with the process my institution follows, is at an interview when I ask you why you want this job at this place. Stating it in your cover letter is simply a waste of real estate for me. I'm not going to slap you for saying it in a cover letter, I'm not that awful, but it really doesn't enter into my calculations. So why not use that space to talk about something more important?

And it might not enter into calculations even later. If I had two absolutely perfect, tied in a dead heat candidates, location would matter only for the candidate who failed to give me any interest or gave me the idea that they weren't so thrilled with moving here. If both seemed positive about the location? I'm not going to give the job to the person who wants the place more. There's going to be some other difference between the two that is more important to me. Which candidate has an edge with the other employees in the department? Which candidate seems more flexible on working hours? Which candidate has better inter-personal skills? Which candidate is willing to cat-sit? (Okay, really really kidding. And I can prove it: my last two hires are severely allergic to cats.)

Subject knowledge is altogether different. If the repository you're applying at has a geographical focus to collections and you have some history/experience/knowledge that gives you a leg up on learning collections there, that is completely fair and a good thing to include in a cover letter and gives you a great reason to express why you want to get back to that area.

Yes, I'd like to know that our part of the world isn't going to send you screaming back to civilization (whatever you define that as) in three months. But if you're taking the time to apply for an open position at my place? I don't think it's out of line for me to assume that you're willing to live here. But what I want to know, what I need to know from your cover letter is that you'll be able to do our job and that you want our job. The location is only the tiniest proportion of it for me. KSAs and affinity for the duties of the job, passion for the mission, that's all far more important to me. Make sure that's what's in your cover letter first. If you still have space, then you can mention the location.

And again, personally? I'm okay with you applying all over the country although blanketing, not so much. I'm better than okay, I prefer it (though I don't advise sharing your job search exploits that with recruiters). I've done it myself (not the blanketing). The job has always been more important to me than the location.

Here's my thoughts on this from the other side of the table. You see, there is a part of the country I really, really, really want to live and work in. I like many of the local institutions. But even with saying something little in the cover letter--well balanced with everything else--I've never had an interview in the multiple times I've applied to jobs in that place. My normal interview to application ratio? About 4 interviews for every 5 applications. This is about the only part of the country where I can't get an interview. So my results on this place are totally out of whack with my normal results. Despite saying that I'd like to be there. So I'm not seeing any evidence from the applicant side that this is worth my time to say.

Oh, by the way, don't take that interview ratio as some sort of superpower on my part. I'm just extraordinarily picky about the jobs I apply for and I rarely apply for something that I'm not completely qualified to do or pretty close. So that cuts down on the amount of applications I've done. And my job offer to interview ratio isn't quite as good.

At any rate, this is one of those subjects I've got a fairly firm opinion on. Let me sum up: you can tell me you like my area of the country if you want, I won't downgrade you for it (unless it comes at the expense of something I actually want and which is missing), but I'm probably going to ignore it. If you're out there reading this and you're a recruiter and you need to hear that an applicant wants your region, let's hear what they should say, how they should say, and when they should say it. And why. Thanks Amber, for a really good question that made me sit back and think about something I haven't spent a lot of time pondering. Let's hope we get some more feedback.

Cover letter part 2: what not to write

2010-02-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

Sorry, this has the potential to be really negative. But the respondents are sharing this because they want to make sure you don't misstep. This is what some of them consider missteps and they have seen them. Most likely more than once. Possibly often. Consider these learning experiences. This time I'm not going to paraphrase, just make some judicious edits for clarity and spelling. This is what recruiters are saying. Oh, and if you start to recognize yourself? You probably aren't--as a direct quote, I mean. You may still be guilty of it but so are a bunch of other people. I've seen most of these multiple times myself and I'm not the one who submitted them. I've only put two in, and I'm not telling which ones.

Under the heading of This Is Repetitious (and these comments are repetitious but I included them all so you can see how badly they dislike these items. Who knew there were so many synonyms for reiterative? Aside from Roget, anyhow):

don't just reiterate resume
full history as presented in resume
a regurgitation of the resume
A restatement of what is in the resume
a repeat of the application/resume
Should not simply rehash your resume
Re-listing what's in the resume
a straight rephrasing of the resume
Rehashing the exact job description (well, that's a little different)
A detailed summary of the contents of the CV or resume
information taken from the resume that has not been elaborated on
Redundant information
Redundant information - information already included in the CV or résumé
a restatement of all the experience on a resume
information that could be learned elsewhere
laundry list of duties or jobs
Recitation of what's already in resume/CV
Word for word copy of the position description
duplication of information in the resume

Under the heading of Thanks, Don't Mention It, No Really:

Personal information (9 counts)
personal life
irrelevant or extraneous information (8 counts)
hobbies (4 counts)
the applicant's life history
a list of courses taken (2 counts, although 1 noted entry-level are exceptions and I'd also amend it by saying that if I'm demanding graduate level archival training, you've got to give me something, though I'd prefer it in the resume to cover letter)
qualifications not sought or needed from applicant
age
religious affiliation (2 counts)
Life experiences and interests not directly related to the requirements
A long explanation of why applicant is leaving present job and how past jobs have wronged him
Irrelevant skills or hobbies such as "in my spare time I like to garden" or "I'm really great at organizing social functions"
non-applicable information for the specific position
non-work information
a photograph of the candidate
detail about interview availability (okay, this is a toughie since two of our respondents specifically asked for interview availability, but maybe the compromise is not to be too specific.)
marital status (2 counts)
sexual orientation
basic job history (that could also go under repetitious)
anything too terribly personal
excessive personal information (2 counts)
clubs to which you belong
children

Under the heading of Flat-Out Mistakes:

the name of the wrong position
contradictory information
Typos (5 counts)
Misspelling my name or the name of the institution
Grammatical errors (5 counts)
unfinished sentences
spelling errors (3 counts)
another hiring institution's name in lieu of the one to which the applicant applied

Under the heading of It's All A Matter Of Style:

don't gush about wanting the job or how good a fit you are
Obvious that it has been cut/pasted from multiple applications, previous cover letters
Obvious generic passages, e.g. detailed descriptions of processing projects when the job is for reference. (I could have written that one, but I didn't.)
Too many words--too wordy (is anybody else seeing the irony in this one? See, recruiters aren't perfect either)
Rambling
Jargon
empty phrases
inappropriate informality
Lengthy information
cookie-cutter letter
long ramblings of "me" and "I" statements
Should not be too broad or too detailed
informal language
acronyms that are not initially spelled out
slang
humor (2 counts, though the second one was "attempts at")

Under the heading of Where Angels Fear To Tread:

emotional pleading
ask to be directed to a job with duties the advertised one does not include
name dropping
relaying of personal hardships
use this job as stepping stone in career ladder
superfluous bull (sorry, that's a direct quote)
mention of other positions applied for
fluff
adverse comments about applicant's current/former employer
really short letters that basically say "I like archiving"
demanding letters that say "I'm the best candidate" or "you should hire me" and "I'll call you next week if I don't hear from you" (note: this becomes a bigger faux pas when the candidate doesn't call next week. Know what? I've heard this several times, I've never received the follow-up call.)
excessive admiration for the potential employing institution
flattery
desperation
statements like "I've always wanted to work in that part of the country because people there have a better work ethic than where I am now"
explanations of jobless circumstances
hype
long drawn out explanations of why we should hire them even though they do not meet the requirements
Why, or how badly, the applicant needs the job
offers, like 'I will buy you a cup of coffee'
'I have always dreamed of living in ____'
Aspirational nonsense, e.g. "I've always wanted to hold history in my hands."
Don't tell me about your personal friendship with a member of our legislature, or with a highly placed state executive, please. It will not help your application, and it may make me wonder why you feel it should do so.
Desperation, no matter how desperate.

Now that you've read those, are you freaked? Are you saying "I can't believe people do that sort of thing?" Wonderful. That's exactly what I want to hear from you. If you're saying "What's wrong with that?" let's start the conversation. I don't necessarily follow these exactly myself, but let's figure out why these fall under the listing of "what not to include" for so many of our recruiters. Do you have an argument as to why we should vote one or some of these off the list? Why they should be acceptable? Let's hear it. Or if you think that one of these could do with some further explanation (why is humor so bad anyhow) and you have some insight, share, comment.

In general, aside from the interview availability where we've got a couple of people asking for it and at least one saying no, these fall into two categories: don't do it, or the balancing act. Obviously some of these could be survivable in moderation but if you're unsure if you've crossed the line, again, hit up the proofreader. If you want, hand them this list and say "make sure I haven't done any of these, okay?"

Next up on Monday: more of a summary of cover letters that will hopefully tie some of this together. What makes good ones good, what makes bad ones bad.

Cover letter part 1: the long and the short of it

2010-02-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

Part 1 will be about the length of a cover letter, what it should have. Part 2, coming shortly, will be about what a cover letter shouldn't have. Part 3 will be about what makes a good one good and what makes a bad one bad.

First assumption I'm going to make here: You ARE tailoring each cover letter to each application. Go ahead and create that master cover letter with boilerplate language or with the fill-in-the-blank MadLibs look, but you must modify. That's not just me. I heard it from the survey respondents, I hear from recruiting colleagues all of the time. Job ads are kind of like snowflakes (I can hear my high school writing teacher howling right now) in that a lot of them may appear alike, but there's going to be differences, even if subtle. Even if it's the same job a short time down the line, do you want to take the chance that some reader with a spectacular memory will notice that your two cover letters are word-for-word the same? More importantly, if you didn't get the job the first time, what are the chances that repeating your exact efforts are going to work the second?

Let's dig in.

The length of the cover letter. Apparently? Size matters. At least to most of the respondents.

I also offered "the shorter the better" as an option and a few people chose that, mostly in tandem with other size preferences.

The interesting thing about these results are that I put in some vague statements (shorter is better, any size if all relevant) and people still chose specific lengths. Nobody sent me a comment saying that they needed more choices: that they preferred 5 page letters, for example. Nobody argued with the answers they had to choose from. That hit for 3 pages or less? 1 respondent only. I think you can take from this that 1-2 pages is acceptable but the closer you can get to 1 page, the more likely you'll hit the mark.

So short and succinct. But not too short, mind you. Again, I told survey takers to assume you've put your contact information on it. This probably isn't a safe assumption--I've received a number of cover letters submitted that don't have any header information on them at all or have only a name. If the cover letter manual you read between the last post and this one says you don't have to put that information in? It's wrong. I've also received cover letters that essentially said: "I'm applying for X job at Y institution." And nothing else. We get our share of apps that are from people who are clearly just applying for anything open in the system whether or not they're remotely qualified for the position, but some of these came from people who were actually seeking the position in question. Really, really not good. As for contact information: provide your name, address, phone, email. One of the survey respondents has obviously been bit a few times by cover letters that only have a signature at the end and no other mention of the name. (Sounds like s/he dropped a few bunches of papers and had to gather them together too.)

So what does my panel of experts say on what a cover letter should include? Here we go...

For the first point, I'll quote one of my experts. "Evidence that the candidate has read the job description carefully." This is pretty broad, I'll agree. The first way to demonstrate this? Not only mention the position by title, get the name right. If they're advertising for a User Services Archivist, don't call it a Reference Archivist. Why? If you don't prove that you've read the job ad and read it closely, you're not going to convince your recruiters that you're interested in the position. We all want to hire somebody who really wants the position we have on offer, as well as somebody qualified to do it. Getting somebody like that means the employee is more motivated in the position, they tend to do a better job, all things that make supervisors' and coworkers' jobs easier.

According to several panelists, they want to know where you saw the ad too. And in the spirit of keeping things short, it nicely combines with the previous requirement into one sentence for your introductory paragraph along the lines of "I'm applying for the position of XYZ as advertised in PQR." Why mention this? Time savings for the recruiter. If none of my qualified candidates picked up the ad from LibJobs, well maybe I don't need to bother to advertise there. If the subject-targeted listservs are generating the best candidates, maybe I need to send the ads out to those sooner with occasional reminders. Or if I'm paying for the ad in one of the for-pay venues and I'm not getting responses from there, maybe I can save that money. Or better, if somebody has reposted my ad to another place and I get a lot of good candidates from that source, I'll be sure to post directly to it next time. Not everybody cares about this, but enough do to make it worth the 3 or 4 words you need to dedicate to it.

Experience, experience, experience. Every single respondent had some sort of riff on this topic. Not a rehashing of your resume which they'll also look at, but a summary. Mind you, that's a summary of experience as it relates to the job duties. Connect each element clearly to the job responsibilities and requirements if you're not using the exact phrasing that the job ad used. (Though do try to use the keywords as they appear in the posting, okay?) In your summary, either provide examples or reference the explanation provided in your resume--and by directly pointing to it. "I have three years of progressively responsible reference experience with XYZ Archives, as detailed in the enclosed resume." Keep it short. Not every respondent emphasized that, but enough did. They were using words like summary, brief, pithy (I love that word), short, overview, relevant, relevant, relevant.

The cover letter is also the place to explain why the readers should pass you even though you may not have one of the requirements. This is tricky. As one respondent put it: "If the candidate does not meet any of the stated job requirements, there MUST be a VERY persuasive argument for alternate relevant experience." Sometimes the institution is stuck and can't waive one type of degree for another or a certain length of documented paid full-time experience can't be made up of unpaid part-time work. But if you can't make the argument and you aren't qualified according to their standards, you're probably not going to make it past that first screening. Take a shot at it, but make it a good one. Don't ignore it in hopes that nobody will notice. I'm not kidding about the check-off list that a bunch of institutions use.

Also, if there's no apparent direct correlation between your resume information and the requirement, this is your chance to draw that connect or, perhaps, to reinforce it. I had a friend who a few years back was able to get a reference job (library) based on her argument that her cataloging experience gave her the ability to understand the search process and how to make the most of it. Connects like that are really important. In our last position opening, I didn't require archival reference experience (I think it was a preferred) but I did require customer service experience. I was willing to take retail, waitstaff, anything that showed the candidate got the public service side of things. A few candidates did an excellent job of telling me about their part-time retail college job and why that was pertinent. Okay, so I gave them the initial connect by stating the customer service requirement, but those who demonstrated that they understood why it mattered? They got a lot further along in the process. They reinforced the relationship between the job requirements, the job duties, and that hard-to-judge "is this person suited to this type of job" query.

Provide other relevant experience or knowledge that may or may not be covered in the resume. Like past experience that may not be in the archival field that still relates (note customer service example in the previous paragraph). Relevant is important here: a reading knowledge of a language may or may not be relevant. If it's in the job ad? Obviously it's relevant. If not? Maybe you should go take a quick peek at the institution's collection policy or collections list: do they have anything or are they trying to collect materials in that language? If not, probably not a priority for the cover letter. Especially if leaving it out can help you condense down to a page.

A few other things. Do some homework on the institution, make it show. That's true for every step of the way, by the way. If you can demonstrate a feel for the types of materials the institution collects, the mission of the organization, so on, that's a good thing. Survey respondents--when they defined what would exhibit understanding of the institution--pointed at holdings and mission. Keeping it short, of course. I was amused by one respondent who answered "Appear as if you have done some research on the place or job." Note s/he didn't say do homework, just appear to have done homework. You don't want to go too far, too early, since I'd be worried about somebody who quoted the minutiae of our commercial use fee policy in a cover letter, but keeping in mind the keeping it short goal should help you avoid the worst excesses.

Express why you're interested in the position. Now this can get tricky too. You don't want to emphasize one piece of it over the others. I had this discussion not too long ago with a jobseeker who wanted to know how to make it clear to places he was applying that he really, really wanted to live in that part of the country. He wasn't just applying because of the locale, but the locale was an attractor. The problem is if you tell me "I really, really want to move to Alaska" and focus too much on that, I'm going to start wondering if the reason you want my job is because you want somebody to pay your way here (we offer moving allowances) and a few months of salary and you're going to dump me for some other local job soon after you get here. It's a balance. I also don't want to waste my time and our travel budget interviewing the otherwise-perfect candidate because they really just aren't quite ready to move away from home yet so a statement of location affinity isn't a bad thing. But if you put it in? What will balance it out is a clear and effective statement of why you want that job, not just the locale. Something about the duties, the challenges, the responsibilities.

But don't tell me (or just tell me) why the job is perfect for you, tell me why you're perfect for the job. What will you bring to my department that's you-specific and should make a difference in my calculations? Careful here, you want to do this without slamming the competition or making a statement that can't be supported by evidence. I had a candidate one time who told me something like "I'm better for this job than all the other candidates because I have thus-and-such qualification." And my first thought was "how do you know any of the other candidates don't have that?" and my second thought was "wait a moment, 2/3 of the candidates have that," and my third thought was "I don't have that qualification so is this candidate slamming me?" But back to how to do this. Look over the job duties and requirements again. Do you have a special ability in one of them? A combination of some of them that would make you stand out from the crowd in some way? Some sort of compliment you received on a review that you could quote?

Some other points mentioned by survey respondents. Show some personality. (Not too much, because hey, only one respondent said that.) Explain any gaps in your resume. Provide information as to when you might be available to interview. You don't have to provide an exact time and date and if you'll be available at their pleasure, go ahead and tell them that. If you can't take phone calls at certain times of day, let them know when it would be good to call. Make sure you put in your time zone. (Please, begs the Alaskan of any Louisiana, Iowa, or South Dakota applicants, save me the lookup. I'm good with both coasts and offshore, but I occasionally misstep in the middle). If you have a preference for method of contact, let them know what it is. Provide an alternate in case that doesn't work for them. Make it as easy as possible for them to contact you when they're ready to do so.

Ready for what not to put in? That's the next post.

BTP: Curriculum Vitae

2010-02-16T13:43:00.000-08:00

I'm going to get into what should or shouldn't be in a resume/cv later--at length, trust me. But for the moment, we've had a comment from Pearl asking for clarification about what a CV is--she'd basically been told a CV is a resume with some personal info (DOB, gender, race) added. Pearl? I'm sorry. Somebody has led you astray.

First bit of clarification. So far as I've been told, anybody hiring in the US can't ask those questions (gender, age, ethnicity and many others including marital status and so forth). International may be different. So don't ever provide those, okay? And worry about any recruiters in the US who ask for those things. I'll get more into specifics about what to include/what not to include on a resume or CV in a professional job search in later postings.

A CV differs significantly from a resume--mostly in length, usually in relevance to the job at hand. A resume is usually created for purposes of job searching or similar, a CV is more like a personal professional history which can also be used for purposes of job searching or moving on up the ranks. And gender, race and age should be irrelevant there, too. My CV? It's 11 pages right now after about 15 years in the biz, and that's actually low compared to some I've seen. If I'd do my job descriptions right, it would be longer. My average resume that I send out for professional jobs is between 2-4 pages.

What Pearl also said was that all her professional experience is listed on her resume. Fair point. Your professional employment history will probably be included, fully, in your resume. Again, I'll get into the basics of what a resume should have in it in extravagant levels of detail later. But the most important part you need to remember at this point is relevancy. Relevant experience, education, and so forth. But you might not include your full publication record, all of your continuing ed, and so forth. And that's the fundamental difference between a Curriculum Vita and a resume. The CV is/should be significantly more extensive and may contain information that is not directly relevant to the job for which you are applying. It's your entire professional history.

Would it help to have an example? I'm not going to subject you to the 11 page version of my master CV (only I get to see that one anyhow). Here's the sections my master CV contains:

Education and credentials (college, grad & CA, current faculty rank & tenure)
Professional experience (including descriptions of jobs and dates and internships which are labeled as such)
Consultancy work (paid and unpaid)
Workshops and instruction (all of the ones I've created and taught)
Papers/panels/presentations (all of the ones I've done)
Publications list (including this blog)
Exhibits curated
Grants obtained & completed
Continuing education (these are the classes & training I've taken)
Professional affiliations and service (every SAA post I've ever held, all my professional org memberships, etc)
University service (every committee I've ever served on)

It might help to know that CVs are generally required for academic institutions that are hiring archivists into a faculty rank system. Obviously I'm not going to include all of this in a resume if I were to apply for, say, a non-faculty position in another academic archives or in a state government post: they certainly wouldn't care about my publication or presentation record unless it pertained directly to the job at hand. They may not even care about the full job description--just the bits that are relevant (there's that word again) to the open position. And they probably are not going to care about my university service, unless the position has a lot of committee memberships associated and then they might want to see this as proof of my ability to serve on committees. Another academic position where it may be tenure track or equivalent, where there is an obligation for a service component in the job, these types of things might go in. They also might go in if I'm trying to get hired above the most basic rank, if I'm arguing that I need to be hired as a full professor based on my record rather than as an assistant. Or so on.

This all appears on my master cv because at my job I have to turn in my CV once a year to prove I'm still doing my responsibilities, and all of this relates directly to my workload and job description. Yes, even the grants, the consultancies, the exhibits. And I'll use the full version to justify my application for promotion when I go up for full professor in a few years (haven't decided exactly when, yet.)

I hope that helps define what a CV is, or is not. And I hope this helps justify why I'm suggesting you keep a master cv. You can increase, substantially, the speed at which you can respond to a job advert when you don't have to go looking through paperwork or pondering "when was that appraisal workshop?" for every different job advert you see. Copy/paste functions are a very nice thing. I'm even pondering creating a second master cv with every job I've ever had--even the non-professional. Maybe that two years I spent working part-time in Idaho transcribing the 1900 census records will come in handy in a job app some day.

Generic--yet still important--advice

2010-02-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

When I originally mentioned that I was thinking about doing a workshop/something on this topic I heard from a few people who were interested in taking such a thing. And what almost all of them said was: "I'd do it, but don't give me the feel-good listen-to-yourself annoying pep talk stuff" that apparently was the primary content of previous career counseling sessions they'd had. I so get that--I'm not a real fan either. If you do need that kind of thing, let me know and I'll add a post down the line on--probably pointing you to places you can get that kind of help because I suspect I'm probably pretty bad at providing it.

But back to the theme here. Those potential audience members also said: "don't give me the stuff I can get out of generic job search manuals."

As a result, when I sent out my call for survey takers, one of the things I more or less said was that I was trying to target this toward professional archival positions specifically and as such I wasn't looking for more generic advice and I was going to assume that the audience for advice had done some of the basics like reading the job search manuals. And that they knew that every page of every document should be sequentially numbered and have contact info, and shouldn't have typos, etc.

Well. I won't soften it for you, or not much anyhow. What I'm hearing from the recruiters who responded to that? And tellingly, even though I hadn't asked them to respond to that? And from a few who didn't go on to fill out the survey? They think it needs to be said. They think that too many of their applicants haven't read the manuals, haven't proofread their application materials, haven't figured out the basics. Some of them? They're kind of unhappy about it. I don't want to say angry or insulted, because that's an overstatement, but maybe it could end up that way. Certainly that's not fair to you, the dedicated conscientious applicant who has done the full thing correctly, but for those of you who haven't, just, you know, fair warning.

I've hesitated about writing this post. I decided to include it for a couple of reasons. A portion of the audience who has bothered to search out this blog has most likely already taken care of all of these basics, so this is just annoying to you. Sorry, skip ahead if you like. But do so judiciously. Because there's two parts to this and 1 is that you do need to read those manuals but 2 is that sometimes the manuals are wrong or rather, inappropriate.

Let's get this over then. Yes, go to your local public library (they need the gate count) and take a look at two or three basic resume/cover letter guides. They should--I hope, it's been a while since I've read one--talk about things like not getting overly dramatic with the formats, not getting too many font types in, and so forth. And how to structure a formal cover letter. But there are some things you can blithely ignore and when I show you the results of the survey questions about structure & content of application materials, you'll see some of those right away. Because these manuals are often written for somebody other than you. So that whole nonsense about the resume never being longer than one page? You can probably ignore that one as I'll show you later. Do you have a favorite resume or cover letter guide? Toss up a comment and please, tell us specifically why you found that one helpful in your professional archival search.

And while you're at the library, be positive and take a look, not at the interview guides, but at the interview books written for the interviewers. Find out what to say, what you should never say, from the perspective of the interviewer. What you should prepare for. Again, I'll get into more details when I hit that section of the results, but in the meantime, use this as a starting point. Consider it homework. It may not be exact, but it's not a bad baseline.

Oh and those other things I mentioned when I was talking about assumptions? I'm not kidding. A lot of recruiters forgive typos. Some don't. If you write for one who doesn't forgive, you might just impress the ones who do forgive and make your application stand out amongst the competition who has failed to do so. Proofread. I won't speak for you, but I know it's easy for me to overlook typos (non-spellcheck-caught typos) in things I've written so what I do is hand it off to somebody who owes me money or similar favors (with a vague promise to forgive such debts) with a copy of the ad and have them proofread me too. I get a lot of cover letters that get the name of my institution wrong. Sometimes just a comma in the place that shouldn't have a comma but I've had a few name the locale as the University of Alabama Anchorage. Am I clearly coming down on the side of the unforgiving sorts? Yes, but one of my requirements--always--is demonstrated communication ability. That's my fail-safe requirement. If I've got a lot of applications to read? Placing my institution in a state that is several thousand miles away is probably going to get you screened out. Even if I don't catch it, one of the other search committee members will. If it doesn't get you screened out, it will make me wonder how much you really want this job, if you can't even be bothered to catch an error like that.

Okay, enough of my cranky opinionatedness. A typo isn't the end of the world for some recruiters. But if I achieve nothing else for those of you who don't leave themselves enough time for real and intent proofreading, maybe this gives you an idea about what a recruiter may be thinking when reading your app. Why take yourself out of the running with something so easily fixed?

One last point before I stop nagging on the generic advice (I'm tired of hearing myself channel my mother). Make absolutely sure every page of any document you submit has some sort of identifying information--the very least, your name. The big fail with this one is usually the references list and subsequent pages of a resume. Oh, and also make sure any multi-page document has page numbers on it too. Sometimes these get a little weird with the pdf conversions that a lot of online sites do to application materials, but it's a start. Why? Because I'm a klutz and I drop printouts all the time. I lose pages. Or I mix them up. Do you really want candidate X getting credit for all your experience because I shoved page 2 of your resume back in the file in the wrong order?

Next up: that singular challenge, the Cover Letter.

The paperwork

2010-02-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

Question #8 on the survey: Does your standard recruitment follow the model:
a. Screen for requirements
b. Rank candidates
c. Interview (single or multiple interviews).
Yes or no, and if no, could you explain?

So why am I putting this in the paperwork post? Because it leads into the "what to expect" in terms of what paperwork you'll need to submit to apply.

93% (64 of 69 answers) said yes, it follows that path. The nos are either doing headhunting, internal recruitments or temp positions, so we'll ignore those for now. The point of this is that the vast majority of respondents are going to have some sort of a screening step, a ranking step, and an interview step. And the paperwork you turn in is what is going to get you through the first two.

Let me elaborate by explaining how the process works at my current institution. It may not be exact for where you're applying, but it's a common model.

The job description and ad have been approved on all levels and go out. Applications start rushing in (hopefully). Prior to looking at any of the apps, I create two screening documents. The first is a simple check-off list for whatever I've listed as the minimum requirements. Candidates who have all the requireds get put into a stack to go to the next screening document, candidates who don't have the requirements are set to "screened out" in the computer system and eventually get a note from the system telling them that.

For those candidates in the yes stack, the second screening document is a ranking/scoring document. We rank to decide who gets phone interviews. So I create a document that lists the various qualifications, required or preferred, and add a multiplier in so I can give preference to candidates who have a lot of the things I think are important. The more important, the bigger the multiplier, the less important, the lower the multiplier. Let me give you a for example, for those of you, who like me, don't do well with story problems and would rather see the actual math.

Say I'm advertising and it's important to me that the person have strong educational/training credentials, that they know something about webpages, have good reference skills, etc. Here's how the job ad might read in the requirements section:

Required qualifications: Degree in related field with graduate level archival training, knowledge of web authoring software, experience providing archival reference.
Preferred qualifications: Web authoring experience.

What my ranking sheet might look like:

Why haven't I repeated the masters degree? Because the candidate must have it to get here, and my ranking of the grad ed makes ranking of the degree unnecessary. And why not the web knowledge? Similar answer. Knowledge was required but I want to give some extra points to those who can demonstrate it and the more they can demonstrate, the more it's worth. But the web authoring experience isn't nearly as important to me as the amount/level/quality of the graduate education or the reference experience, so those two areas get a greater weighted multiplier. Somebody with limited ref experience who has some web experience might be able to make up some of the lost ref ground in their web scores, but they won't be able to outrank somebody with a ton of reference experience and no demonstrated web experience. And somebody who has both reference experience and the education will always outrank somebody who is missing one of them.

With that end score, the committee then decides about how many people we want to interview or what the scoring cutoff for an interview is. That's usually a balance: we decide we don't want to phone interview more than, say 12 people, and look: there's a clear point gap between person 9 and person 10! We also tend to create a second cutoff--a score below which we won't interview. The ones we will not interview are set to screened out in the computer system. And we then have two groups left--the ones we know we want to interview and the ones we might consider interviewing.

We as a committee are also discussing the rankings. If one committee member comes in with rankings that are completely upside-down from others, we'll have to work through that. Not only do our HR people tend to object to odd scores like that, it means that we don't all have the same understanding of what is needed for the position. We don't have to be in lockstep though. In fact, if one committee member is ranking a specific candidate much higher than the others do, we take some time to work through it, discuss individual candidates, and committee members can advocate for or against candidates and their rankings until we come to some sort of agreement. Often it's that one committee member whose score is completely off of the others that will have caught something everybody else missed.

So that's our basic process. On to the paperwork that's going to get you through those screening stages and in to an interview. So what do our respondents require?

A quick sidebar on that transcript one: a lot of academic institutions--especially if the position is faculty rank or equivalent--will require the eventual submission of transcripts. Proof of degree, that sort of thing. And related to that, three of the respondents said that they only ask finalists for FA or writing samples.

What's the outcome? I think you'll probably have to fill in an institutional application form. At my place, that's a pro forma kind of thing: name, contact info, have you worked for us before, have you ever been convicted of a felony. But in some places that application is pretty intense and may even take the place of the cover letter/resume/cv thing. Only 3 of the respondents, by the way, went with an app only format.

Since the majority of our respondents are requiring a cover letter and resume or CV, let's look a little more closely at those numbers. By the way, one of my proofreaders asked me to explain CV a little more thoroughly so let me do it for you too. A curriculum vita, for the purposes of this survey and for the purposes of my particular institution, is often a career-long listing of every professional activity (publication, presentation and so forth), even if it does not directly pertain to the position at hand. (for anybody who doesn't like that definition or would like to refine it as it applies to their institution, please do comment with an alternative definition!) Here's a visual for you to see how the whole resume/cv/resume or cv blend plays out.

So what's the point of the diagram? Most places are going to take a resume--only a small percentage require a CV. Of the few who require CVs? All academic institutions.

However, I'd argue for you to spend the time to create a CV anyway, even if it's only a master file that you never send out. If you've got one, you've got a listing of every professional or other activity that could possibly every relate to your career goals so if you do run across that one recruitment ad that has an odd little quirk in requirements or preferreds, you don't have to spend the time trying to remember what you have that could fit it: you've got that master cv sitting there that you can search and plug in the relevant piece.

Onto a quick look at the cover letter results. Only 8 respondents didn't require this. It was about half & half on those wanting either an application or a cv/resume. But that's 88% of the recruiters asking for a cover letter. So that's something else you should be thinking about. Same goes for the references list required by 85% of the respondents.

Part of the reason I'm giving you these numbers now is that I'm going to be spending a goodly chunk of time talking about the whole cover letter/cv/resume thing. Unless you're looking for federal jobs only, you're going to have to develop some of these documents. If you are looking solely for fed jobs, you're going to be able to skip past many of these posts coming up. Oh, and one last thought. Of those 5 respondents who said they didn't follow that standard recruitment model I told you about at the beginning of this post? All of them still required cover letters and resumes. Perhaps for those who were headhunting it was more of a legalities type of thing (gotta put something in those personnel files) but their successful candidates still had to do the paperwork.

Some last general advice in the next posting (Monday) and then Weds we're off to start assessing cover letters.

quick look at phrasing

2010-02-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

Now, you've found some ads for positions that look attractive to you and it's time to start thinking about your application materials. So what do those listings in the job ad mean anyway?

"Knowledge of" means it's sufficient to show that you've taken a class on the subject or taken some training, though proving you've done it is always an extra little bump. Chances are, having read about it is probably not sufficient.

"Ability" or "Skills" mean you have to identify where you've actually done this particular thing.

"Demonstrated ability" means you will need to prove that you've done this thing, you can't just say that you've done it.

So that's fairly straightforward. But what, I can hear you say, do I do with the intangibles? "Demonstrated communication ability." What does that mean anyway? Here's where it gets interesting. A lot of different things to different people is what that means. For those applications that don't require writing samples, perhaps proof of a publication record or a link to an online writing sample of some sort, so forth. For me when I use it? I often make that assessment off of the quality of the cover letter and I'm not just talking about grammar and spelling here. (Yeah, I know, I'm occasionally really really mean.)

Computer literacy? Or web development ability? Or all those things that could mean a lot of different things to different people? Rely on context. Isn't it nice to be an archivist so you're used to looking for context? If the job is a digital archives specialist, the baseline for computer literacy or web development is likely to be a lot higher than a position that consists primarily of physical processing of textual records.

For more help with context: often, though not always, the elements that are more important to the recruiter will not only be listed earlier in the requirements, but the important stuff will be referenced in the job description as well. If digitization experience is listed in the requirements but isn't even hinted at in the job description, chances are you don't have to dedicate a huge amount of time to this topic. You'll still need to mention it, it's a requirement after all, but it's probably not as important as that "knowledge of web editing software" where the position description says "Will maintain departmental website." I'll get more into ranking matters in the next posting.

So that's some of the things you have to interpret in terms of you. What about the hidden things the advert is telling you about the job or the institution? The thing to keep in mind is reading a job advertisement is a lot like that old joke about reading real estate ads: "Handyman's dream" is likely to mean "Everybody else will want to raze it and start over." Chances are, there aren't going to be too many of these types of clues in the job ad because somebody along the way will have read those and edited them out, but occasionally you can still pick them out.

The job ads that look like somebody pulled the description off of a basic archives textbook? Could mean that the people doing the searching--and potentially the supervision--don't actually know much about the job or what an archivist does. Might be a great chance for you to do some education in a really supportive institution and build a great set-up from scratch or you might spend your time in the position battling for the basics. Like boxes and shelving and a place for people to do research that isn't your office desk. A huge laundry list of duties with no sense of what the priorities are? Again maybe written by somebody who doesn't understand the position or could be you're looking at a position that does nothing but put out fires as they come up. A low wage rate in comparison to expected credentials? Just avoid it. Sorry all, but if they're asking for three master's degrees and reading knowledge of two non-English European languages and five years of progressively responsible management experience, the pay for the position should recompense appropriately and not assume a second or third income in the household.

On that note, I know a few people who swear they will not apply for a position where the advertisement doesn't give any hint of pay. And I occasionally see those ads and wonder that if the people advertising truly understand that when they don't include a pay range, that a lot of otherwise excellent candidates are going to avoid applying just because they assume that an unstated pay = pathetic and embarrassing pay. I've applied for a few of those and with one exception, that was pretty much the case. I've heard the justification that this weeds out the people who aren't serious about the position, but honestly I'm not buying it. If you are paying a good salary, while it may weed out the timewasters or the money-hunting types, it also weeds out far too many excellent candidates. Perhaps some places aren't allowed to advertise their pay. If that's your institution: what is the background here? Do you find it affects the size or quality of your candidate pool? What are the regulations that prevent you from giving applicants an idea of what the compensation might be? Are you at an institution that doesn't advertise the pay for other reasons? Want to explain or defend your practices? I'll take out your name & institution and post an explanation on your behalf if you need to be anonymous. Send me an email.

For those that give pay ranges, you can generally assume that they're going to be hiring closer to the bottom end of it. In some cases that top number looks really nice, but that may not be a hiring range. At one place I knew, that was the top wage for the job scale: that is, that it would take you about 20 years to hit that number and then you were topped out, you'd never get a raise above that. Some will let you negotiate for a point in that range, some won't. I haven't yet figured out a way to tell which is which. If anybody out there reading this has, please share?

Got any other intangibles or not clearly defined requirements you've seen in an ad? Want me or the other blog readers to take a stab at them? Let's see them. Hit comment below and type away. And in that line, Jamie is still waiting for an answer from the Background posting comment that asked about the NARA presidential library requirement: "Knowledge of the recent history of the United States, the Presidency and the Federal Government, and the organization and functions of the White House staff and Executive branch." Anybody know what would meet this one? I guessed maybe modern US history or poli sci courses might cover it, but I really don't know. Anybody?

BTP: In Praise of Fairbanks

2010-02-09T19:26:00.001-08:00

Since Anne introduced it in her comment on the last one, I'll pick up the flag. The geography thing. Like it or not, the more geographically flexible you are, the more likely you are to find a position. If nothing else, you have a much wider pool of positions from which to select.

Look, I spent the last hour writing and rewriting a very long post where I took each possible excuse for not being geographically flexible and hammered at them. And I realized that maybe that wasn't the right approach. (If you want individual abuse, contact me. I'll heap on you all you like.)

Here's the short summary. You may have valid reasons for why you're limiting your job search geographically. And only you can ever know how valid they are. But what I'll tell you is that if you want to build a career in a profession with far more trained professionals than there are jobs, you might have to let go of some of your own requirements. I don't think any of us should let go of the pay thing, so what else is left? Job duties, institution types, location.

Location, location, location. I had 75 applications for my last open position, 40 or so for the one before that. My colleagues at my sister institution in Fairbanks? They average less than 10 (not all of whom are always qualified.) What is up with that? They have a vibrant program, collections that make the rest of us drool, solid funding and academic support (which occasionally makes the rest of us drool too), a large user base, a significant donor base, and they pay pretty well. Plus, you know, excellent and supportive (and occasionally jealous) archival colleagues elsewhere in the state with a record of cooperation and collaboration. The town of Fairbanks has a strong focus on community and civic engagement so if you like being involved in local cultural events, this is the place. Heck, Elton John played there last year. (Probably the smallest venue he's played in years aside from his own living room). In terms of the career development opportunities you'll have, the jobs there will offer far more of that than most other places you can name. Why aren't people lining up in droves for these positions?

Winter? Piffle. If you can handle a winter along most of the northern tier of the contiguous states (excepting western Washington), you can handle Fairbanks. Trust me, I know. I lived in Winnipeg for 5 years, having moved there from Seattle in November (was that a temperature and culture shock) when I was about 14. I've been in North Dakota and Minnesota in January. I'd rather be in Fairbanks. Fairbanks doesn't get wind in winter--or only rarely. No windchill factor there. Been in Wyoming in winter lately? I--Arlene who doesn't like spending time outdoors in winter--was in Fairbanks last March for a vacation weekend and I walked about 4 miles in subzero temperatures and honestly? I had a great time. Never really felt the cold as it was a gorgeous sunny day and as I said, no wind. And the whole light/dark thing? Well, there's a few artificial ways around some of the effect but you either learn to deal or you don't. And the only way you can learn if you can deal is by trying it out for awhile.

Which brings me back around to where I was going with the whole Fairbanks thing. Nobody expects you to stay at any given position for all of your career anymore. (Though I note that Fairbanks tends to have more than the normal share of people who do that too, so take what you like from that.) When you take a position, you're not promising to stay forever. If you have the geographic flexibility, why not apply for some of these more far-flung or rural positions? Are you serious about career building? Some of them offer excellent opportunities with far less competition than the more popular or populous locales. Put in a few years. Build up that resume with some excellent experience and then write your own ticket out to that dream destination or institution. Odds are, you'll have a stronger record than the people who didn't have your geographic flexibility and who stayed and are now competing for the mid-career position with you.

Besides, you'll always have the perfect answer when the next interviewer says "why would you consider leaving this position?" You can pull out all those excuses you're currently using to justify not applying for jobs like these. Proximity to family. Weather. Unless your next interviewer is myself or another Alaskan ex-pat, chances are they'll believe you. Or you may just find that Fairbanks is that dream destination for you. A lot of people have. And in the meantime, you'll have a really interesting job at an institution that has a vibrant program, phenomenal collections, solid funding and academic support, a large user base, and that pays well too. Where's the down side?

The elusive advert

2010-02-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

One of the first substantive questions--and by that I mean one of the questions I thought would directly correlate to advice for the jobseeker--was about where these recruiters are advertising the position.

Here's the results for the more commonly used--at least 2 mentions. I wasn't specific enough in my query between regional archival organization websites and regional archival organization listservs, so I've combined the two because not all respondents clearly differentiated either. Many did, bless them for outthinking me, and those that did were about evenly divided between websites and listservs. For the Archives school job centers, we're talking about Simmons or UM's or similar. I also note that in the past when I've sent advertisements myself to LibJobs, the University of Michigan's job center has always picked it up, so some (all?) of the LibJobs respondents may be considered to be advertising that way too, albeit unintentionally.

Of the 67 people who answered this question, only 5 provided only one option. Two of those advertised on their institutional site only, one said A&A only, 1 said local newspaper only, and one said word of mouth only. I think you can assume that the one that said A&A only, his/her institution is still trying to reach a national audience, but I'm guessing the rest are not. So if you are willing to move, you'd have to do a lot of research to find those and it may or may not be worth it. For clarification: the individual who said "word of mouth" was from an academic institution and said s/he does most of the recruiting in-house, looking for specific people for specific projects. So probably not something the avid job-seeker is going to either find or be hired for. I think that qualifies as an outlier--a response we can probably cut out of the mix.

Oh, and other stuff I'm not going to go into in-depth. 86% of respondents indicated that they advertise via their institutional website. I'm not sure how helpful this is in terms of targeting a search. Often this is simply a HR matter. Since many application processes these days require that you go through an online application form, this may just be a relic of that. Certainly some robots pick those up (I had one weird inhouse redo of a job status about a year ago that ended up being advertised nationally even though it was clearly not posted as such). Same for the 13% that use their departmental site or publications to advertise. (If you're reading this and one of those people who assume these will reach a wider audience than people who know to look for the job, will you please submit a comment clarifying how that works for you? Thanks.)

Back to the more popular answers--ones that are clearly aimed at getting an audience beyond local or internal candidates--and some more number crunching with them. Of the 61 respondents who are clearly trying to reach more than an in-house or very local audience, 93% are advertising on the Archives & Archivists listserv, or as one respondent put it, "the always loving and entertaining A&A." 44% are advertising on the SAA Career Center site and 31% are advertising on the LibJobs listserv. 97% are advertising on at least one of those three. 56% are advertising on 2 or 3 of those sites. So that's a pretty high return rate on keeping an eye on those distribution routes, if we can assume that the survey respondents are somewhat reflective of the broader world of archives recruiters.

Oh, and lastly, some of the one-hit wonders. These are sites--specific or otherwise--that only one respondent mentioned that they use. I'm providing them because you may find them useful or they may serve as a suggestion to search routes for you. Hotjobs, Monster, ALA, NEA, RecMgmt listserv, subject matter listservs, ARSC (Recorded Sound), and relevant SAA roundtable or section listservs.

And I'm going to close with one more point, something I failed to ask in my survey. See? I'm really not very good at this whole survey thing. I didn't ask whether or not recruiters held on to older applications or took in unsolicited applications to be held for future openings. I've had a few discussions about this and listened to a few others discuss this, and I'm not sure this is an overly reliable search mechanism, either sending in unsolicited or hoping they keep your previous app. I'm not saying "don't send unsolicited," it just seems to me that there's some pitfalls in this. Sure it's flattering to know somebody wants to work for me or at my institution, but I want to see resumes and cover letters that are targeted. If you don't know specifically what job I have open or might open up next, how can you possibly make sure you've hit all the high notes with whatever you send me? Then again, I have a small shop in a very big shop and the big shop has procedures for applications. And I can't do anything with cover letters and resumes sent directly to me even if I have an opening: apps have to be submitted in response to a specific position through our online application system.

So what I'd tell somebody taking this approach is not to send me application type materials, but maybe to shoot me a short email introducing themselves and telling me about their interest in my archives. I've had a few people do this. And while I may not have remembered to email them back when we had an opening, I have usually responded at the time and let the person know what advertisement routes I usually use so they can keep an eye on them. Then again, there are people who do like unsolicited applications but I'm betting they'd like them just as well--and probably will say yes--if you contacted them via email first and asked "can I send you my info?"

Oh, and yes, I'm suggesting contacting me/other potential recruiters via email if you're going to do the cold-call route. I probably shouldn't be speaking for the rest of those people out there, but in my case? About the only unsolicited phone calls I like to get anymore are from donors, co-workers, friends. The call from the person who may want to work for me and who I've never heard of? Not so much. At a conference sure, but when I'm at work? You're probably interrupting something else, even if I'm too polite to tell you that. With email I can respond at my own leisure and if it is important to have voice conversation, I have more control over scheduling. Or possibly saying no. But again, that may be just me. Maybe people who feel otherwise will add a comment or two. (hint, hint.)

Next up, a look at the ad itself. What to watch out for, what common terms mean, and so on.

BTP: Certified Archivist

2010-02-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

Okay. This is in response to Daria's query about the role of the CA in the job search process on an earlier posting. For those of you who haven't been following the comments, I strongly suggest you do so. I've been getting some excellent advice out of them and they will help drive some of the future postings. So not only read, add to the discussion please!

Heads-up, I really, really don't like to talk about the CA. I have the CA credential and will be reupping by petition this year (I probably should have sent that off before I wrote this paragraph). I have many friends (or did until I wrote this) who are strong proponents of the CA. I'm not such a proponent, and no, I'm not going to tell you why. But since I know mine is an unpopular viewpoint, I feel it's only fair to you to let you know it up front. There you go. Wow. Is that the longest caveat I've written yet? Well, except the introduction posting.

Well, now that I've said all that, what's my take on Daria's question? I've read some of what the Academy of Certified Archivists says about the value of the credential and their website contains a lot of information along those lines. Go look at it--it's interesting. I've heard lots of testimonials as to the value of the credential (some of which are on the site). Some institutions require it. So in that sense, it may be worthwhile because some of the jobs you might be interested in applying for may have it as a requirement and if you don't have it, you can't even apply. Do you want to cut those positions out of your search up front? Can you afford to cut those positions out of your search up front?

What I haven't seen is an empirical study as to the value of the CA in terms of your hireability and/or a resultant increase in wage potential. I figured that if such a study existed, it would be on or linked through the ACA site and I only spent about 10 minutes today skimming over possible options and didn't see it. (If such a study exists, please share where we can all see it?) But let me make very clear that I am NOT saying that the hypothesis CA=Hires+$ is wrong. It could well be that the CA will not only increase your likelihood of getting a job, that it will also improve your earnings potential. I'm not saying it does, I'm not saying it doesn't. I don't know.

Studying for the CA will take some time--the process of the CA, studying aside, takes some time. I think it was May/June (application) to Sept/Oct (notification) when I did it and there's no way to shorten that time frame. Paying for the exam, perhaps getting to an exam location, and the certification costs will take some money. Is it worth it to you? What I would suggest is that if you find getting the CA is burdensome for you, then you need to do a cost/benefit analysis as it applies to your search specifically. Go look through the postings of the A&A listserv (since so many of us advertise jobs there as you'll see in Monday's posting) for whatever period of time you think would be helpful, and look at the ads for institutions or jobs that you would want if they came open now. Figure out what the cut-off would be (10%, 20%, 30%, 50%, ?% requiring the CA) for you to decide the CA would be something that would assist you in your search. You may very well discover that it's worth it for you.

Again, I don't know of any circumstances under which having the CA would hamper you in getting a job unless you were applying for something that was not a professional position with an institution and interviewers who knew nothing about archives as a profession. Then this might take you out of the pool as overqualified (and in that case I'd just advise leaving it off your resume, just like you might fail to include your graduate degree though leaving off an educational credential may result in a time gap that has to be explained lest somebody assume you were serving time). Are you likely to be looking at those types of jobs? Possibly and I totally understand it since I've been there, done that too. Got the "you can get a degree in this?" query from the interviewer for that job that paid $2/hr over minimum. But the job was the right one for me at the time although maybe not the best power source for my career trajectory.

That last bit is mostly unhelpful, I realize. Let me get back on the track of seeking a professional archives position, which is what this blog is supposed to be about. I'm hoping that my failure to provide a resounding "Yes! Get the CA" is still a fairly even-handed treatment of the subject. I know that at best this is coming across as damned with faint praise for CA advocates. And even knowing I could be setting myself up for a fair bit of unhappiness, I'll remind you that the comments option is open here and the reason I set up the blog that way is because I'm well aware that I am not a spokesman for the majority of the profession on any topic covered here. So was the CA worth it for you in your job search? Share. Found--or done yourself--a study on the value of the CA in the job market? Let's hear the results. Oh, and I'm also willing to give equal time. Are you a recruiter who requires or prefers it of applicants? Send me an email and I'll be glad to give you a BTP posting on what it does for your institution and for your applicants sometime in the next week (first email gets first shot at the posting so make it quick).

And Monday, we'll take a look at where to find the job adverts. Something I'm much more comfortable with discussing. And by the way, where my survey respondents have indeed mentioned the CA, I will tell you along the way.

Who's the competition and what are we competing for?

2010-02-05T08:00:00.000-08:00

Okay: so what's this chart? You wisely ask. This is the results of what survey respondents said when asked "how many applicants do you typically get with recruitments?" A lot of number ranges were provided as well as discrete numbers, so I did a little gathering. And one respondent said something like "I get 25 but HR, who culls them, gets 200-400." (I logged that one under the number the archivist got, not HR). So in archival terms, inclusive span: 4-200, bulk span: 10-75. With 25-50 being most common. Oh, and by the way, most of the people who answered this question had been involved in recruitments within the last five years.

I'll get into what types of application materials are typically expected a few posts from now, but in the meantime, you've been through the process. You know that it's probably more than a couple of pages of application materials submitted per person. Unless the recruiter has a specific form where information goes in specific fields, generally we're not seeing a lot of consistency in the application documents. So figure multiple pages for the recruiter to read per applicant, where things don't always appear in the same place from application to application, well, you can start to see where I'm going with this argument. That's a lot of reading, that's a lot of time. So why am I saying this? I'm saying this so you'll know why I'll keep encouraging you to make your application materials as targeted and as organized as possible. We'll get into more specifics later (are you tired of me saying that yet?) but in the meantime, I just wanted you to see this. You're going to need your application to shine amongst all of these applications as much as you can make it shine. Because you have a lot of competition.

My next question was intended to refine this a little. I asked: how many did you get for your last recruitment? Here's the results. This range is skewing a little higher than the average recruitment numbers above.I'm not going to make any assumptions about why: could be the economy, fewer jobs, more archivists, whatever, I'll let somebody else figure out the whys of this. I'm showing this to reinforce my point about the competition: for those respondents who have engaged in more than one search over the past five years, the more recent searches have had a higher rate of return than their average search. So the competition is getting heavier. Now, that's not necessarily going to continue, but that's how it is at the moment.

However, here's some good news for those of you who are entry-level or early-career archivists. I asked, on that most recent recruitment set of questions, what level the position was aimed at.
The vast majority of searches are trending (isn't that an annoying word) toward entry or early-career positions. And one of the benefits to this is that while a mid-career archivist on the market is probably going to apply for mid-career, and occasionally an early to mid job, they're probably not going to be competing with you for the entry level spots. Recruiters may hire people with more qualifications when they can get them, but there are drawbacks to hiring people who are vastly overqualified for entry-level positions. Including the fact that the person will probably continue to search for something more appropriate and sometimes they're not so happy with the job in the meantime, either. But in general, on the searches I've been in on, when we advertise for an early to mid-career person, we get that and a lot of underqualified candidates. When we've advertised for entry-level? We get very few mid-career archivists applying for these positions. Even when we're paying at a rate comparable to mid-career wages.

And now for a different query. I asked: on that last recruitment what type of position was it? Processing, ref, so on, so forth. It's a little harder to come up with a chart with the exact answers that really gives you the feel here for the flow, so I apologize for that: this visual is just not quite as effective. But I think you may find the numbers helpful, depending on what type of position you're seeking.
oh, by the way, one explanation. Generally respondents who said something about cataloging included metadata. Lots of processing jobs, a little bump for reference and a little bump for digital projects.

For the next chart, I want to show you something of the breakdown on what types of positions correlated to what experience level. To do this and to make it anywhere near coherent, I had to group some of these job descriptions. So while the category of Processing below may indeed refer to, say, processing-only jobs, the processing category also includes processing-focused jobs. What you can take from this--insofar as this project is even remotely scientific, is that the processing jobs are probably not going to be advertised for much beyond early-career. In fact, none of our respondents were targeting anybody beyond early career archivists for processing positions. Now, that doesn't mean they weren't hiring people a little further along in their career, but the bumps for mid-career archivists really hit in reference (though lots of entry-level on that one too), management, cataloging, and the generalist positions which also seem to be scattered across all experience levels.

Quick semi-tangent: One other thing Dana Miller said in that SAA '09 session I mentioned in the intro posting: in her survey, a lot of the recruitments she was reading were grant positions. Temp, contract work, so forth. So feed that into the mix as you will.

Again, I don't want to get into your career choices in general and what you want to do, but just be aware that the hiring succession amongst the people who responded to this survey seems to be that processing-focused positions are for less-experienced archivists and if that's what you really want to do during your whole career, you may find that the recruitments are targeted a little below your experience level as you progress time-wise. I can't really make assessments for the other job foci since they seemed to be a little more blended. Something to think about, anyhow.

So are you tired of getting all this background and want some real advice on the search process itself? That's up next. Thanks for being patient with me.

Who are those anonymous survey takers?

2010-02-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

67 of the 70 survey respondents answered the question as to institutional affiliation. Here's the cumulative look at it:
And oh, boy, those captions aren't readable! Put that down to my current limitations with MSExcel. I'll work on that. In the meantime, that first column is academic (45), the second is corporate or for-profit (7), third is federal, state or local govt (10) and fourth is non-profit, non-governmental orgs (15).

Obviously, that's more than 67 individuals. 5 individuals chose two or three affiliations which is understandable given that they may have served in a hiring capacity for more than one type of organization and chose to answer the survey with all of those types of searches in mind. For example, if I'd remembered to fill out the survey before I closed it down, I would have represented myself as both academic and government since I've served on archival search committees in academic settings and in state and local government archives. Oh, and 4 of the respondents noted that they work in specialty media archives (digitization shops, born-digital units, film, video, so forth).

Now on to the individual roles of respondents. The question I asked was: are you an archivist hiring archivists, an allied professional (librarian/records manager/etc) hiring archivists or non-archivist (business or personnel manager) hiring archivists? I also allowed write-ins and got a few other responses based on that. Here's a visual for you.

The numbers: 60 of the 69 respondents identified themselves as archivists. 5 identified themselves as allied professionals. 2 identified themselves as business or personnel managers (one of whom pointed out that s/he was part of a hiring panel) and the 2 other individuals identified themselves as "special collections librarian hiring special collections librarian" and an "archivist representing archives interests on other library searches." I think the high rate of response from archivists is probably due to the initial circulation of the survey announcement which went out to the Archives and Archivists listserv and so the survey probably didn't get distributed widely beyond the immediate readers of the list, most of whom would probably identify as archivists.

So this is getting long but I do want to share three more of the survey results about the respondents before I switch over to the more advice-oriented information that came out of the survey. The next question I asked is how are recruitments handled: are they committee searches, single-manager searches, HR-managed, or other? Obviously there's overlap (HR-managed searches may also be single manager or committee searches and some institutions may do multiple types) so technically a pie chart isn't the proper way to handle this, but I still think it gives you the best visual as to how the respondents are approaching the rest of their answers to the survey. The HR-managed number there is only 4 respondents who said they solely did searches that way, but given the plethora of comments and respondents who checked multiple choices, I think you should assume that in most cases, HR has a finger in this pie. Why does that matter? We'll get to some of the specifics later, but this does mean that many of these searches are being conducted under specific rules for process and procedure and depending on the institution in question, you won't always be able to assume that all of the important hiring decisions are being made by people who have a strong personal understanding of what archivists do and what archives need in personnel issues.

And on to the second-last chunk of numbers in this posting. For those who had a committee process, this is how they shake down in terms of their role on the committee.So what's the point of this? Mostly to give you an idea of where the respondents fit in the scheme of things. 20 chairs, 34 committee members, 3 who have served in both capacities, and 1 other, who identified his/her committee process as a two-person committee without any defined hierarchy.

I think that's a pretty high response (20+3) from individuals who have served as chair of the committee. Now in some places, that might not mean much: that's just the person who does the meeting scheduling and so forth. But in many places, the chair has much more extensive duties than the general members of the committee. The chair is probably responsible for initial drafts of job ads, ranking matrices, some of the leg work. When I'm chair, I bring food to our committee meetings. Some of my regular committee members have been spoiled by this and now demand it of other search committee chairs. But I digress. What should matter to you is that most of the respondents to this survey, whether part of a committee process or not, are very involved in the recruitment process. So even though you'll notice as we go on that they may occasionally provide advice that is contradictory to each other, they have a strong interest in providing that advice to you.

Let me enforce that concept a little and close on this last bit of numbers. One of the other questions I asked respondents was how many recruitments they'd served on in the last 5 years. Of the 65 people who answered this question, only 6 (10%) had no recent hiring experience. From there, the numbers shoot up. 85% of respondents had served on two or more recruitments. Over half of the respondents had served on three or more. Two individuals admitted to 12 recruitments each and one person admitted to 30 recruitments. In the last five years! I feel for that person, I really do, and since it got my curiosity up, I did some digging. For the two individuals who had been involved in 12 recruitments each, one was from a private for-profit, one from an academic archives. And the 30-person? An archivist from a private non-profit institution, and this individual not only goes through the committee process, but usually serves as the chair of the committee. I don't know who you are, you masked wonder, but I have to think that you do nothing but recruitment paperwork most days.

But to get back on tangent. The surveyed? Very involved in recruitments. 85% served on 2 or more searches in the last 5 years alone. These are individuals with a lot of time invested in recruiting and with, presumably, strong motivation for getting their advice out to candidates. Not to get too preachy here, but as you read the following posts, I'm hoping you'll keep some of that in mind.

BTP: the schedule

2010-02-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

It just occurred that since I told you I have an outline for the postings that you might like to see it. Many of these will make up multiple postings: I'm currently at 6 separate postings for the resume section and who knows? It might end up being more. I'm going to aim posting an entry each M/W/F for the main schedule and any BTPs alongside as topics and suggestions come up in the comments.

So aside from the background that we've already done, here's what's up next in order:

Meta info: who did the survey, what kinds of numbers are they getting on apps
Advertisements: where, what
Meta app info: what docs you'll need and what to learn from the resume books (and what not to learn)
Cover letter
Resume
Reference checks
Intermission/review/reinforcements
Interviews
How long do recruitments take?
Following up for candidates
Other advice
Networking
Survey feedback
Conclusions (if any can be made)

Truthfully, we're probably looking at May here to get through all of this.

I've really enjoyed the commentary thus far--please keep it up! You're helping me write and rewrite sections and think about what I've missed and what I'll need to include. Again, I've got the comments set to be moderated and I think I'll keep it that way for a while. While I'm pretty obsessive about keeping up with my email and I do get the email notices that there's a comment awaiting me, there may be times when I'm not going to get to it right away resulting in a delay between your comment being made and your comment being posted. If I'm going to be down for longer than a half-day or so, I'll try and let you know.

off the rack or bespoke

2010-02-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

You're going to get really, really tired of this topic by the time I end these blog posts. I'd rather stop nagging on it, but the truth is that even knowing this is tiresome to a lot of you, I also know that a lot of application materials I see still don't exhibit it. Tailoring.

Here's the concept. You're a clothing designer. You create a design for a suit/dress/whatever and hold it up to the next person who walks in the door and it probably doesn't fit. Or doesn't fit exactly. You can let the person walk out the door in that ill-fitting clothing or you can tailor it--take it in here, let it out there, lengthen it here, shorten it there, and they can walk out in something that looks like it was made to suit them exactly. Your recruiters? They want to find the candidate or candidates who suit them best. They're your clientele. You need to make sure that your application materials not only show off your skills but how well you can fit their position.

Obviously that's taking the metaphor too far. Sorry! Let's get back to reality.

Neither I nor the rest of the survey respondents nor anybody else of my recruiter correspondents and friends ever want to see general, all-purpose resumes and cover letters. If you can't spend a few hours--if that--cutting, pasting, rephrasing your master cover letter and resume to match up with my job description and stated job requirements, don't bother applying. You're probably going to get taken out of the pool on the first read because you don't fit. Or you don't appear to fit as well as the candidates who have spent the time to do the tailoring. Believe it or not, most of the time we can pick out the cookie-cutter resumes or cover letters.

Don't think I don't understand though. I do know that sometimes it seems like a huge commitment of time for you to be amending and rewriting and what the heck do those people mean by communication ability anyway? It's a pain, I get it. But if you do want that job (as opposed to a job) you're going to up your chances of getting to the interview level by presenting the best possible appearance that you can in those application materials. And don't think that many of us aren't doing the same from our end. We're writing and rewriting job descriptions, we're developing screening and ranking criteria dependent on not only the general job responsibilities but all those other little skills and details that will allow the hire to work well with us and with the position. It's frustrating to you to spend 4 hours writing a resume and cover letter that may only get 5-15 minutes of my time on first read. But that's also why you need to make that 5 minutes of my time count: you want to be sure that I'll pick your application up again for the next read. And when it comes time for interviews. Or reference calls. Or a hiring offer.

By the time a candidate makes it into our initial interview pool, I and the other committee members have probably spent about an hour each on that candidate's application materials. (I've probably spent more as the committee chair.) That's a minimum of five hours of our time dedicated to you.

But what if you don't fit? What if you're missing requirements? That can be a problem. Some places will accept missing pieces especially if they're not some of the more major things, some won't. I note that my own willingness to do so degrades in direct proportion to how many applications I have to read. Some might accept substitutions, some won't. If it's a major qualification (e.g. 4 years of professional experience) and you don't have one year, please don't apply for the position unless you've had personal word from somebody at the institution that they're willing to waive.

Why not take the chance and apply for jobs for which you're not yet qualified? As a positive person who wants to be encouraging, I want to tell you to try. As somebody who has read a lot of applications that don't have our requirements in them, I want to tell you to stop wasting my time because even at 5-15 minutes per application per committee member, that adds up. And it's probably higher than 15 minutes since when I find an app that is missing requirements, I do a few read-throughs in case I missed that sentence where you said you did have it.

So I'm torn. But I guess here's my bottom line and it has nothing to do with wasting my time: if you don't have the basic requirements that the institution has stated are necessary to be able to do the job, how are you ever going to do the job? Some places might make those requirements up out of the ether, but a lot of us don't. We create requirements that directly pertain to the needs of the position and the department and if we were to hire somebody without them, we would be setting them up to be unsuccessful in that position. That's not something I ever want to do. It shouldn't be something you want to do either. This isn't just about getting a job here, this is about getting a job that is right for you. Do you really want to be on the market again in six months to a year having to explain why you're considering leaving this position so soon?

And on with the show. Next a review of who took the survey so you can have a better idea of your audience for that job application. I promise I'll get to more specifics about how to write those various documents--but I've got a few other things to go through first.

BTP: the costs of a recruitment

2010-01-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

BTP=Between The Posts. I'd actually plotted out the posts I wanted to do at the beginning (which will shock any teacher I've ever had--they know for a fact I don't outline anything ahead of time). But I was also aware that along the way topics might come up in comment discussions or other recruiters might want to say their piece, so if you see a blog posting labeled and tagged with BTP, that's what's going on. Since Jamie commented about my estimate of $15K for the cost of a recruitment to an institution and I suddenly got worried that my vague and guesstimated math I'd done a couple of years ago could have been really wrong, I sat down this morning and recreated it as best I could. The following is that calculation. I'll admit, this probably won't really affect anything in your searching. It shouldn't. What it should do--if I've aimed correctly here--is remind you that no matter how frustrated you are with your jobsearching and how expensive it can be for you in terms of time and money, you're not the only one feeling some pain here. The recruiters have it as well, albeit with some differences. You're not in this alone.

Any average search committee member’s hourly cost (including benefits) is going to be between $25 and $60, skewing heavily to the upper end of that range since many professional archivist search committees tend to be more heavily laden with faculty or long-time professional staff rather than technical staff. We’re going to take $40/hr as our average per person per hour of work. Again, that includes benefits. I agree that might be high for non-profits or local government, but I suspect it's not far off for govt, academic or larger corporate. And although I’m basing the numbers of candidates and search committee members below on our most recent search, the hour estimates and other payroll type costs should not be assumed to be from that search and as such, this should not be taken as an exact replica of what my institution is doing. For one, we were able to take some of the work from a similar search done two years previously and re-use or adapt that, which reduced some of these time frames considerably. (Have I made it clear yet that I’m not speaking on behalf of my institution here?) This is an estimate--an educated estimate--as to how much could be spent on a recruitment from start to finish. Obviously different institutions, with different procedures and different costs, will vary.

I also should state that I will go more in depth into the structure of a search as we pass through the entries in this blog. I promise I’ll talk more later about some of the specifics—like the various screenings—and what they are and how they might affect you.

Here we go, ready for this?

Preliminary work: developing job description and ads, creating screening documents, developing interview and reference questions, working with HR, sending out postings, getting admin permissions, etc: est 16 hrs work. ($640).

Last search, we received 75 applications. The first screening was done by a single member of the search committee with an average of 15 minutes spent with each application: est. 18.75 hrs work, let’s round that up to 19. ($760 for a running total of $1400). In some places the whole committee (up to 5 people) does this step thus taking $760 up to $3800.

The first screening left us with 30 applicants for the second screening/ranking. This is more intensive work, average of about 1/2 hour per applicant per search committee member (total 5 people): est. 15 hrs X 5 committee members for a total of 75 hrs. ($3000 for a running total of $4400).

Data entry on a spreadsheet and calculations to rank all the remaining applicants and create an ordered list by average score, assuming no negotiations to fix scoring that had gone astray on the part of any one search committee member, oh and getting notices out to candidates who were screened out on the first level. 1 person: est 3 hrs work ($120 for a running total of $4520).

Search committee meeting to determine the cutoffs for phone interviews and develop a schedule for the interviews: 1 hr X 5 committee members for a total of 5 hrs. ($200 for a running total of $4720).

* note additional time spent here playing email and phone tag with candidates to schedule said interviews plus getting notices out to the candidates screened out on the second level.

8 phone interviews at 1 hour each: 8 hrs X 5 committee members for a total of 40 hrs. ($1600 for a running total of $6320).

Search committee meeting to determine the finalists to bring in individuals for an in-person interview and to pick potential dates: 1 hr X 5 committee members for a total of 5 hrs. ($200 for a running total of $6520).

Reference checks on (in this case) 2 candidates. 3 references per person, average of 20 minutes per check. 1 hr X 2 search committee members X 2 candidates for a total of 4 hrs. ($160 for a running total of $6640).

Paperwork time. Writing justifications for interviews, justifications for non-interviews, getting permissions from HR to interview, arranging travel, arranging dates with candidates, getting notices out to candidates screened out by the phone interviews, done by several different individuals but at least 4 hrs work: 4 hrs. ($160 for a running total of $6800).

In-person interviews, personnel time. Chair of committee has a full 8 hrs committed. The rest of the search committee is probably putting in about 4 hrs each, for a total of 16 hrs. Over the course of the day, about 40 hrs worth (minimum) of other library employees’ time including departmental meetings, meals, open presentations and open meetings: est. 64 hrs X 2 candidates ($5120 for a running total of $11920).

In-person interviews, other costs. Airfare for 2 candidates, approximately $600 each, $1200. Hotel: $75 each, $150. Taxi from airport to hotel: $20 each, $40. Lunch and dinner sponsored by the Library for 4 people (3 employees, 1 candidate or 2 employees and candidate and significant other): $150 (this is really a low estimate) each: $300. ($1690 for a running total of $13610).

Search committee meeting to determine the finalist: 1 hr X 5 committee members for a total of 5 hrs. ($200 for a running total of $13810).

Paperwork: writing justifications, negotiations with candidate, permissions obtained from HR and other admin types, creation of contract, getting letters/calls out to the non-successful in-person candidate, done by several different individuals but an est. 8 hrs work. ($320 for a running total of $14130).

So that’s $14K. A 3rd in-person candidate would add another $3405 for that interview day. And don’t forget all the copy costs, long-distance phone calls, the HR hours that are done outside of our field of vision, the prep times for meetings, and so forth. All of those add to the total. Plus my current institution often pays relocation costs which can run upwards of $8000 (though usually not).

Having said all this: this is part of the price of doing business. At some academic institutions, since most of the search committee is faculty and salaried, a lot of them are still putting in nearly full hours on their jobs alongside this, so some of the time is more or less a freebie. Some of it is repetitive: if the institution hires regularly or has a stringent job hierarchy, they're probably spending fewer hours on the development of job descriptions, interview questions, so forth. It's all dependent on the type of job too: when I hired a contract archivist a couple of years ago, the cost was significantly less because we didn’t go beyond phone interviews, didn’t offer moving allowances, much of the paperwork was simplified. Other places aren't going to have the air fare costs that Alaska or Hawaii does.

Okay, so that's the first BTP entry. Again, this probably won't make much difference to you as an applicant and I'm pretty sure there's a few recruiters out there reading this and laughing hysterically at how much some places spend on recruitments (I hope a few are nodding in agreement). At any rate, I thought you might find it interesting--oh, and it's entirely possibly that I've gone completely astray in some of the math above. I'm usually good with basic addition and multiplication, but story problems really nail me. Feel free to correct my math. Back to our regularly scheduled postings now.

Background

2010-01-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

I’d like to start out with an introduction of who I am and why I’m doing this and some background to this project. My name is Arlene Schmuland. I’m head of Archives & Special Collections at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage and a tenured associate professor. I’ve been an professional archivist for over 15 years now and probably most people would consider me a mid-career archivist (although I hope my longevity is a little more than another 15 years). Though I’m currently working as an archivist/manager for a special collections department in a state university (both university archives and manuscripts collections as well as rare books), I’ve also worked for a state government archives (Utah) as a processor, reference archivist, and cataloger, and for a county court system (archivist, microfilmer, and records manager). So not just the academic side of things. My masters is from the archives and records management/history program at Western Washington University and I also hold the Certified Archivist credential. I’ve been active in SAA, NWA and CIMA.

On to the caveats. Having said all that, none of the opinions expressed in this blog should be assumed to reflect any of those institutions or organizations. And I should say that I barely squeaked through statistics during my years as a math major a few decades back, so I'm hoping I won't go too far astray on some of the numbers I provide but odds are... I'll take the blame and the heat for any mistakes I make. By like token, the caveat follows that none of this should be taken as take-to-the-bank, I'm-going-to-read-this-and-get-a-job promises. Job searches and job recruitments are so individualistic that no one can provide a perfect step one, step two, step three, voila job approach. The aim here is tips, hints, advice, ways to make better, things to avoid, and so forth. I'm also not the most expert archival recruiter out there (as you'll see two posts from now in the section about the survey respondents) but I am one of the more obsessive ones which leads me to:

Why I’m doing this. I’ve served on a lot of search committees for professional archivists in the past 15 years. I’ve headed up several committees in just the past few years. I’ve also applied for far too many positions in the past 15 years too. And I've not always done a good job of it. What I’ve come to realize is that in a lot of cases, I've wrecked my own chances at the job. Not deliberately and maybe not even something I could ever have prevented, but with the exception of one early failure, the people doing the hiring did seem open-minded and interested in giving me a fair shot at the position. As I've served on search committees, I've also seen a good number of excellent applicants whose application materials and interviewing skills represented them well. Unfortunately, I've seen a few bad applicants whose applications materials and interviewing skills represented them well, which was probably for the best. But sometimes--even one is far too many--it's been a case of good applicants who weren't able to represent themselves as well as they ought.

As I've chaired at least 3 professional archives search committees in the last three years, I've developed a few traits as a recruiter. (I'm getting to the why, hang with me please.) I don't have a lot of patience for vaguely worded application materials, candidates who don't target the job I have on offer, badly structured resumes, in short, anything that I come to regard as time-wasting at a time when I'm probably down by one full-time person in a small department. Even when I'm fairly sure that the candidate could be a good candidate, if they'd just done that one little thing different. So based on my experience, I got to thinking about how I could save time and effort in future searches. One of the things that occurred was that a lot of the problems I was seeing were most likely based on a lack of available advice to job-seekers.

There's the crux of the why. The more applicants that get it, the more applicants that understand what rules and regs and processes constrict my handling of the recruitment process, the more applicants that are able to give me the information I need to make my assessments, the simpler this is for me. This is really self-interest at play here. I don't like spending an hour reading and re-reading a single resume and cover letter set seeking that mention of that minor requirement: I'd much rather quickly check off that requirement and go on to the more serious assessment and ranking of how well this candidate might fit this job and to have all the information I need to assess that comprehensively. By the way, I'm not alone in this. I don't think I'll be doing another recruitment for awhile, but I've talked to enough of our colleagues now to realize that they want this too. And since I have a break from performing a recruitment right now, it seemed a good time to get this all written down.

And since I'm not nearly egotistical enough to assume I speak for anybody else, much less the whole archives profession, I asked colleagues for help. That help consisted of a few things. One was conversations with other hiring professionals on how they felt about the recruitment process and what they were seeing and what they wanted to see. The more official though perhaps not much more scientific method was to conduct a poll for anybody who had conducted archival job recruitments or served on committees doing so and ask them what they thought. So I drew up a basic survey. From there I asked several colleagues to review the survey and many had criticisms, corrections, amendments, additions, and deletions to it, and I took much of that advice. I then posted the link to that survey to the Archives and Archivists listserv and gave people about a month and a half to fill it out. I received 70 responses. Not all of them filled out the whole survey--it was pretty long. But I think that in there is some valuable advice and I'll be passing it along to you. Recruiters participated in the survey because they want applicants to do the best possible job in their applications. It's a potential time-saver for us when our applicants really hit our marks.

Plus I'm interested in it from the other side of things. I don't know that I'll stay in this position for the rest of my career. I'm tenured now, and I must admit, I really, really like my job, but I like to keep my options open. And I want to be sure that solid job-seeking advice is out there for when I go looking for the next one because I'll probably continue to make mistakes in my own job-seeking (I'm good at making mistakes). So to that end, the comments option for this blog is enabled. If you want to provide advice too or tell me I'm off the rails, that's all right. I am moderating comments to make sure spam doesn't get through, but if it looks real enough, I'll post. If you want to ask something and you don't want to go public, if you register with the blogspot site you'll be able to pull up my email address and contact me directly (beware that I may still use it as fodder for further discussion.) If you have questions about stuff I've failed to cover, ask. If I can do something with them, I'll try. If I can't, I'll try and get you pointed at someone or something that can. If you know of any other really great resources on archival job searching (has somebody posted NARA's guide to KSAs?), share please?

In the end? It will be a learning experience. For all of us, hopefully.

the bad news/the good news

2010-01-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to start on a depressing note, so please be sure to read through the end of this posting.

There's a lot of archivists out there and the schools with archival programs are producing a lot more every semester. And honestly, there probably aren't enough jobs for all of them in the "classic archives" field. At a session at SAA '09 (See Session 106 description) in Austin, Dana Miller (see comments please) noted that according to a count she'd done for the previous six months, the library schools are graduating four archivists for every open position, and that doesn't include the archivists coming out of non-library archival programs. Plus, of course, a lot of people are entering the profession from outside of graduate archival programs. And those open positions? Not all entry-level.

I'd rather not get into the topic of the choices our graduate programs are making and I certainly don't want this blog to be about making the career choice in the first place. So from here on out, I'm going to assume that whether you're looking for that entry level position or you're a little further along in your career looking for a change, that you've got the basic credentials: professional training, experience appropriate to the job in question, and interest and passion for the work. Also? That you're willing to put some serious time and effort into your search and applications. I'm going to be asking you to do work. Thinking time, writing time, editing time, practicing time, not only for you, but for colleagues and friends that you're going to get to help you with this process.

A couple more bits of bad news and then on to the good. I'm not seeing a lot of advertisements for professional archival positions out there. This is nothing new, this is not new to the economy right now, this has been the case for a long time. Sure some archivists maybe be retiring or due to retire in that moving target of soon, but sometimes those positions go unfilled for years, if not permanently. Worse, last open position for which I was doing the recruitment? 75 applicants. That's a pretty big pool and means the odds were stacked against any given applicant. Not to mention that recruitments are very, very expensive. I'd guess that my last recruitment--between personnel time for the search committee and flights, housing and food for interview candidates--probably ran my institution close to $15,000. So why do I mention that? It might help explain why we sometimes get so picky and critical about the details: our institutions tend to get very unhappy about failed searches so we want to do it right the first time. Plus the costs of hiring the wrong person for the job are incalculable, but even so, who wants to add another $15K onto the incalculable?

And now I'm going to say quite the most awful thing I didn't ever want to hear being said as a job candidate. And I'm sorry about this, but you have to hear it if you haven't yet. The high rate of response on most recruitments means that--for the first run-through at least--many of us are not looking at all your hard work, we're looking for reasons to reject your application and to get our work down to a manageable level. That stinks and we know it, but there you are. That's a strong part of the reason why I think the advice spread throughout this blog is important: you need to get past that initial cull so the people doing the reading and assessing and ranking can really start looking for what's good about you, not what's bad. I've taken too many candidates out on the first screening who probably would have been in the top group of eligible candidates for interview because they made a small mistake in their application materials. And sometimes individuals have made it into the interview pool who really weren't all that spectacular comparatively because they didn't make those mistakes. So let's give you--the prepared and qualified candidate--all those opportunities, okay?

So I've made you wait long enough. The good news. The good news is that professional archival recruitments are still happening. New jobs are being created. Most of the recruiters I've spoken with aren't playing the "who you know" game but are willing to consider all applicants equally. Honestly? The smart recruiter wants somebody who will be good in the position but who also wants the position and will be happy in it for a while. So for those of you who may not have a lot of experience, sometimes that means that the most experienced candidate may not be the best fit and you still have a good shot at getting the job. If you concentrate on putting an effort into a job search, if you somehow manage that elusive goal of having your application materials and answers to interview questions match up with what the recruiter is seeking, you're qualified, and you keep focused on what you want to be doing and make sure you're taking all the necessary steps, you'll have a decent chance at most jobs.

So how do you figure out what the recruiter is seeking? What are those necessary steps? I'll get to those in further posts. I'm aiming to post entries about 3 times a week til we're done. Thanks for hanging out so far, more shortly.