Phone Interviews

Our candidate pool for our open librarian position is complete. No more applications are arriving. We have to decide who to consider and who to eliminate. It is a challenging process trying to match words on a paper with tasks on a job description. It is difficult to get a sense of person and skill sets from the scanty information on someone's resume. Some people look great on paper and end up not so great in person. Others look OK on paper and turn out to be wonderful.

We are moving to the next step in the process. Phone interviews. I remember from past experiences how challenging it is to get a sense of a person over the phone. Does a hesitation mean they don't know, they are struggling with making their words clear to a non-tech person, or they think before they speak? Does that mean anything at all in reference to competence? This may not be much more helpful. Wouldn't it be easy to just hire someone you know who is already doing the kind of job you need done? Maybe. People act differently in different settings. Someone who is fabulous at a large city institution may wither away at a small town place.

We call each candidate and chat, using the same questions. It does reveal more than I had hoped. Now we are ready to move on to bringing people on campus for face-to-face interviews. It is frustrating for the candidates that the academic hiring process takes so long. It isn't unusual for start to finish to be at least 6 months. Meanwhile, we are still holding our breath that nothing breaks in a major way. So far, Grace of God.