I'd Like to Offer You the Position...

I got to hire someone this week. Even better, it's someone who has been trying very hard to break into our library system and has been doing better and better in her interviews each time. So it's so awesome to reward someone for that hard work.

Of course, the down side is I also had to call some other internal candidates and I still have to write letters to some others to let them know they were NOT successful. One great moment deserves eight other crappy ones, I suppose.

I have been on both ends of the interview process in this library system, and despite the fact that I didn't get two jobs in a row, one I wasn't really qualified for yet and the other I was already doing in another branch, I feel the process is awfully fair. And it is, indeed, significant that I use the terms "awful" and "fair."

Obviously, I can't talk about the intricacies of the interviews. However, I'm glad we have a very formal, strict process as jobs in this system are treasured and when they open up, the candidate pool is amazingly good. I interviewed nine people for a part-time Library Assistant position. I could have hired ANY of them. The minimum requirement for that job is a high school diploma. Most of the people I interviewed had Master's Degrees (some in library science, some in other fields) or were working towards them. This is for part-time work! Lots of nights and weekends. Starting salary is between 10 and 18K. The county does pay benefits, though, which does sort of bring up the value of that paycheck.

There is nothing like interviewing a whole bunch of people who REALLY want to just get ANY job as long as it's for the organization YOU work for to remind you how lucky you are to have your job.

And I get to hire a librarian sometime in the next couple of weeks. Woo hoo! This is great!