If you have ever applied for an academic librarian position and gotten nowhere, you might have wondered why. I grew up in an academic family, had a strong mentor in library school and still did not understand fully what a hiring committee would be looking for when I applied for my first librarian position. Now that I have served on several hiring committees, I am giving you a peek behind the curtain.
What can you, the applicant, do to stand out? Do you need to have all the required qualifications plus all the preferred ones? Just as teaching faculty members may leave their doctoral programs feeling unprepared to enter a college classroom, many newly minted master’s in library science graduates may not have learned about the academic job search.
When I recently taught a class at a local graduate program, I created a module centered on that search. I taught my students how to create a matrix using the stated qualifications of the job advertisement, because that is what hiring committees use to create their screening tools. This article will walk you through that process and provide tips for success, using a job ad for a university library position at a top research university as a case study.
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