The Candidates' Perspective on the Academic Library Interview Experience during COVID-19

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5860/llm.v38i3.7592

Abstract

Academic libraries have made varying changes to the librarian interview, owing to the swing to more virtual interviews that were necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We surveyed recent candidates for academic librarian positions about their academic library interview experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and received responses from 137 individuals who had applied for positions between March 2020 and April 2022. Our respondent feedback captured candidate perceptions that applying candidate-centered design concepts to interviews, centering the process around the needs of the applicant, and increasing transparency is worth considering to provide a better, more accommodating experience for the candidate and greater accessibility in academic library hiring practices.

Author Biographies

Summer Krstevska, Wake Forest University

Summer Krstevska is the Business, Economics & Data Access Librarian at Wake Forest University, where she supports business school students as well as entrepreneurship minors, and the economics programs. She is currently teaching her for-credit business research course for entrepreneurs on-campus & abroad. She holds a masters in library and information science from Simmons University.

Elizabeth Ellis, Wake Forest University

Elizabeth Ellis is an Instruction Librarian at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library. In this role, she teaches for-credit courses related to research skills and information literacy, including critical information literacy, and provides research and reference support to library users. She received her MLIS from UNC Greensboro.

Mary Beth Lock, Wake Forest University

Mary Beth Lock is the Associate Dean at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library.  She serves on the Assessment Team for the library, and does research on how the library impacts faculty and student scholarship, as well as best practices to enhance library effectiveness. Her responsibilities include faculty and staff development, committee oversight and assignments, and facilities oversight.

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Published

2025-03-31

How to Cite

Krstevska, S., Ellis, E., & Lock, M. B. (2025). The Candidates’ Perspective on the Academic Library Interview Experience during COVID-19 . Library Leadership & Management, 38(3). https://doi.org/10.5860/llm.v38i3.7592

Issue

Vol. 38 No. 3 (2025)

Section

Peer Reviewed

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Summer Krstevska, Elizabeth Ellis, Mary Beth Lock

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.