2018 Charleston Library Conference

As we gear towards building the libraries of the present and the future, we look for staff who bring with them a new set of skills and abilities. We often intentionally look outside our library ecosystem for IT, analytical, or service frameworks which will enables us to diversify our workplace while bringing in fresh ideas and capabilities. We want to work more smartly and we need to find the staff to ensure such progress is made now.

Still, all libraries differ somewhat in the ways by which we plan, select, hire, and retain our most valuable employees. This panel attempts to provide information on institutional and personal differences surrounding our hiring practices in general and in particular as they relate to what we consider a “disruptive” hire. We define disruption in hiring as of strategic value, often found from outside of normal institutional types, boundaries, or skill sets that enables a team, a department, and occasionally even a whole library to increase creativity and innovation. These hires introduce and apply diverse and unconventional ways of thinking which can result in a complete re/engineering of thinking or workflows of a whole service.

Searching, interviewing, hiring, and retaining such employees require our organizations to apply a considerable amount of organizational flexibility in preparing and sustaining one or more disruptive staff members in our hybrid library areas. We already struggle with limited resources and continuous work; how can we adjust salaries, work conditions, and most importantly teams and culture surrounding these hires to integrate them fully while managing and balancing this disruption well?

Panel members, senior administrators in large research libraries, will attempt to shed light on differences in our hiring and retention practices and will share stories of success and failure around this issue.