CV/Interview Surgery

CV/Interview Surgery

This is my final post on Library Camp East which I attended last week, and covers the other session I made notes on, which was essentially a brain-picking exercise on how to improve your chances of getting the job you’re going for.

I think (I hope!) I contributed quite a lot to the discussion; I’d just been for a job interview the week before (and been rejected) so the experience was still rather fresh in my mind. I also picked up lots of ideas for constructive things I could do, so I’ve tried to organise my scribbles into something coherent below.

Tips for CV Writing

• It’s better to keep a master copy of a CV which you can continually update and improve, rather than dusting off the CV you tailored to the last job and re-jigging it each time. You might have played down some areas in favour of focusing on others and neglect to re-add them.
• Always, always, always follow the instructions given by the organisation! If they want a skills-based CV it’s going to look inept and unprofessional if you send in a chronological CV instead.
• Good spelling, grammar and literacy are absolutely crucial; possibly more so for librarians than many other professions.
• Don’t be afraid of contacting the organisation if you have questions – it demonstrates initiative (unless you could have found the information easily yourself).
• There were different opinions about CV length. Some people felt 2 sides of an A4 page was a good length, while others pointed out that when the application is online or read on a computer this doesn’t matter so much.

One question raised was what we should be focusing on? As librarians/library workers, we are many things and have many skills and duties. This fed somewhat into the next few points for how to structure the CV to best highlight these qualities.

• Avoid long essays, and try to chunk the information, using bullet points or headings. Use the organisation’s terminology where possible.
• Sometimes skills-based CVs are more appropriate than chronological CVs, particularly if you’ve had many different jobs.
• Library workers have many transferable skills, including office/administrative skills, policy-making and strategic planning, and financial planning.

Hobbies again was an area where opinions differed. I shared the fact that I know an interviewer (in a non-library sphere) who regards the hobbies section as merely light relief and totally ignores it when deciding on candidates, while others disagreed and thought it worth including. However, most of the group expressed a preference for the word “interests” or “activities” rather than “hobbies”, which seemed juvenile.

• Unusual interests or activites might stick out in an employer’s mind and set you apart from the crowd.
• Some activities will be a good way of garnering transferable skills, and particularly at the beginning of a career may be a way of demonstrating that you have experience which you wouldn’t have been able to gain in a work environment yet.
• A lot of people agreed that it wasn’t worth putting “reading” as an activity!

Another interesting point of debate was where to put the skills/qualities that the organisation listed as “essential” and those listed as “desirable”. Some people argued that their employers would assume that every application would have the “essential” qualities, and would use the “desirable” qualities as a way of filtering through the hundreds of applications received. There seemed to be no general consensus as to how to tell what criteria an employer would use when looking through applications, and various people described the criteria they knew their workplaces used, which were all different.

Questions about more specific information were also raised, and some good advice was shared.

• Reasons for leaving your current/past posts – this should sound positive, even if you hate your job and you’re desperate to leave! Suggestions included “looking for a new challenge/greater responsibility”, “I have exhausted all the development opportunities available” and one person even stated that they’d got the job when their response had been “to earn more money”!!
• Expected salary – you don’t want to price yourself out the market, nor do you want to devalue yourself. However, CILIP was suggested as a good place to get advice on this.

Interview tips and suggestions

• Nerves a problem? Do you clam up or waffle uncontrollably? There’s plenty of advice on public speaking which is relevant to you. Deep breathing, speaking slowly, and not immediately launching into an answer will all help.
• Practice interviews – get friends/partners/colleagues to practice interviewing you, and ask them to critique your performance.The more times you immerse yourself in this sort of situation, the more prepared you’ll be for when it happens for real.
• Don’t forget you’re being judged from the moment you set foot on the premises. This can include the library tour, which will probably be conducted by either a potential colleague or junior – they will probably have input in the final decision!
• There’s often no consistency in either size of interview panel or level of expertise. You may be interviewed by people who don’t use the library, let alone work in it. Don’t be thrown by this!
• Blind them with expertise! You can always explain further if they ask, but feel free to throw in all those wonderful library buzzwords, like RDA, digitisation and bibliometrics – assuming you know what you’re talking about!
• Don’t assume they’ve read your application – but don’t be surprised if they have and want to ask about something in it. (NB It helps if you haven’t stretched the truth too far in your CV…)

Interview questions

• If you’ve been asked a tricky or in-depth question, ask the panel for time to think about your answer. There’s no need to rush!
• One librarian said she always took a notebook in with her to interviews, where she’d readily have the information that would be difficult to recall, e.g. exact dates/salaries of old jobs.
• It’s worth having prepared answers for typical questions. These often involve “state a situation where this happened; how did you respond?” – like time management, teamwork, difficult situations or conflict resolution or demonstrating initiative.
• One person recommended using the structure STAR to answer this type of question: Situation, Task, Action, Result.
• Don’t be afraid to ask if you’ve answered their question satisfactorily. This is a good tip particularly for people with a tendency to waffle or get sidetracked.

Other general interview issues

• Be prepared to face your competitors. Some people said they’d been interviewed as a group with the other candidates, while one person said she’d received a tongue-lashing from an unemployed candidate when she was going for a job whilst currently employed.
• It can be hard to walk the line between being professional and friendly. I found this with my recent interview, relaxing a bit too far and making a joke which went down like a lead balloon. On the other hand, if they do not feel at ease with you, then maybe it’s not the right place for you?
• Ultimately, the interview is a two-way process. They want to see if you’ll be a good fit for them, but you also need to see if you’re going to be happy and productive there. Ask questions!
• Always ask for feedback! It might be that they were looking for someone different, or that there are things you can work on to improve your chances next time.
• Don’t berate yourself if it went wrong. Chances are it wasn’t as bad as you think, and the competition is often very fierce in this profession. Draw as much as you can from the experience and make sure you do better next time!

Finally there was a bit of discussion regarding LinkedIn and its relevance to the profession. Again there was a lot of difference in opinion; those who used it found it generally useful for some things, while those who didn’t use it didn’t feel like they were missing out on anything.

• It could show dedication to your career, and a professional interest in the potential job.
• It is a good way of looking up information about the interview panel. If nothing else, it’s nice to know what they look like in advance!
• If you use LinkedIn, make sure your profile looks good, because chances are potential employers will be looking at it.
• Privacy settings – it’s worth thinking about this in every aspect of social media. If you search your name online, what will come up first? Your LinkedIn profile, your CV, your professional career, or those pictures on Facebook of you dancing on the table and upchucking behind the plastic palm tree in that club in Ibiza?

As I said, lots of advice! I particularly liked the use of the notebook – after all, I don’t remember everything about my career parrot fashion, and you can look really stupid if you’re just falling over the fact that you don’t remember if it was March or April in 2002 that you started work!

Here endeth my final blogpost on Library Camp East. Phew! Does anyone else have advice about CVs and interviews they'd like to share?