Both as it runs up to openings of new facilities and as an ongoing part of operations, LCPL frequently hires new staff at all levels. We relied primarily on older, pre-approved questions that explored skills and experience that were becoming less important in library service today, and may have ignored newer aspects of our mission. In addition, persons interviewing for positions were frequently asked questions that they had heard before during previous recruitments. Also, we believed that our available questions should align closely with our areas of strategic focus, as defined by the Director and senior management.

To develop a flexible, extensive, and relevant set of questions, a committee researched best practices, drew open-source questions from a variety of sources, and worked with staff throughout the library to enhance our working pool of questions with contemporary, experience-based questions. The committee tagged each question to match with the library’s areas of strategic focus. The questions were then made available to hiring managers to select questions for interviews. Lastly, we developed a technique for crowdsourcing feedback on the usefulness of questions so that future refinement would be based on the experience of interviewers throughout the library.

We have achieved a much more varied, mission-focused and contemporary set of questions available for managers to use. This has led to efficiency in the recruitment process as well as the recruitment of many exceptional new staff. We have found that the questions will need periodic revision based on changes to the strategic plan and the mission, changes to duties of the library positions, and changes in the communities we serve. We will also need to revisit the questions (and the tagging) to reduce the number of highly similar questions and to reveal topic areas that are underserved.