Interview Questions

The current head of my department was recently hired over the summer, and while I wasn’t privy to all of the steps that went into hiring her, it was an intense process that lasted for several days, consisting of both one-on-one and group interviews, as well as a presentation. I would imagine that the interview process for the position at the UT-San Antonio Library would be something similar.

To interview a candidate for this position, I would begin by asking general questions about the applicant's education and current position, then move on to questions about the position they're interviewing for (including questions about collection development, ILS, digital libraries, budgeting, collaborative work, management style, communication skills), and finish with questions about the candidate’s long-term career plans. I would ask both open- and close-ended questions, as well as behavioral and traditional questions, and I would give them time in between questions to answer. (I would definitely *not* make this a stress test interview or ask all of my questions at the outset!)

To get an idea of what to ask, I looked at a list of some of the most frequently asked interview questions as reported by students at the University of South Carolina CLIS and by Ann's Place, and chose some of the ones that I thought would be useful for interviewing a candidate for this position. While I probably wouldn't ask all of the questions in the interest of time (and I would probably not be the only one interviewing the candidate for this type of position), I would ask some variation of them so that I would be able to get enough information to decide whether the applicant would be a good fit for the position and for the department. (Of course, I would also make sure that the applicant has a place to park, if s/he has a car, and that the applicants are provided with plenty of water, since they will likely be interviewed several times over the course of a day.)

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What courses in either college or graduate school did you find most satisfying? The least satisfying? Why?
3. How will your subject background and your coursework outside of library science aid you in this position?
4. How will your experiences outside of librarianship aid you in this position?
5. Tell me about your current position - What do you enjoy most about it?
6. What are some of the things that you feel you have done particularly well?
7. How do you define success?
8. What are some of the problems you encounter in doing your job? What do you usually do about it?
9. How have your present or past positions developed you to take on even greater responsibilities?
10. What is your experience with collection development?
11. How would you select and evaluate materials for the UTSA Library?
12. Please describe your experience with automated systems, in particular, an integrated library system. Do you have any experience with Exlibris?
13. Describe your knowledge of and/or experience with digital libraries.
14. What is your experience with budgeting? What do you see as the budget implications of the increasing use of electronic resources in libraries?
15. Describe a situation where you had to work collaboratively. What was your greatest challenge, and how did you handle it?
16. What role do you usually play in group or team interactions?
17. What kind of people do you enjoy working with the most? The least?
18. Describe a problem person you had to deal with. What did you say or do to improve the situation?
19. How would you describe your management style?
20. What do you look for in a supervisor?
21. How do you get people who have differing approaches to a problem to work together?
22. What experience do you have working with academic departments?
23. How do you set goals, and how do you work to achieve them? What important goals have you set in the past, and how successful have you been in working toward their accomplishment?
24. How would you rate your communication skills and what have you done to improve them?
25. What does “open communication” mean to you? When have you successfully used open communication?
26. How do you see collection development changing in the next five years?
27. How does this position fit into the career path you have set for yourself?