Tag Archives: hiring

Check it Out:, CMLE

We’re Hiring! Work With CMLE as a Part-Time School Library Contractor

We are looking to hire a part-time (10-15 hours per week) contractor to work with us through mid-June of 2021. We’re looking for someone familiar with K-12 schools in Minnesota who can help us connect our library services with the needs of our member school libraries.

You can get more information in the full posting here, but these are some of the qualities we are looking for in our contractor:

  • Someone who can move fast, identify problems, and help us to come up with solutions for our members. 
  • This job will require someone with experience in schools, and preferably in school libraries/media centers. 
  • We need someone who is a good communicator – online and in person, when necessary. 

We will work to keep in-person contacts to a minimum, in accordance with best practices and guidelines for working during the pandemic. 

The contractor will meet regularly with CMLE staff, to report on progress, clarify expectations, ask questions, and discuss plans.

Hourly pay: $20

Applicants for this position should submit a resume and a cover letter. Send your application to Mary Jordan: mary@cmle.org.

Please see our full posting for more information.

Check this out:, General, Training

How do you get a job?? (Hiring Series #6)

hiring
It’s so hard for everyone!

It’s a perpetual problem: Employers complain there are no good candidates applying for their jobs, and job hunters complain there are no good jobs.

Job hunting is just hard. Sorry. There are not going to be any easy strategies here, because they do not exist!

Don’t panic! We do have some suggestions from CMLE on ways you can get started looking for a job, and how to get through the hunt.

For our purposes, I are assuming you want to work in a library, or a library-adjacent job: archive, museum, etc. First: who would want to work anywhere else?? Second: you are part of a pretty specialized audience, reading a library system’s material. So I am just going to talk about libraries here; but if you know someone else who is job hunting in another area (gasp!), the advice will probably carry over to them. Continue reading How do you get a job?? (Hiring Series #6) →

Check this out:, CMLE, General, Resources, Training

Planning for your successor (Hiring series #4)

hiring
Who do we hire next??

Have you ever started a job and had no idea what you were supposed to do? Have you tried to hire someone, and realized you have no good direction on where to start finding a qualified replacement?

Where are the pens kept? How do you file a report? Who does the scheduling? When everything is new and different, even the most basic things are a challenge. And when an employee is trying to get through the basics, s/he is not focusing in on getting to the important parts of the job.

Every job should have some level of succession planning in place. Employees may move, get promoted, or abruptly depart from their jobs for all kinds of reasons, either permanently or temporarily. Having some basic procedures to help the next person will make the transition easier on everyone. For most jobs in the library this can be fairly minimal. It is a good idea to have everyone make some notes about their work and the things they do each day, each week, or annually. (Sometimes this request stirs up fears in employees that they are going to be replaced. Managers: be quick to reassure them this is not the case!)  These will be useful if an employee has to be out of work for a couple of weeks, or if they win the lottery and depart without notice. (Who could blame them??) Continue reading Planning for your successor (Hiring series #4) →

Check this out:, CMLE, General, Resources, Services, Training

Recruiting to hire good people (Hiring Series #3)

hiring
We need to get them to us before we can hire great employees!

Part of hiring great people is making sure that they are applying to your library! Without a pool of good candidates, you can’t make good people appear.

How do you get these good people? Like so many things: you need a plan. A solid recruiting plan will help you to bring in the good applicants, and give you the best kind of hard choice to make when hiring – picking among people who would all be good in your library.

It sounds hard. Where will you get the time? How will you know if it is working? What kinds of decisions should you be making?

CMLE is here to help you! We will walk through the basic steps of creating a plan here, so you can start working on your own plan for your library. Then, we are here to work with members to finalize their plans, to make decisions, and to help with the evaluation. Continue reading Recruiting to hire good people (Hiring Series #3) →

Academic, Check this out:, CMLE, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Special

Giving and receiving: Performance Appraisals (Hiring Series #2)

performance-appraisals
It’s a conversation!

Everyone dreads this. It’s hard, as an employee, to have your performance judged – even when the result is good news. And it’s hard, as a manager, to have to come up with insightful things to say about everyone’s work without constantly repeating yourself.

So is it still valuable to go through the process? For most people: yes!

Ideally, a performance appraisal is not a time to talk about problems – though those should be addressed. When there are performance issues during the year, those can be addressed in the moment and dealt with at the time. They should not build up to wait for the annual review. Instead it is a time for people to reflect on their past performance,  and to think about what they want to do over the next year. It is an opportunity to take time out of a hectic schedule, or one that has a lot of repetition from day-to-day and week-to-week, and to see, think, and do some self-evaluation.

Continue reading Giving and receiving: Performance Appraisals (Hiring Series #2) →