Stop letting in the stupid people.

 This post is the first in a series as I examine what, I believe, will improve the library world, libraries, and librarians. 

I know, the title of this post is harsh.  It's meant to be.  Maybe it'll cause people to sit up and take notice. 

A few years back I was having a conversation with a few Google employees on how they got hired there, what the interview process was like and what it was like to work there.  Most interesting in our conversation was their discussion of Google’s unwritten policy to not hire stupid people.  This seems pretty basic.  Everyone can agree that regardless of the field of work, we’d be better off if smarter people were hired over less intelligent people.  Let’s break this down for a second, though, why is this decision to not hire stupid people so important? 

As I see it, there are a few good reasons.  First, the stupid employee just doesn’t do their job as well as someone who is smarter, someone who communicates better, someone who grasps concepts faster, someone who understands problems and comes up with solutions.  Your organization suffers because of the weak link.  Second, and I’ve seen this up close and personally, it is very difficult to get rid of an employee once their hired.  You’re documenting and documenting and documenting their missteps and still you’re worried that if you do fire them that they’ll want to collect unemployment or they’ll sue you for wrongful termination.  Third, it is such a waste of time and resources to manage a problem employee.  A manager can spend so much of their day fielding issues from a problem employee, hours that could have been spent doing something far more productive than cleaning up someone’s messes or documenting someone’s problems.  Fourth, and this was straight from the mouth of a google employee: stupid people hire more stupid people, further perpetuating the problem. 

Of course, all of the reasoning above is self explanatory.  What isn’t quite so easy to digest is HOW do you prevent stupid people from not only entering your library but also the library field in general.

As I see it, right now graduate school is just a tool for employers to weed out candidates.  If the job requires an MLS/MLIS, that’s a way to automatically filter out a portion of the population from even applying.  That’s fine.  There are already a lot of librarians looking for work; I understand that if the degree requirements weren’t there that we would be absolutely flooded with candidates.  By making the requirement that you need the degree you filter out those people who aren’t really serious about the profession or those who can’t, intellectually, pass muster to do the work required.  I understand all of that;  however, there is a problem to this logic:  the degree isn’t that difficult to get in the first place.  To make that job requirement really mean something, we have got to make people work for their degrees.  We need to make the degree mean something.  In short, we have got to make these degrees harder. 

Through my own experiences and through speaking with other recent graduates from 3 other different schools here in the northeast, we all walked away with the same impression: “my undergraduate education was more difficult than my graduate degree.”  This is a problem.  That means that a graduate degree is not doing its job to weed out the weak candidates.  I want to work, I want to be challenged.  I want something harder than what I got.  This may sound terrible but I want people to drop out of the program when they realize that it is more difficult than shelving books according to the Dewey Decimal System.  I want professors who are going to challenge me, who aren’t just going to pass everyone along with an A.  I want more difficult classes on technology, computer programming, management.  I want to learn more about advocacy, marketing, research, metadata.  I want to learn more about RDA, and about the theory behind it. 

There are a lot of things that I learned in graduate school courses that I could have learned on the job.  What a wasted opportunity.  There is so much that you could learn in graduate school that would make you a better candidate for a wider breadth of jobs, but they’re simply not teaching these courses or these skills.  We need to reexamine our graduate schools, what they’re teaching, how their teaching and how they are preparing our future librarians.  This is where we start the process of gaining quality employees who are going to revolutionize this field.  Currently, graduate school is not the filter for the job market that we think it is or should be.  It’s not weeding out the candidates who can’t do the work, what it’s doing, in actuality, is weeding out the candidates who couldn’t pay for a graduate education. 

Graduate school is prohibitively expensive.   I went to the cheapest possible graduate school because I was paying for it myself and I didn’t want a lot of student loans when I graduated.  It was a good decision on my part but I understand that even at $9,000 a year, which is what I paid for my education, this cost stops many qualified candidates from applying.  This isn’t fair that we have a degree requirement for some jobs when the degree is so easy to get for those who are financially qualified and so difficult to get for some people who are intellectually qualified but financially under-served.   If we want to raise the quality of our candidates, we need to think about boosting financial aid at graduate schools. 

Finally, employers need to up their game in the interview process.   Even if we cannot reform our graduate schools in the near future, managers need to be on the front lines making sure that we’re hiring the correct people.  We’ve got to overhaul our interview process.  I’ve been on a lot of interviews and found most of them wanting.  If you’re ready to hand over the keys to the building you better be 100% sure that you’re giving them to the right candidate.  Long and detailed interview processes take more time up front but will save an employer time in the long run when the correct candidate is hired.  We need multiple interviews for candidates with multiple people on interview panels.  We need strong interview questions that ask about competencies and past work experience.  I want to hear about what you’ve done in the past.  Past work experience is the best predictor of future success.  We need to see work samples.  People need to be put in trial situations before we commit to a hire.  It sounds like a lot but it is the only way of knowing for sure that someone is a good fit for the position.  If we’re going to go through the trouble of hiring someone new, we need to make sure that person is going to add to our organization not detract from it. 

None of this is rocket science, I doubt that I’m saying anything new.   However, as new positions become available in libraries, we have a tremendous opportunity to fill these positions with great people, outstanding people.  If we hire correctly  from a strong pool of applicants who were correctly vetted through graduate school we are going to have people who are going change the face of librarianship, who are going to be so smart and so good at their jobs that people sit up and take notice and it is going to be those people who will lead us forward.  We have a tremendous opportunity.  I just hope that we don’t waste it following the same paths that lead us down here in the first place.