Get Ready For Your Job Interview!

This page is intended as a resource/place to share questions from interviews in library, archival and information organizations, in the spirit of helping your peers in their job search! The focus is mainly on questions directly related to the professtions (theory and practice). The page is divided into sections. Please feel free to share your interview experiences with all SLAISers. Thanks in advance to all contributors.

General interview questions:

• Think about a team project you were part of. What issues did you have and how did you deal with them?
• Can you tell me about a time when you had more time than you needed?
• Can you describe a time when you had to assert yourself in a job?
• Can you describe a job situation where attention to detail was important?
• Please describe in detail your capabilities with insert name of software program here . (In my interview they asked about Access, which was mentioned in the job ad, and Excel, which was not.)
• How did you prepare for this interview?
• Describe what makes you the ideal candidate for this job.
• Is there anything else you would like us to know about you?

Interview questions specific to libraries:

General

• Describe a time when you had to deal with a difficult patron.

Cataloguing and Indexing

• What do you think about Google and Cataloguing. With Google around, do we still need cataloguing?
• What standards are you using in indexing?
• What kind of indexing are you exposed to? (i.e. back of the book, facets, word index, ….)
• Describe the relationship between RAD and AACR2. What do you think about them and do you think they can they be merged?
• What are the challenges in cataloguing digital content?
  How would you go about assigning subject headings to materials?
• In special libraries, we create our own rules for cataloguing materials. How would you go about creating cataloguing rules?
• Tell me how you would create a controlled vocabulary.

Reference

• Various scenario questions (e.g. What resources would you use if a student needed to find the price of coffee over time?)

Academic:

• How would you prepare for teaching a session?
• What is your philosophy for teaching adult learners?
• What experience do you have providing email and chat reference and how do you think these services differ from in-person reference?
• You are asked to update an online research guide. How would you proceed?
• Explain how your work experience, academic background and interests have prepared you for providing reference service in all subject areas.
• Describe a time when a patron was upset about a library policy and how you handled the situation.
• Give an example of a time when you had to show someone a resource you had never used before and how you handled this.
• It's the evening and you're the only person working at the reference desk. A faculty member comes to the reference desk upset and wanting to urgently speak to the University Librarian, who isn't in. There is a line-up and the phone is ringing. What do you do?

Special / Health

• Describe the process you would go through to conduct a systematic literature search.

Public

• If a teen asks you to recommend a good mystery novel what would you suggest?
• Which informational database do you think is the most useful for library users? Why?

Collection Management

• What is your experience with collection management? Describe a project you have been involved with.
• How would you go about weeding a collection?

Interview questions specific to archives:

Records Management

• What are the components of a records management program in a de-centralized environment?
• What experience do you have administering FOIPOP?
• If you were asked to update a classification, how would you start?

Archives

• This is not an interview question, but prior to the interview I was required to write a test. The test was to write RAD-compliant item-level descriptions for three photographs, without the use of RAD!
• How familiar are you with Canadian copyright law?
• How familiar are you with Canadian FOI legislation and it's application in an archives setting?
• What is your opinion on the addition of subject access points when most online archival descriptions are full-text searchable?
• Are you familiar with the BC Thesaurus?
• Do you think archives should accept copies of photographs from donors in lieu of the originals?

Other organization-specific questions:

An internship interview:

• How do you plan to take what you learn in your internship and share it with the wider world?