Dealing with labor shortages

Citation

Holt, G. (2000), "Dealing with labor shortages", The Bottom Line, Vol. 13 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2000.17013dab.001

Dealing with labor shortages

Dealing with labor shortages

Keywords Employers, Employment, Labour market, Benefits, Compensation, Training

Introduction

At meetings where librarians gather, conversations almost always turn to the problems of recruitment and retention of qualified staff. In such a conversation at a recent ALA convention, one library director proclaimed that she has 22 professional and high-level paraprofessional vacancies in her medium-size public library. Some slots have been vacant for more than a year. Another director noted that her institution recruits constantly for staff at all levels. She reported that she was unable to hire as many qualified staff as she needs. A third said that in the next five years, her institution will lose almost all of its professional staff through retirement, and she is certain she would not be able to replace them with staff who have comparable skills. A fourth, the director of a large library, asserted that even though he has raised salaries "dramatically," he cannot hire the staff he needs at any, but the low, unskilled levels. The fifth, the head of a university library, talked about how he had divided up previous professional library duties and handed them in smaller pieces to graduate students "who fortunately have to work cheap." He ensured quality through tight supervision by a librarian. A sixth, throwing up her hands, proclaimed dramatically that, because of a shortage of library professionals, "we are witnessing the end of librarianship as we know it."

The library labor shortage is hardly new. Throughout the last decade, those who attempted to hire cataloguers, children's librarians, school media specialists and MLS managers for small and rural libraries have faced continuing or growing professional shortages. Had representatives of these organizations and specialties been involved in the convention conversation, they might well have asked, "What else is new?" Because those shortages continue and grow worse, many library governing bodies and administrators are changing their recruitment and retention strategies. The remainder of this column is about how libraries, my library in particular, have been dealing with the current, hot staff market.

Recruitment of professionals

Not long ago one of my branch managers called to tell me that the director of another close-by library district was visiting SLPL's library branches openly recruiting staff, especially professionals. I was both amused and flattered. I felt like the college basketball coach who had recruited and trained a star-quality team that another coach had to steal away rather than developing equally high-quality stars in the other system. Although crude in its nature, this simplistic recruitment mechanism demonstrates how cross-system recruitment has become commonplace. Far more effective recruitment tactics exist.

Enhanced visibility

My library's first tool for recruitment of both new and experienced library professionals is our national visibility. I encourage staff to give papers and become active in professional work at national and regional library conferences. My administrative officers, some of my board members and I write and publish in our library specialties. Nearly all of us have had the post-conference speech experience of being asked about job openings or receiving an offer to send an up-to-date resume. Frequently experienced professionals, along with being tired of a current job, want to move back to our region of the country for personal and family reasons. We find this latter group to be excellent candidates and relatively easy to hire. The post-convention speech conversation is an excellent beginning for staff recruitment.

Proactive recruiting presence

Often those libraries least needing staff are the most active in recruitment at ALA conventions. Our human resources staff does preliminary screening of candidates on the spot. If such screening produces a quality candidate for an opening we need to fill quickly, a call can be made to a professional staff member who can conduct a first interview at the conference. Between conferences and before out-of-town visits, we frequently use telephone interviews, usually with multiple staff on our end, to see if we want the potential hire to visit our system.

Visits to library schools

For nearly a decade now, we have supplemented our convention recruitment with regular visits to the library schools that produce the quality candidates we seek to employ. Usually the visitor is a member of our human resources staff. We occasionally send a professional staff member, especially if it seems possible that we might want to conduct a first interview with a specific candidate. We often make library school visits even if we do not have job openings. These visits help make our institution more visible nationally and this helps recruitment. Several times in years past, these visits have produced possible candidates whom we later hired.

Local recruitment

Organization visits and mentoring

A large number of our staff at all levels is active in neighborhood and community organizations. Encouraging them to offer the names of candidates or to issue invitations to friends and associates to complete library job applications helps our recruitment enormously. One of our lead workers on our housekeeping staff started telling members of his church about the benefits and fun of working for the library. Soon, we had a steady stream of applicants from his religious organization. One of our support professionals is active in a high school mentoring program. Both volunteers and part-time shelvers have come out of that association.

Outreach

An active library outreach program also aids in recruitment. During outreach visits to daycare centers, school classrooms and senior centers, staff at these institutions have the opportunity to watch our staff in action and to talk with them about library jobs. Daycare and school classroom visits are among SLPL's best source for names of potential recruits.

Part-time workers

University libraries for decades have operated with large numbers of part-time student workers. Increasingly public, special and school libraries are also using part-timers. At SLPL, we have turned to area colleges and universities where we have found many students who have free time when we need staff. Since we pay more than traditional minimum-wage on-campus jobs, we tend to recruit very good workers from this pool. Intriguingly, a couple of them have become librarians.

Minority recruitment

Close association with minority-focused organizations like the Urban League, Black Expo and the African Arts Festival helps create good visibility among many potential African-American job seekers. These contacts, plus a substantial benefits package, on-the-job training, and the chance for quick advancement have kept SLPL's minority staff at around 46 percent, or at about the same percentage as our city population. Our minority professional staff remains consistently over 20 percent, well above the national average for libraries our size.

Volunteers

Volunteers should never become a source for tasks that need to be handled by regular staff. They, however, can play important roles in library work lives. Our volunteer cadre serves as decent tour guides for our central library building; former media professionals volunteer to help arrange and identify the institution's media archives; and teen volunteers help make kids feel comfortable and use the library effectively. Volunteer recruitment is a special art, one that it is well worth any library system learning.

What to say and how to say it

Communication training

We happened on another tactic that aids in recruitment as we prepared for our two tax campaigns. In the course of that preparation, we trained dozens of staff to present the institution's work in quick and effective sound bites. Out of this training came agreement on simple "positive points," which all of us could use to convey quickly our institutional strengths and the attractions that might win new employees to our organization.

Recruitment of new immigrants

Libraries that cater to large foreign-born populations discover that members of those ethnic and racial groups often find library employment very attractive. Queens Borough (NY) Public Library, for example, has found recent immigrants a good staffing source and one that has the additional advantage of being able to work easily with new immigrant groups.

Benefits

The benefits area is one place in which a public-sector institution can often compete with private-sector employers and with other library systems that pay higher salaries.

Insurance

Fully paid medical, dental and at least some mental health benefits are a powerful incentive to take library jobs. So, too, is a solidly funded retirement system with immediate or quick vesting. These programs can attract more experienced staff as well as first-job candidates to a library job.

Paid leave

Substantial vacation, sick-leave and personal/family-leave benefits are valued, because they provide the staff member more free time and more flexibility in handling personal and family issues. Each are an excellent recruitment and retention tool.

Paid vacations

All SLPL staff quickly move to a 22-work-day paid vacation soon after their hire. For those working under a "two weeks forever" vacation policy, a month-long paid vacation can be a powerful recruiting incentive, even if salary is somewhat higher elsewhere.

Paid travel

Paid travel to conventions and conferences for purpose of education and program participation is a greatly appreciated benefit. This tool has been one of our most helpful in recruiting ambitious young professionals who are looking for a job where they can train to move on to bigger things.

Working conditions

Flex time

Flex time has become an organizational mantra to improve the work of library staff. We have found flex time effective only to a limited degree, however, because we need librarian managers on the job during most of our open hours. Somebody has to tend the store, even if the store is a one-person library. Our technical services department has a good deal of flex time and the policy has helped both recruitment and retention.

Job sharing

Job sharing is another innovation that can serve libraries well. Most staff see it as a natural extension of traditional cooperative library work processes. The sticky issue in such alliances almost always is "Who gets the benefits?" Recent state and federal law usually suggests that the answer to that question is "everybody." Job sharing is a tricky strategy, but one well worth considering in a tight job market.

Team organization of work

Those who read management literature know that teams just now are being put forward as having nearly a mystical quality to solve work problems. In some library work settings, teams work well and most staff like to be part of successful teams. A good deal of SLPL children's work is carried out by work teams. Frequently these operate on the old team-teaching principles that were introduced into elementary and secondary education in the 1960s. The principle was intellectual work divided by skill and education with everyone cooperating for a best fit of their efforts to teaching and advising.

Technology has enhanced team work

Aided by our Intranet and the skills of our online database searchers, we are moving quickly to "team reference." Work-handling teams also are helpful on tasks ranging from custodial and maintenance through the organization of library reference. Just like closely supervised employees, however, successful teams need definite goals and appropriate connections with the rest of the working organization.

Salaries

Starting salaries

As almost anyone who reads much management literature knows, there is almost no evidence that raising salaries improves job performance. However, higher starting salaries do attract higher quality job applicants than do lower salaries.

Adjustments to "market basket"

SLPL does not attempt to pay the highest salaries in the region. We, however, do adjust salary categories annually to a "market basket" of items that indicate cost of living. We also check salaries paid by other libraries, other not-for-profits and, in some cases, private-sector companies as well. Our research allows us to legitimately boost the tops of job classifications, thereby extending the ability of outstanding staff members to receive additional compensation for their outstanding work.

Commensurate salary levels

At some point, all library directors have to face the current reality that professionals in areas like HR, finance and computer services operate in different salary marketplaces than do public and most private-sector librarians. The recent surge in librarian salaries has removed some of these inequities, but not all by any means. Deciding how to handle this set of issues is never easy.

Merit salary increases

Merit salary is a tool used by less than 5 percent of all US libraries. Often controversial because of the implications for those who do not score at the top of the merit scales, merit systems work well in systems that have developed support for them. Essential to the process is having trained staff to use the system and allowing sufficient oversight in place to ensure that the systems work.

Redefining work and who will do it

Redefining work

When the USA entered the Industrial Revolution, the nation lacked skilled workers. One solution was the invention of the "semi-skilled worker." As part of this invention, skilled craft processes were broken down and standardized, allowing persons with less skill and shorter training to do them. As can be imagined, skilled artisans resisted, yet could not stop this transformation. Eventually the USA became the world's capital for semi-skilled workplaces.

Skill-short libraries today are in the same situation. And, as they face mounting staff shortages, we can see the same "down-skilling" and "up-skilling" processes as occurred more than a century ago in the Industrial Revolution. Clerks now do what paraprofessionals did and the latter group do what some librarians did. Professional library work is becoming increasingly intellectual and managerial. The change-over already has affected work in many larger libraries.

Part-time workers

Another mechanism is to create new categories that can be filled by part-time workers. For SLPL, two of these, technology assistants (who help patrons use and learn about computers and searching) and homework helpers (who play "the mom role" to help kids with their school assignments), have been especially successful. Nearly all of the employees in these categories are part-timers from area colleges. With our model, it is convenient and fun for them to work for St Louis Public Library.

Staff sharing

Cross-institution staff sharing also can be effective. One of our branch librarians works half time for SLPL and half-time for EBSCO's NoveList writing book discussion materials. Discussions are under way with other institutions to share the talents of our best staff with other institutions rather than assigning them work that does not match their considerable talents and training. As public libraries move to 24 7 virtual reference, we will see more cross-institutional staff sharing.

Contracted skills

As all of us learn better how to use our networked connectivity, we will find it cheaper to contract out the answering of some reference questions rather than trying to answer all with our own institutional staff. Consider how many botanical reference questions a public library could have answered if it set a virtual reference budget of one librarian's salary of $40,000 and paid $4 or even $8 per answer.

Outsourcing

Inevitably, such issues raise the greater issue of outsourcing. A striking fact is how much most libraries already rely on outsourcing. Applications include database creators, catalogers, automation system developers, and operations for purchasing and payroll functions, only to name a few categories. As library labor shortages continue, outsourcing is bound to increase.

Training

Changing technology, shifting university costing strategies and the continuing shortage of library staff is transforming library training.

Library school outreach

Some library schools, like the University of Missouri at Columbia, have loosened their residency requirements and adjusted their off-campus MLS class schedule. As other library schools make similar changes, libraries everywhere will have more professional training opportunities. And, that means the supply of professional librarians will increase.

Distance education

Distance education is bringing the same result. The largest distance education program in US library science is delivered by Florida State University. This carefully structured MLS degree program has 250 on-campus residents and 250 students studying via networked computers. Such programs build on a long distance-education tradition, one carved out by library schools like Rutgers and Emporia State before the age of networked computing. When the cost differentials between residents and non-residents of the states are adjusted equitably, the FSU program and others like it will become the first "national" LIS programs.

Changes in library in-service

The labor shortage has transformed many library training programs. One change is libraries offer more training. Where SLPL had a few courses, now it has a couple of dozen, including intensive and extensive training in use of networked computers. Our library has hired an adult education/curriculum writer to provide professional leadership to our institutional training program. This initiative harkens to an earlier time more than half a century ago when larger libraries operated extensive training and certification programs to produce the staff they needed. As our institution returns to its past, we have begun to talk about our training program as sufficiently comprehensive as to designate it SLPL University. Our SLPL-U program has one other dimension, which is a scholarship program that aids staff to finish their bachelor's degree and to undertake and complete their MLS. This is one more way we get the quality staff we need.

Conclusion

The competitive labor market has hastened shifts in recruitment, work, working conditions, training and professional education. It is easy to predict still more changes in the way libraries deal with labor shortages. It is impossible to predict the nuances and the direction of these programs as libraries continue their long heritage of adaptation to changing conditions. These changes do not mean "the end of the librarianship as we know it," but they will result in a vastly transformed world of library professional education and staff training.

Glen HoltExecutive Director of the St. Louis Public Library, St Louis, Missouri, USA