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Feed your RSS Reader – Blogs to follow for career advice

by Mary-Michelle Moore, Head Editor, INALJ Vermont

Feed your RSS Reader – Blogs to follow for career advice

mmoore_headshotJust because Google Reader is shutting down is no reason not to keep cultivating new RSS feeds for resume, cover letter and general interview advice.  When I graduated from high school, I was told to always tell hiring managers my biggest flaw was I was a perfectionist and that “nervous” and “excited” read as the same emotion to the person interviewing you – so remember, you’re not nervous, you’re excited.  There’s much more information out there now!  Below are five of my current favorites.  I was going to include one more: Open Cover Letters (http://opencoverletters.com/) but Lauren Arnsman, Head Editor, Puerto Rico beat me to it, read her review of them here: http://inalj.com/?p=10469!
On Hiring – The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/

1On Hiring is a daily blog put out by ten authors from a variety of academic backgrounds.  Their entries provide insights on how to handle rejections gracefully, the importance of word choice and other hints and encouragements on how to navigate hiring practices in academia.  On some college and university campuses where librarians have faculty status it’s useful to have an idea of what you may be getting yourself into as well as what hoops your faculty patrons had to navigate.

 

Hiring Librarians – http://hiringlibrarians.com/

1Started when she was “frustrated job-hunting librarian,” Emily Weak sent out a survey to the librarians who do the hiring to ask what they look for in a candidate.  Recently, they’ve started adding interviews with job hunters as well.  This has been a wonderful resource for seeing some of the reasoning and needs of the person on the other side of the interview table.  Don’t just take my word for it; Emily Weak was a subject of an INALJ In Six interview last year: http://inalj.com/?p=2287
Career Q&A with the Library Career People – LIS Jobs  http://www.lisjobs.com/careerqa_blog/

1Originally a recurring column in Library Career Trends Newsletter, Career Q&A has been a blog since 2007.  They respond to reader’s questions within the blog and their advice is always incredibly useful.  If you are shy about asking a question in a public forum you can mine their archive of past posts that are arranged in useful categories including ones specifically for resumes and library school.

 

Library Journal – Careers  http://lj.libraryjournal.com/category/careers/

1Library Journal Careers includes interviews with the annual Movers & Shakers as well as interesting library professionals who discuss their current projects, advice and a great place to look for links to interesting trends in the library world.
Ask a Manager – http://www.askamanager.org/

1Alison Green is a consultant who used to work as a manager responsible for “hiring, firing, promotion, managing, all of that.” She blogs about everything from candidate behavior to advice on how to accept criticism gracefully and admitting to mistakes at work.  The breadth of her information is wonderful and her advice is delivered in a wonderful conversational tone that makes it easy to read and reflect on.

 

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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