Interviews, Success Stories

Jonathan Harrison …Success Story

My interview with success story, Jonathan

Naomi:  How did you find your current job?
Jonathan:  Scouring my current workplace’s job page.  Already being a worker, even though I was quarter time, got me an interview which lead to me being hired.

Naomi:  Favorite library you have been to?
Jonathan:  I would say the downtown public library in Nashville TN.  I worked there for a year and half but the classic beauty of the building never got old.

Naomi:  Favorite book?
Jonathan:  All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Naomi:  Favorite thing about libraries/ library technology?
Jonathan:  Personally I love physical books.  I wish I could live in an age where they were the only source of information, but I realize that’s more or less a pipe dream.

Naomi:  Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Jonathan:  INALJ seems to be the most comprehensive job feed that I could find, but I also searched libgig quite frequently and any library/information job page in my general area.

Naomi:  Best piece of job hunting advice?
Jonathan:  I think every job searcher should read  “Know the Difference: Identifying Obstacles to Employment by Ellen Mehling” an article that was posted on INALJ a few months back. A sense of entitlement destroyed my job search in the beginning, but when I learned I deserved nothing I started to see consistent results.   Also before every interview, I would ask myself “What is everyone else not doing?” and then I would try to do it.  I started sending thank you notes to employers for reviewing my application and by my last month of job searching I was averaging two interviews a week.  For my current position’s second interview, I wrote a six month strategic plan which I’m pretty sure earned me the position.

I graduated with an English degree from Lipscomb University in 2007.  After teaching English in China for a few months,  I worked retail for two years before deciding that I needed a career path, so I decided to earn my MLIS from Florida State University entirely online.  I graduated in December 2011.  After eight or nine months job searching, I found a position as an assessment manager at my alma mater, and I’ve been working there for a little over a month.

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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