The Accidental Human Resources Manager

The premise is about being an accidental HR and hiring manager for library staff and directors. Vanessa is going to be talking about hiring practices, and the benefits of working with municipal HR. Vanessa and I have a good working relationship in our respective roles. My role is Library Director role would be to talk to the library side of HR – how working with municipal HR can benefit the hiring process, how it helps fill in the gaps, the importance of relationship building with municipal officials. Vanessa and I did a similar presentation at the Massachusetts Library Association conference in 2022. Our session was fully booked, with many of the questions spilling out into the hallway after it was done. We want to specifically discuss recruitment/hiring practices for people getting started (we call this 'Recruitment 101') right at the beginning of the presentation before moving into specific things like job descriptions and how to advocate for new positions. We want to offer this again 'by popular demand' since so many people were interested. It's clear people getting started in management find this presentation helpful and can use a variety of the discussion outcomes in their individual libraries. We have our previous presentation in Powerpoint, which I can make available if you'd like to review. I don't think this has ever been offered at a NELA conference, so we're hoping this could help a wider audience.