NOCALL Officers & Committees

PLACEMENT

Employment Listings

The mission of the NOCALL Placement Committee is to join prospective employers with job seekers of law librarian positions. Additionally, our mission is to promote law librarianship in the community at every opportunity.
In the interest of expediency and efficiency, most of the Placement Committee procedures are now electronic.  If a job seeker or employer does not have access to e-mail, alternative options are available.

Procedures for job seekers

1.  Subscribe to the NOCALL listserv.  If you do not know how to subscribe, the Chair will give you instructions.  By checking the listserv frequently, you will have immediate access to job announcements and you can decide for yourself which positions interest you and you can send your resume directly to the employer.  You are encouraged to enclose a cover letter mentioning that you saw the listing on the NOCALL listserv and offer a brief review of your qualifications (without repeating your resume) and what interests you about the job.

2.  Alternatively, if you do not have e-mail, but do have access to the Internet, check the job listings on our web page: www.nocall.org .  The positions are put up on the web page usually within 24 hours of the Placement chair’s posting of POSITION AVAILABLE on the listserv.

3.   If you have no access to a computer, call the Placement Chair. to indicate that you would like to send your resumes to be kept on file and to be sent out to prospective employers.  It is important to call the Placement chair not only to alert him/her to watch for your resumes, but also to get advice about the job market.

Procedures for prospective employers

1.  The swiftest way to have your position posted on the listserv and web page is to e-mail the announcement to the Chair placement@nocall.org.  The Chair can then cut and paste it into an email to post on the NOCALL listserv in less than two minutes.  If you would like your position posted on the Southern California Association of Law Libraries listserv or the national law librarians’ listserv, please indicate this.

2.  If you do not have e-mail, you may fax or mail the announcement to the Placement Chair.  Bear in mind that the announcement must be re-keyed, so the turnaround time will be longer.

3.   It is also possible to post the position in the newsletter, but timing is such a huge factor (deadlines and frequency of publication) that it is not always the most effective route.  The position listing should be sent by the Chair  to the Newsletter Chair, with a follow-up at publication deadline to indicate whether the position is still available.

4.   Please feel free to call the Placement chair. if you have any questions at all.  The Placement Committee welcomes the opportunity to discuss your situation and what a law librarian can do for you.

Procedures for the Committee

1.  Currently, the Placement Committee consists of two people. The Chair posts positions on the listserv and website and the Member posts positions on the San Jose State Jobs website.

2. The Chair should keep NOCALL listserv instructions on subscribing handy to send to job seekers. The Chair should acknowledge all requests from job seekers by e-mail or regular mail.  The Chair should acknowledge all announcements and questions from prospective employers by e-mail or regular mail. In any of these missives, the Chair will promote NOCALL and law librarianship.

3. The Chair should set up a uniform format for the position announcements on the listserv,  e.g. POSITION AVAILABLE on the subject line followed by two dashes and the city.  This will make it easy to search the NOCALL archives for previous announcements.

4. Keep a file of all position announcements and indicate when they are filled.

5. Encourage job seekers and employers to let you know when they find or fill a position.  This is necessary to keep reasonably accurate statistics. With electronic procedures, maintaining statistics becomes for difficult. However, I believe that we bring job seekers and employers together more quickly and the job seeker does not have to spend money sending many copies of resumes to the Chair who may exhaust the supply sending resumes out to positions that the candidate does not want.

6. The Committee should seize every opportunity to promote NOCALL and law librarianship to job seekers and employers.

Procedures to be implemented when there is time

1. Work with the liaison to the library school at San Jose State University and to the School of Information Systems at UC Berkeley to promote careers in law librarianship.  Travel to these schools with the liaison to give students a realistic picture of the job market and to promote the importance of a career in law librarianship to the schools’ faculties.

(Revised 3/2009)