Where are all the job candidates?: geographic considerations for early career librarian recruitment in health sciences libraries

Anecdotal evidence suggests that hiring managers and hiring committees are seeing small numbers of applicants for vacancies at their health sciences libraries, making recruitment difficult. Several challenges are often cited for this, but little has been said about geographic considerations. Our objective was to analyze early career health sciences job postings in the United States for one year, and identify any geographic disparities relevant to recruitment. We explored medical and health science librarian job postings from MLA's website, ALA's joblist, medlib-l, and caucus listservs, which were compiled from January to December 2023. Early career postings were determined based on predefined criteria. Based on the medical/health science librarian job postings from 2023, there were 216 total postings including 105 early career positions (requiring one year or less of experience), reflecting approximately 49% of all job postings during this period. A plurality of early career postings (27%) were located in the Mid-Atlantic region while the fewest (5%) were from the Mountain West. Researchers analyzed the early career postings finding that instruction (67%) and reference (58%) duties were most prominent. Geography is important, as a new LIS graduate living in a region with fewer opportunities may be forced to move in order to obtain a medical library position, and optimal approaches to recruitment will vary depending on the employer's location. As this highlights just one aspect of the challenge, there are further research directions that may be taken from this analysis.