In academic libraries, first impressions carry enormous weight.
They shape how candidates are evaluated in interviews, how they are perceived during campus visits, how they are welcomed by faculty and staff, and how relationships with supervisors begin. They often influence decisions about “fit,” collegiality, leadership potential, and whether someone seems ready to succeed in a highly relational environment.
But first impressions are not neutral.
For neurodivergent librarians, they are often shaped by expectations that have little to do with intelligence, preparation, creativity, or long-term capacity for leadership. Instead, they are filtered through narrow and often unspoken norms around eye contact, tone, body language, pace of response, small talk, and social ease. In a profession that values inclusion, reflection, and access, that should give us pause.
Too often, academic library hiring and onboarding processes reward performance over substance. They privilege candidates who can quickly read the room, manage informal conversation, move smoothly between social contexts, and appear calm and confident in environments that may be sensory-heavy, ambiguous, or exhausting. Neurodivergent librarians may be fully qualified and deeply thoughtful, yet still be judged through a framework built around neurotypical comfort.
This is especially true during online interviews, which are often described as more inclusive because they reduce travel and allow candidates to remain at home. For some people, that is helpful. But virtual interviews are not automatically inclusive. In many cases, they simply shift the burden. They can intensify screen fatigue, auditory processing challenges, difficulty with turn-taking, the pressure to maintain camera-based attentiveness, and the exhausting demand to monitor one’s own face while also thinking clearly and answering questions. When institutions treat video performance as a proxy for professionalism, they reinforce exclusion rather than reduce it.
If academic libraries want to build genuinely inclusive hiring and onboarding practices, then awareness is not enough. We need practical changes. Below are five ways libraries can begin rethinking first impressions through a neurodiversity-informed lens.
1. Replace ambiguity with structure
Many academic library interviews rely on hidden expectations. Candidates are expected to infer how formal to be, how long to answer, whether conversational warmth matters more than precision, and how much of the day is evaluative versus informational. The same is true during onboarding, where new librarians may be expected to absorb institutional culture, read departmental dynamics, and build relationships without clear guidance.
For neurodivergent librarians, that ambiguity can create unnecessary stress. It can also distort performance, making a person seem less confident or less engaged when in reality they are devoting significant energy to decoding unclear expectations.
A more inclusive approach is to provide structure in advance. Search committees can share the schedule, the names and roles of participants, the format of each meeting, expectations for presentations or teaching demonstrations, and the general themes that will be discussed. Supervisors can do something similar during onboarding by providing written agendas, clarifying priorities, and outlining how communication and meetings typically work.
Example:
A library invites a candidate to a campus interview and sends a detailed itinerary in advance. The candidate knows who they will meet, when breaks will occur, what the presentation is meant to cover, and what kind of questions may arise in the teaching demonstration. This does not make the interview easier in any unfair sense. It makes the process more equitable by reducing guesswork and allowing the candidate to prepare around substance rather than uncertainty.
Structure does not lower standards. It gives candidates a clearer opportunity to demonstrate what they can actually do.
2. Stop confusing social performance with professional competence
Academic libraries often pride themselves on collegiality. But collegiality can become a vague and subjective measure that rewards familiarity over ability. A candidate who is socially polished in conversation may be perceived as stronger than a candidate who is more deliberate, less expressive, or slower to warm up, even when the latter has deeper ideas and stronger experience.
This is where first impressions can become especially harmful.
Neurodivergent candidates may communicate in ways that are easily misread. A pause before answering may be interpreted as uncertainty rather than careful thought. Reduced eye contact may be seen as disengagement rather than concentration. A direct communication style may be judged as overly blunt, while a flat or restrained affect may be misunderstood as a lack of enthusiasm.
These interpretations are not objective. They are shaped by expectations about how confidence, warmth, and intelligence are supposed to look.
Example:
During a committee interview, one candidate takes a few extra seconds before answering each question and does not engage much in small talk. Instead of treating those traits as red flags, the committee evaluates the actual content of the responses. They notice the candidate provides thoughtful examples, demonstrates deep understanding of instruction and outreach, and responds with care rather than performance. The committee’s assessment becomes more accurate because it is grounded in substance.
Academic libraries should ask: Are we evaluating how someone appears in the moment, or are we evaluating how well they can do the work?
3. Rethink online interviews instead of assuming they are inclusive
There is a persistent belief that online interviews are inherently more inclusive because they eliminate travel, lower costs, and may reduce disruption for candidates. These are real advantages. But they do not make the format universally accessible.
For many neurodivergent librarians, online interviews introduce a different set of barriers. It may be harder to process multiple faces on a screen, follow lagging conversation, manage overlapping voices, or think clearly while monitoring one’s own facial expressions. Looking directly at the screen may be uncomfortable or distracting. Looking away to think may be misread as disengagement. The expectation of sustained camera presence can become its own form of performance.
This matters because academic libraries increasingly use online interviews in early-round screening and even in finalist processes. If those interviews are not designed with care, they can filter out strong candidates for reasons unrelated to their ability to serve students, teach effectively, collaborate with faculty, or lead projects.
Example:
A search committee holds a virtual first-round interview and intentionally limits the panel size. One person asks questions at a time. The candidate is told at the beginning that taking a moment to think is completely fine and that they do not need to maintain constant eye contact with the camera. The interview includes a short pause midway through. These small changes reduce cognitive overload while preserving the seriousness of the process.
Online interviews are not inclusive simply because they are online. They become more inclusive when institutions deliberately reduce unnecessary strain.
4. Make campus visits and early relationship-building more humane
Campus visits in academic libraries are often framed as opportunities for mutual exploration. In practice, they can feel like endurance tests. Candidates may move from formal interviews to meals, tours, presentations, meetings with faculty, meetings with administrators, and informal conversations with little downtime. New hires may face similar pressure during their first weeks, when they are introduced to faculty, staff, students, and campus partners in rapid succession.
For neurodivergent librarians, these experiences can be draining in ways that are invisible to others. Constant transitions, sensory overload, extended social performance, and little time to reset can affect how a person presents, even when they are highly prepared and deeply committed to the role.
Libraries can make these moments more humane by building in breaks, reducing unnecessary events, offering quiet space, and recognizing that not all relationship-building has to happen quickly or through informal charm.
Example:
A library revises its finalist campus visit schedule by removing one low-value social meal, creating time between meetings, and offering the candidate a private room to decompress before a teaching demonstration. Later, when the new librarian begins, the department spreads faculty introductions over several weeks rather than condensing them into two exhausting days. That approach still supports relationship-building, but it does so in a way that respects different processing and communication needs.
A person should not have to hide exhaustion to be perceived as a strong future colleague.
5. Help supervisors and colleagues interpret differences with care
Some of the most consequential first impressions in academic libraries happen after the hiring process is over. A new librarian meets their supervisor. They begin attending department meetings. They start building relationships with faculty. These early moments shape belonging, trust, and whether someone feels safe being themselves at work.
For neurodivergent librarians, the first impression made on a supervisor can be particularly important. Will directness be mistaken for disrespect? Will a need for clarity be interpreted as rigidity? Will thoughtful follow-up questions be seen as a strength or as insecurity? Will communication differences be treated as normal variation or as a problem to be managed?
Too often, neurodivergent employees feel pressure to mask from the beginning. They smile more, overprepare, soften their language, and work to appear easy to supervise. That effort may protect them in the short term, but it comes at a cost. It makes authenticity harder, increases strain, and can delay the development of a strong working relationship.
Supervisors and colleagues need to learn how to interpret differences with more care and less assumption.
Example:
A new librarian prefers written follow-up after meetings and asks detailed questions about priorities and timelines. Rather than seeing this as anxiety or lack of confidence, the library director recognizes it as a thoughtful working style and begins sending short written summaries after major conversations. The result is not only better communication, but a more trusting supervisory relationship from the start.
Inclusive leadership begins when managers stop asking why someone does not communicate as they do and start asking what conditions help that person do their best work.
Beyond “fit” in academic libraries
The language of “fit” remains one of the biggest barriers to equity in hiring and onboarding. In academic libraries, fit is often presented as a sign of future collaboration, departmental harmony, or institutional success. But too often it functions as a coded preference for sameness. It rewards those who are easiest to read, quickest to connect, and most fluent in unspoken professional norms.
Neurodivergent librarians are often disadvantaged by this, not because they lack the ability to collaborate, teach, innovate, or lead, but because they may not perform familiarity in ways that immediately reassure others.
That should concern a profession that claims to value diversity of perspective and equitable access.
We need to ask better questions. Not whether a candidate felt effortless to interact with, but whether the process allowed them to demonstrate their knowledge, values, and potential. Not whether a new colleague follows the dominant communication style, but whether the workplace is flexible enough to support multiple ways of thinking and relating.
Moving from awareness to practice
Academic libraries have long positioned themselves as advocates for inclusion, access, and belonging. Those commitments should extend to how we hire, welcome, and support one another as colleagues.
That means designing interviews with more structure and less ambiguity. It means resisting the urge to equate charisma with competence. It means recognizing that online interviews are not automatically inclusive. It means making campus visits and onboarding more humane. And it means helping supervisors and colleagues respond to difference with curiosity instead of judgment.
First impressions will always matter. But they should not be shaped by unexamined assumptions about what professionalism, confidence, or collegiality are supposed to look like.
A neurodiversity-informed approach asks academic libraries to do something both simple and difficult: to stop treating one communication style as the standard and to build processes that reveal what people actually bring to the work.
That is not a special accommodation. It is a better and more equitable way to hire, onboard, and lead.
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