20 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 295 — 2018 hiring of professionals. Collectively, ARL libraries have increased— not decreased—the employment of professionals, even through the recession of 2008. (See Figure 4.) The demographic data don’t speak directly to replacement decisions at the individual level, but in the ARL Statistics, the median number of professionals has grown at a rate of about 1% per year since 1985.3 Figure 4 In sum, while hiring was low in 2015, it would not have been were it not for an unexpected surge in delayed retirements. Looking forward, the combination of high numbers of individuals aged 65+, the low likelihood that they will work past 70, and the strong tendency on the part of libraries to fill professional vacancies means that the 2015–2020 period is almost certain to require more hiring than any time since 1985. This is a great time to be looking for a job in an ARL library. Continued Rise of Nontraditional Professional Jobs It is one thing for a library to fill vacated professional positions on a one-to-one basis, but quite another for those positions to be refilled in the same jobs that produced the vacancies. Libraries normally use vacant positions to do just that—a vacancy in cataloging, for example, is usually used to recruit another cataloger. But each vacancy is also