RE: Portfolios of samples as Interviewing criteria

["Van Laan, Krista" <KVanlaan -at- verisign -dot- com>]

John Posada said, in response to my posting that I ask writers
who show samples to tell me about the subject they wrote about: 
> 
> In the 10 years that I've been writing stuff, I've written 
> about some pretty
> obscure software and applications. In my portfolio, which has about 40
> different pieces, I have a Release Note for a UNIX tool that 
> was home-grown
> by the client for internal use. It is pretty impressive and if you are
> looking for me to have some experience writing Release Notes, 
> this will
> satisfy the requirement.
> 
> However, having written it 5-6 years ago, I couldn't remember what the
> application did to save my life. I researched it, I wrote it, I got it
> approved, I deployed the documentation, and I went on to the next
> deliverable.  Unless I need to revisit something I've written about, I
> cannot afford the limited amount of mental storage that I 
> have left for
> something I don't need to remember....I'm having trouble 
> remembering the
> things I DO need to remember.
> 
> I'd venture to say that if you can remember off the top of 
> your head what
> everything you wrote about during you career as a writer did, 
> you either
> haven't written much or you haven't been writing long.

True enough, and that's one thing I did forget to add, that if
people have been writing for a long time and for many different
contracts, I know they're not always going to remember everything they did.
The
most experienced tech writers can extract information, understand the
important points, put together a relevant structure, knock out a quick
document, and forget about it a week later.

I ask people about the product if it's been done fairly recently,
or it's part of a large document set, or even if they bring in more than
one document on the same subject and mention the product itself as a
selling point of their experience. If you tell me you've spent
n number of years writing for a company and you bring in several docs
as samples of your work, I'd expect you to know something about the
product. If, as in John's case, the piece was there to show you
can write release notes, I wouldn't be turned off if I asked
about the product and he gave me the answer he did here.

  Krista

================================================
Krista Van Laan
Director of Technical Communications, Engineering   
VeriSign, Inc.  http://www.verisign.com
487 E. Middlefield Rd.    Mountain View, CA 94043    
tel: (650) 426-5158    fax: (650) 426-5195


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