Re: Why they don't ask for candidates by technology skills.

[GeneK <gene -at- genek -dot- com>]

This is common because most recruiters - as well as most hiring managers 
who haven't been writers themselves - haven't
the foggiest notion of the research and writing process and are going off 
buzzwords gleaned from badly written standard
position descriptions or a frustrated demand from someone who said "get me 
someone who knows <whatever tool the
previous writer was using>" because they don't know what the other 
available tools are.  The other recruiting habit that
always fills me with wonderment is the ad that calls for a writer with so 
many technical qualifications that a candidate who
actually had them all would be qualified to pursue a position as an SME, 
rather than the ability to assimilate the unintelligible
ramblings of the average SME and translate them into documents that are 
actually user-friendly.  One of the first things I've
done upon assuming management of every publications group I've ever run has 
been to rewrite the job descriptions so
that they actually describe productive researching writers rather than 
people who spend 20 hours a week working with
every software demo that comes along.

Gene Kim-Eng



At 03:06 AM 2/20/2003 -0600, Robert H. Strickland wrote: