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Re: Why don't more job interviews use writing tests?
Subject:Re: Why don't more job interviews use writing tests? From:"Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 8 Feb 2005 15:55:01 -0800
The only time in my career that I was ever asked to take a writing
test it turned out to really be a "tool test" (FrameMaker and Viso),
consisting of a few pages of a "document" with corrupted grammar
and graphics and 45 minutes to "rewrite" it all. Unfortunately, the
company's document template was so screwed up you could not
have produced a decent document from it without first repairing
the template (their previous writer had walked off the job, so there
was nobody in-house to explain their document problems to). It
should have been15 minutes of editing/recomposition and 20 minutes
of Visio illustration, but it needed at least an hour of FM template
reconstruction (no, I didn't get the job, but that turned out to be a
good thing).
I still rank references as #1 when it comes to evaluating skills. I've
never hired a writer who came with good ones and then disappointed
me.
Gene Kim-Eng
"Chuck Martin" <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com> wrote in message news:...
>
> This question occurred to me recently. In all the interviews I've had
> over the years, in just one was I ever asked to take a writing test
> right there. (In that case, I was shown a section of existing
> documentation, asked some questions about the product, and was given 30
> minutes to rewrite the content. I got that job.)
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