RE: Getting Hired...Opinion #2500

["Dori Green" <dgreen -at- associatedbrands -dot- com>]

Gene Kim-Eng wrote:

has anyone else noticed how often the
job descriptions for writers are...badly written? :)

*************

I courted my current employers for two years -- through the mail, through
Job Service, at job fairs.  No dice.

Finally when they advertised a Quality Coordinator job (for which I was
just-barely qualified), I applied.  This did not get me that job, but it got
me and my resume finally through the HR bottleneck and in front of the
appropriate people who knew they needed document creation and control (dings
from FDA and customer audits), but did not know that the person they needed
was called a "technical writer".

It took another six months of agency contractor sub-status to show I could
do what they needed, and another month of gently but firmly kicking and
screaming until they gave me the "permanent" job status they had promised
when asking me to leave my former (permanent and vested) job and jump into
the contractor pool with no benefits for six months.

Job descriptions for writers are badly written because good writers are
actually in short supply, while anybody with a high school diploma thinks
they can write and most of them resent the idea that they might need a
specialist (or it doesn't occur to them that a specialist might be useful).

Dori Green

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