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> But let's put on our techpubs
> manager hats for a moment: We just spent two months
> advertising, _reading_ resumes (_we_ don't use no steenkin
> OCR!), interviewing, checking references, running
> interference at Personnel, helping the new writer find a
> home and fill out all the forms. We finally hire someone
> good, pay them a competitive starting wage... and then they
> fly off at the first good job offer.
You have to be willing to pay the piper. You can either hire
people whose loyalty is stronger than their sense of self-interest
(difficult -- these people are, by definition, no on the market),
or you can start with inexperienced writers and train them, thus
giving you breathing room before they realize that they're not
being adequately compensated, or you can hire experienced people
and pay them at a rate that doesn't make them hurl their belongings
into a suitcase and vanish when they realize what your competitors
are paying. All these techniques work. They have their own strengths
and weaknesses.
You can't hire experienced people and forget about them -- not in a
boom market, anyway. Doing so is an indication that your employees
are more experienced than you are, for one thing -- it's an indication
that you haven't fully absorbed Management 101.
If you are a manager, and you don't fight tooth and nail with your
superiors to keep your department competitive, you're not doing your
whole job. If you feel that it's hopeless, you should be contacting
headhunters yourself.
Don't work for companies that won't let you do your job. In fact, from
the postings in this group, I'd say that far more of us should be
job-hopping than have been doing so. Not for wages, but to find a
company that supports us and believes in what we're doing.
-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon, President/Managing Editor, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc.
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139
