re: Editing and writing tests for jobs (long)

[Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>]

Hi all. Digest mode on the fritz, so I may be jumping in a little late. Apologies all around....BUT:

As to the question of whether someone took a writing test:
I did for my current job. Actually, it was more of a general skills test. It involved general questions about the Windows interface (which I thought was odd), some questions about how I would manage certain situations, a paragraph to edit (the paragraph was pretty well written with only a few mistakes in it, a pretty good test I think), and a question about Plato's forms and ..... something else. That part of the test was designed to see if you could take bits of information and relate them together (the instructions in the test told me so). I thought it was pretty creative and pretty clear as to what I was supposed to do. The test did remind of my Western Civilization classes though: write 15 essays no longer than 5 sentences in one hour <cringe />.

But that test taught me a lot about the company and the kinds of people they had had for technical writers in past years. I found out after I had been hired that the company had been hiring people with no technical writing experience. That wasn't a surprise because the test and the interview questions, pointed to that fact.

As for trying to figure out what a company wants the answers to be on their tests:
Isn't that sort of like asking a teacher what answers they expect on a test so that you can get an A in the class? It seems like it's confusing the purpose with the goal. The purpose being to see how you perform in a certain situation, the goal being getting the job. That's probably a simplistic view, but hey I like walking Acom's Razor (I don't know how to spell Acom, I can admit that....).

Dana Wrote:
> The REAL test of a tech writer is the ability to handle situations and
> get information, either out of people or from technical papers. 

I agree. The test I took did have questions about the processes I follow/would follow to produce documentation. If I remember correctly, it also had a question about dealing with difficult people, or something similiar....I could be wrong on that one though. It's been a while.

I think it all comes down to designing a good test. A test can go just as bad as an interview if the people involved don't know what they're doing. I've had a couple of weird experiences in interviews that make bad tests look like good ones. In one interview, one of the interviewers was doodling, and obviously not paying attention. I've also had an interview in which the interviewer had a set of questions and just went down the list. He asked me questions I had already answered in my responces to previous questions or asked me questions that the information on my resume covered. It seemed like he was more worried about hitting each of his questions than processing the information I was giving. In another interview, the interviewer started talking about _very_ personal issues. THAT was uncomfortable.

But then again, some of these interviews were for dot-coms.........




********************************************
Sean Hower

technical writer
http://hokum.freehomepage.com

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