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I've just been through the process of screening resumes and interviewing
prospective additions to our tech writing team.
I can certainly confirm that a really long, detailed resume isn't a good
idea... when determining who to CONSIDER calling for an interview, I simply
couldn't spend time poring over point after point... i'd just skim through
looking for key statements that met our requirements and glossed over the
bla di bla. All i cared about was whether they could write and had some
experience maturity... the time for them to sell themselves was in the
interview. And my feeling was that a tech writer should be able to market
themselves in a very space-efficient manner.
But I'd like to emphasize two other really important things that must never
be forgotten:
If you're applying to be a tech writer, make sure that the writing in your
resume... and even in the cover letter, to some extent... conforms to "tech
writing style", and that THERE ARE NO TYPOS OR GRAMMATICAL or FORMATTING
ERRORS!
We wanted somebody that could write clearly, concisely and with precision,
so if the candidate's written material was full of rambling sentences with
scholarly-type constructions and unnecessarily flowery words, I immediately
became leary that they had what we were looking for... and indeed, the
little writing test that we gave as part of the interview would always
confirm that they hadn't nailed the basics of communicating efficiently... I
was able to make a judgement about the person's abilities within one or two
sentences.
And as far as mistakes go... it was always the cvs that claimed that the
candidate was a dead-on proofreader, that had typos or other sloppy errors
in them, like repeated words or rogue commas... if I saw more than one such
error, the cv would go STRAIGHT into the reject pile, often before i'd
gotten through the first page. I'm not going to hire a writer who can't be
bothered to have somebody double-check their grammar, spelling, punctuation,
etc., because to me, that indicates a lack of professionalism. The worst
case was this woman who claimed to have an "extremely good eye for detail",
who submitted a cv in pdf form in which the font style and size changed
radically at the top of the second page... like page 1 was all times roman
10 pt, and suddenly we're into 18pt avant garde bold! "Good eye", MY BUTT!
When a prospective employer has a stack of resumes, and very little time to
process them, they've got to be brutal. So you've got to be flawless to make
it to the short list.
Lynne Wright
Technical Communications
Positron Inc.
5101 Buchan St. H4P 2R9
(514) 345-2200
fax: 345-2272
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