Re: Spam:RE: Evaluating Candidates Using Tests, Logic Questions, and Similar

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

My attitude about testing is inevitably colored by my own experience.
I have been "tested" twice.  The first was a six-month temp-to-perm
contract at my very first job as a writer.  The second was a small
company whose sole writer had left and whose engineers had devised
a "writing test" in FrameMaker and Visio by munging up one of that
writer's document files for grammar, spelling and graphics formatting.
Along the way they also somehow managed to *unintentionally* bollux
up the Frame master template as well; the autonumbering and cross-
referencing didn't work, every page had its own frame so that text 
didn't
flow, etc.  The only way to complete the test in the alloted time was
to first change all the text to one plain style and do everything as if
FM was Notepad before you could even address the document's writing
and organizational issues.  After the test the R&D manager told me they
couldn't understand why *nobody* else seemed to be able to handle FM
as well as their previous writer, but the stake through the heart of 
that job
was when they told me that the engineers had been "muddling through"
document revisions in FM for the past three months since that writer
had left.  I was offered the job, but did not take it.

I think if I found myself in a situation where my management insisted
on a test for writing candidates, I would create one by typing out the
instructional steps from a bank ATM as a plain text file and have the
candidate rewrite it in Notepad.

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sarah Bouchier" <Sarah -dot- Bouchier -at- exony -dot- com>

If the job you're
hiring for specifically requires being able to write/edit information
you don't know anything about with a fifteen minute deadline, then the
test's perfect.

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