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RE: Seeking advice on leading an interview for a technical writer position in English
Subject:RE: Seeking advice on leading an interview for a technical writer position in English From:"Claudine Chausson" <cchausson -at- fircosoft -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 7 Mar 2012 17:36:00 +0100
Hi everyone,
Thank you all for your quality answers.
For the 1st round of interviews, lead by my manager, sheâll be interviewing French citizens as well as other countries citizens (EU and non-EU). Whenever possible, sheâll be leading the interviews in French. If they pass the 1st round, thatâs when I jump in (now itâs a known fact: Iâll be leading the 2nd round of interviews).
In France itâs not illegal to ask some personal questions but usually the recruiters donât ask. Though they tend to do that more often.
When I asked my question to the list, I was thinking about both cultural and management styles. I didnât want my questions to appear as a translation of the French sentence. After a little research on the Internet, I realized that most questions are asked in English as well as in French interviews. So I will base my future interviews on these questions; and thatâs plenty of them so I shouldnât be running short of ideas â
Since Iâm not the team leader, but the team technical communication specialist, I was thinking about focusing my questions on technical writing, skills (personal as well as of the trade), professional scenarios. This should complete the questions my manager is asking.
We also give 3 tests: 1 is corporate and not relevant to the specific activity of a technical writer in the company. Only round 2 candidates will be given this test. On round 1, we give one test to verify how candidates deal with the writing of a simple procedure (how to print a document from Word). This test is in French, unless the candidate is not fluent enough in that language. The other test is in English and more technical. Based on a sample development case, the candidate writes a short text to describe the issue and the correction (thatâs part of our daily tasks).
I havenât had the time yet to read all the different websites youâve advised but they definitely sound interesting. I shall do that now.
Have a nice day/evening.
Claudine Chausson
Claudine Chausson
Senior Technical Writer
dir +33 1 53 44 13 33
e cchausson -at- fircosoft -dot- com
From: Gene Kim-Eng [mailto:techwr -at- genek -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2012 5:35 PM
To: Claudine Chausson
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Seeking advice on leading an interview for a technical writer position in English
I don't think the basic questions are any different just because the language of the interview is different. Since your primary document language is English you probably want to ask some questions that investigate a candidate's ability to write in English without using common French colloquialisms and expressions that wouldn't be understandable or that would look odd to a native English reader, but you could just as easily ask those questions in French (and probably should already be doing so).
Gene Kim-Eng
On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 12:05 AM, Claudine Chausson <cchausson -at- fircosoft -dot- com> wrote: I've proposed to lead the
interviews in English because, though we're located in Paris, France, the
common language is English (many developers and SMEs do not speak French).
I've lead interviews in French in the past but I don't want to be just
translating questions into English. I know that in English-speaking
countries interviews are lead in a very different way and I would really
appreciate if you could direct me to websites that give sample questions.
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