RE: resumes

[Deborah Snavely <dsnavely -at- aurigin -dot- com>]

Sona asked:
>This is for all of you who consider candidates for different tech
>writing positions (or infact anyone who wants to help). What do you
>generally expect to see in a techwriter's resume (apart from experience
>of course)?. Does a CV create an impression even before you meet the
>person? Here I am talking about the format, layout, information present
>in the CV etc and not the *content* as such. I personally feel that a
>TW's resume can be considered as a sample of his/her written skills.
>What do you think? 

When I was the virtual pubs manager of a small firm (which went from one
writer, me, to four and a desktop publisher and two contractors in less than
a year), I reviewed a mountain of resumes. I remember several instances of
both formatting and organization that told me the candidate didn't know
enough to do the job, or didn't care enough to make the effort:

1. Appearance counts!  Got a one-pager from an experienced engineer and
contract writer who sent his information with BOLD ALL-CAPS headings and the
entire page of content center-aligned. Most of his headings were ALL CAPS
whether bolded or not. For additional most of the non-heading content was
too cryptic, jargon-intensive with bad engineer-style abbreviations,
including inappropriate use of virgules and the dreaded "and/or"
construction. I tossed it. Twice! (fax and snail mail)

2. Know your audience and market! Got a 3-page CV from a PhD academic who
hadn't bothered to research his market at all: his resume listed all his
educational credentials FIRST (a doctorate with Harvard and Oxford degrees),
followed by a reverse chron list of all his jobs with a recent short-term
contract for tech editing buried within his Stanford and other university
teaching positions. He went to the bottom of the possible interview stack
(we were scraping for candidates even in 1997). 

3. Focus your resume on what they need: The gal who filled one of our early
openings was worth her weight in gold. She hadn't had the title before our
job BUT she'd organized the resume to demonstrate that she'd done tech
writing and editing work as part of a job at a small technical publisher.
She used her organizational and print-formatting skills to demonstrate in
her resume that she understood how to present technical information for
rapid absorption, with the salient facts in the "scanning column" on the
left, a careful and appropriate use of bullets to point up relevant tasks
she'd done in her last job, and presented reasonable samples at the
interview. She got hired and came up to speed at a rate of knots,
accomplishing gobs of useful and usable work while learning en passant. 

Deborah Snavely
Senior Technical Writer
Aurigin Systems, Inc. 
Innovation Asset Solutions(TM)