Re: job interviews with tests

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

Oh, Michael, that's a sad story. You are so lucky you didn't get that job!

I was recruited once for a job some thousands of miles away, and the company wanted the agency to administer a test prior to deciding to fly me down for an interview (seemed fair to me). They gave me a report that had been written by a field engineer and asked me to copyedit it.

Well, I started, and about two sentences in, I just drew a big red X through the whole thing and proceeded to reorganize and rewrite the report, longhand, on a yellow legal pad I found in the room. In other words, I did basically the same thing you did. The fact that I was able to see outside the "fix the spelling and commas" box landed me the plane ticket, the interview, and the job. Of course, as a result, I had to spend 14 months in Houston; so maybe I shouldn't be so proud of that....)

Then again, the very first test I ever took for a job, when I had just dropped out of college, was in a large cafeteria full of applicants for an editing job at a large publishing house (Prentice-Hall, IIRC). The passage was all about the first American dictionary. I finished before anyone else, quite certain I'd caught everything there was to catch, using standard proofreading marks meticulously and correctly; and I handed in my test paper. About two beats later, as I strode across the threshold, I slapped myself on the forehead. _Not Daniel,_ dummy. Noah! I sure didn't get called back for an interview on that one.

Dick

MichaelHuggins -at- aol -dot- com wrote:


>It turned out that every single instance of the word "responsibility" was misspelled, with the third "i" missing. The text was set in a sans serif font, which made it more difficult to spot. *That* had been the whole point of the exercise: to see if the editor would see that "responsibility" was always misspelled!
>

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