Re: Why are companies now requiring techical writer candidates to be SMEs?

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

Job descriptions are wishlists, in which hiring managers describe the ideal,
perfect, "candidate of their dreams."  How specific the description is depends
on other factors besides what someone really needs to do the job, for example
the size and quality of the candidate pool and how fast the manager needs to
fill the position.  Assuming that the posting is for real and not one of 
the "nobody
but the person we know we want can fill this" things, one reason for the narrow
requirements may be that they know they're going to get hundreds of resumes,
many with *none* of their requirements, due to the state of the economy and 
they
may be hoping to discourage those and reduce the number of applicants to 
people
who have at least have some of them.  Or they may be thinking that after 
having to
train new writers in their technology the past few years the pool of "hit 
the ground
running" candidates is large enough for them to get one.  As for why 
they're treating
tech writers differently compared to other positions, my guess is that 
there's that
many more tech writers available to choose from compared to their other 
postings.

Gene Kim-Eng



At 12:05 AM 4/20/2003 -0700, Chuck Martin wrote: