atw: Re: Styles in resumes and CVs - was - Agencies and resumes
- From: "Terry Dowling" <Terrence.Dowling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:27:47 +0800
When recruiting, often enough my knowledge of a person from this and
other lists (or past jobs, or trusted friends' recommendations) is
enough to get put to the top of a candidate list. However, I view the
receipt of a resume in MSWord as a bonus. If I don't get that, I might
ask for the candidate to supply an example of their work.
I expect that any writer applying for a tech writer position should
treat such docs as advertisements of their skills. If it looks good, OK;
if they use styles, better; if they use styles well, excellent.
How much time does it take to create a style and apply a shortcut to it?
Twenty seconds well invested. Will you save that amount of time when
changing styles within the doc? Yes.
If I do get a doc in MSWord, as part of my elimination process, I will
'test' the document for appropriate use of styles. If someone has used
bullets based on Normal, they get put below someone who has used a
Bullet style for the 'Use of Styles' assessment. If the person who used
styles better can't write properly, they get ranked lower on that
scale...
My favourite test is to select the whole document and do Ctrl Q and Ctrl
Spacebar and then see how different it looks.
Having said all of that, some jobs might not require knowledge of styles
-- but virtually all of the jobs I've had have been made simpler through
using them. And in this current role, my predecessor's lack of
knowledge/use on styles certainly added to the complexity of my work as
exemplified by having bullets based on Normal style that had about 15
different indentation and tab settings. Some docs came back from the
client only with red ruler lines down the edges to show the
bullets/paragraphs being misaligned. The added complexity in fixing
these was partly why I was hired and he was fired.
So, while using Normal won't necessarily result in the CV being
consigned to the circular filing cabinet, it will almost always lead to
a lower mark on the 'Use of Styles' scale.
Your choice.
Cheers,
Terry
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Howard Silcock
Sent: Friday, 13 August 2010 2:58 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: Re: Styles in resumes and CVs - was - Agencies and resumes
The obvious reply to this is that potential employers may not agree with
you. People on the list have already given examples that demonstrate
that some employers will check the styles in these documents. Are you
saying 'well, I wouldn't want to work for one of those people anyway'?
If you feel strongly enough about it to take that position and let your
CV go in the bin, then good on you. But you probably won't get a chance
to argue for your point of view with those employers.
If the point of your post is to convince potential employers *on this
list* to reconsider their hiring practices, I suppose there may be some
point to what you say. But I'll be interested to see what responses you
get.
Howard
On 13 August 2010 16:06, James Hunt <jameshunt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a previous thread, contributors made two assertions that remained
unchallenged: namely, that presenting a resume or cover letter formatted
entirely in Normal style is Really Bad Form at least, and that insight
into a writer's skills can be gained from an examination of the
user-defined styles in a resume presented in Word format.
I will argue that both of these assertions are false.
Cover letters and resumes are short documents whose sole purpose, from a
writer's point of view, is to gain an interview with a potential client
or employer. That is, cover letters and resumes are essentially
advertising pieces, directed at the person compiling the short list for
interviews.
Cover letters and resumes can be constructed with any tool that the
writer considers appropriate for this attention-getting exercise. These
documents are usually quite short - are there any resumes longer than
three pages? - and are infrequently revised - how many times a year do
you update your stuff? These are exactly the sort of documents for which
Word is a good tool, and it is quite efficient to format such a document
by using variations of the Normal style. Applying this practice to a
book-length document will rightly bring charges of fingerpainting, but
fingerpainting does have its place in the production of short,
attractive documents that will rarely be revised.
Even if a Word-based cover letter or resume is style-based, it is simply
not possible to draw any conclusions about the ability of a writer to
devise styles for longer and more complex documents. I will give an
illustration.
The Word versions of my own cover letter and resume contain only
thirteen user-defined paragraph styles between them. The Word template
for books that I have used and adapted on contract after contract for
years contains over two hundred styles, covering many different
circumstances, and a great deal of other material as well (title pages,
front matter outlines, part pages, chapters, lettered appendices,
outlines of custom ListNum and SEQ numbering sequences, useful VBA bits
and bobs, ...): the template is about 100 pages long. It is a big step
from thirteen styles to three hundred styles, and none of the extras in
the template appear in my resume.
I have heard these assertions from a number of sources, over several
years, and I have concluded that technical writing has its urban
legends, just like other fields, and that these urban legends are as
long-lasting as anyone else's urban legends. It is possible to speculate
about how these ideas took hold, and my own hypothesis is that they were
invented as short-listing procedures. Now short-listing is hardly
scientific, but folklore like this is not much help to anyone. I suspect
that a random-number generator might be as good.
James Hunt
----------------
"... there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great
majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past
..."
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
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