My "no-assignment" policy

So, my profile caught interest or we understood each other well during the interview,… of course the “logical” next step is to test my writing and analysis skills and the “obvious” choice for it is to forward a home assignment, right?

Well, let’s stop right there.

You ought to know that I have a strict “no-assigment policy”.

Here’s why.

The clock counts

4 hours, 2 days, 1 week. No matter how generous the deadline, it doesn’t make it any better.

The reason? Time.

Simply put, my time is billable. Time that it’s best employed completing real-life work and invoicing actual customers.

Substantial wish-lists

To illustrate my point, I’ve had companies sending exhaustive assignments over in the past. The longest I received contained 5 writing tasks:

1. a how-to article
2. a feature change proposal
3. a comprehensive development and implementation plan including design and mockups
4. a documentation creation workflow
5. my own outline of the internal documentation review process

All the above would take an estimate of one week to complete. How fair and reasonable is it to spend days burning the midgnight oil while risking a yeah-but-no answer later?

By the way, that writing test was the reason of this no-assignment policy. I still have it as a reminder.

Fair-use… or better, don’t use it at all

There’s also the ethical concern of copyright: works submitted shouldn’t be free-to-use.

Assignments as “job simulations”

The truth is, discarding or shorlisting a candidate over the evaluation of an initial draft doesn’t reflect the reality of the day-to-day job.

Technical Writing —in its core— involves a review process:

Peer review. Subject matter expert review. Managerial review.

Everybody involved will have a say in the new document till it’s ready for publishing. More often than not, the draft end ups as a completely different version from the initial.

Is the Tech writer’s job on the line over a typo or missing bits of the style guide? Never seen it myself.

The best fit

If you’re reading this entry, you landed at a professional services site —concretely Technical Writing; something I’ve done during the better part of a decade.

Naturally, creating a comissioned technical document falls under of my expertise.

I understand your need to pick the best match. I do.

For this reason, I encourage you to browse my portfolio instead and decide if my style fits your requirements.