This week in job search

I took a test as a part of a job application. It was a writing test. The company provides a badly-written, three-page procedural document. I had to rewrite it so that it a) made sense and b) was an example of good technical writing.

It was a good test. The piece was laden with passive voices, bloated phrasings (lots of utilize), and a couple of incomprehensible tables. I eliminated the tables because they added no value.



The procedure resembled dance instructions for an octopus with hiccups. It probably could have been better rendered as a flowchart, but I was limited to words. I think that I got right, but I won't know for a few days.

Twenty-five years ago, I had to take a short test as a part of an interview for a software development job. I was a self-taught programmer. I solved the problem, but not elegantly or efficiently. I took another position before learning if I'd done well enough to get the job. That company didn't make it out of the 80s. The other company didn't make it out of the 90s.

I'd learned of this recent opportunity through an email. I sent a resume, but most of the vetting took place on my LinkedIn profile. Gone are the days of resumes printed on high-quality, off-white paper. Because each job has its own particular requirements, I need to keep several versions of my resume. To keep things in sync, I use Microsoft Word's master document feature to assemble pieces that emphasize one aspect or another of my background.

I'd prefer to keep everything in LinkedIn, but companies have recruitment software that generally require a file of some sort. It would be an interesting project to have a company's recruitment software use the LinkedIn API to fetch information from a person's public profile. I'll look around to see if anyone's done it. I have plenty of important things to do and so am always eager to be distracted from them.