I’ve been an IT consultant for quite a while now and recruiters and I are part of a very symbiotic network. We need each other and we both know that. As in any field, the quality of the players varies and I want to share this particularly irritating thing with you dear reader, to see via your feedback if I’m justified in my irritation.
Hypothetically speaking (of course), let’s say you wanted to hire a technical writer to update websites, user guides, release notes, online help and generate PDF documents. Then one of your responses brings this (terrific) experience to the table … He sends you links to his blog and the websites he’s created so you can see samples of his website work and writing samples. His cover letter … makes it seem like God Almighty sent him to you. Have you died and gone to heaven or what?!
When I was teaching software applications, operating systems, development, whatever, I could walk around a classroom of 20 students and from roughly five feet away from a monitor tell a student if they were missing a comma, a semi-colon or period in their programming code.
As a writer, I seldom use spell check because I’m a pretty good speller and typos literally jump off a page at me.