At 10:31 -0600 15/4/18, Carol J. Elkins wrote:

>Over the next couple of years, I need to help my major client find and train 
>an in-house replacement for me as I wind down my freelance practice. They will 
>not consider an independent contractor next time, so it may be harder to 
>recruit and identify someone with the required skills. I've built 20 years of 
>documentation for this client in unstructured Framemaker, and managing these 
>thousands of documents and books depends less on someone being a good 
>technical writer than being an excellent Framemaker user.
>
>For those of you who are corporate employers, I'd like to know how you screen 
>candidates to identify those who truly are advanced Framemaker users.

I write here as a recipient of such a test, so apols because I'm not a 
corporate recruiter/test administerer. It was for a contract with a well-known 
London-based financial business, many years ago.

The test consisted of a number of unstructured FrameMaker tasks of increasing 
difficulty, done against the clock. At that time I considered myself to be an 
advanced FrameMaker user, but wasn't ;-) Nevertheless, I completed all the 
items in the test, which took about thirty minutes, successfully. I'm afraid I 
cannot remember now what the tasks were, but I'm sure you could easily make 
your own up.

At the end I was told that I'd done the test in the shortest time ever. Didn't 
get the contract, though, as another guy did almost as well and didn't have to 
commute/work remotely :-(

To build on what Robert suggested, how about asking candidates to build a 
folksy template from scratch, and devilishly include a couple of things that 
you cannot do with FrameMaker (there must still be some)? That way you get a 
good idea of their competence *and* incorporate the performance under stress 
and key-marks in the forehead stuff. And if that works out, then ask them how 
they'd adapt it for multi-platform delivery ;-)

-- 
Steve
_______________________________________________

This message is from the Framers mailing list

Send messages to [email protected]
Visit the list's homepage at  http://www.frameusers.com
Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/
Subscribe and unsubscribe at 
http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com
Send administrative questions to [email protected]

Reply via email to