Thanks for the comment. I have worked for companies that told me to never give out more information than verification and dates of employment, though I’ve never had a company tell me not to call references when hiring. BTW, I didn’t exclude calls from HR, which in my memory are even more rare than calls from managers (I can’t remember the last one, though in fairness, sometimes the call is from “Leslie Jones of XYZ Corp.,” so it could be either HR or a manager).

All that said, those kinds of restrictions make it hard to get information from references, and while I understand the legal concern, it’s a real annoyance. I’d like to know whether any company has suffered a significant legal problem from giving an honest reference, or if it’s just lawyers putting on the belts and suspenders.

While I always did my best to follow corporate policy when giving a reference, I have received information “sub rosa” from companies with that policy, especially if the manager thought the candidate was someone who deserved a good reference. And, I have often been able to get a good feeling about someone’s opinion through tone of voice, word choice, etc. But, it can be a real annoyance when you run into a company with that policy.

Absolutely true. A lot of this discussion has nothing at all to do with the quality of documentation. It’s all about perception. Do managers “perceive” that DITA makes it possible to hire cheaper writers? Do writers perceive that DITA will narrow their field or put them in a writing straitjacket?

That doesn’t mean the discussion isn’t relevant, but it does take it away from the core of what technical communicators are supposedly paid to do.

If I’m evaluating the resume of someone who claims to be an expert in layout/design or in the particular tool the resume was written in, then I will look at those things. I will also in most cases consider the overall look of the resume; after all, it’s easy to get an acceptable look from any word processor, so there’s no excuse for having a truly ugly resume.

At the same time, for writers, I’m much more interested in the structure and writing. Chance are they will be using a corporate style guide that will make any design skills moot. Yes, if the resume was written using the tool that person will need to use on the job, I may dive deeper, but that will only happen for candidates I’m serious about interviewing.

Regarding the second part, I do expect technical writers to use styles and clean formatting when using tools that allow it. Most of my recent teams have used XML, so I’m more concerned about good semantic markup. But for a job that uses Word or asimilar word processor, I expect them to use the styles and formatting defined by whatever style guide we are using.

All that said, if you can’t write, I don’t care how well you format, I’m not interested.