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CAREER, WRITING
Practice Good Writing Now So You Can Nail That Job Interview
I’m not manic; I just write that way….
What does writing have to do with looking for a job?
The point of a job interview is for potential employers to evaluate your suitability for the job you want. They strive to find the best candidate for the job and to screen all other applicants out as quickly as possible.
Applicants who make it to the interview phase have gotten past the obvious and simplest means of screening; from this point on, employers have been known to use some subtle and ingenious ways to select the kind of people they want to hire.
One of these subtler methods is the impromptu writing sample done just before or after the interview. This is not a handwriting sample, but only a writing sample — a sample of how an applicant fits words together with no preparation.
It is critical, then, to not let your writing be an excuse for an employer to eliminate you from consideration. This means you must be a skilled writer well ahead of time.
One goal of a writing sample is to assess your competence as a writer. Can you write a basic memo or letter? Can you communicate in a professional manner with an external stakeholder?
How we write conveys a lot about us — our likely education level and/or socio-economic status, sometimes even our ethnicity. Thus, we should learn to write as well as possible, in whatever language we will use at work.
A pre-written piece tells an employer little about an applicant’s abilities because the employer has no way to verify that only the applicant wrote and proofread the work. All it tells an employer is that the applicant or a proofreader knows and understands the writing style or format that the applicant might need to know for the desired job. Usually, a job applicant is a complete stranger to an employer who has perhaps an hour to quickly decide whether this nicely-dressed stranger is the right person to hire.
So, in addition to assessing competence, prospective employers sometimes request impromptu writing samples because they want to know how an applicant thinks.
