Unfortunate but true that there is a lack of faith in the capabilities.

I am of the opinion that the range of skills and capabilities that we in the technical communications field in India have, do vary widely. There is no standard certification of skills nor any significant university level courses.

For the potential recruiter, in most cases, the resume is the only information they have.

When recruiting, one needs to be extremely vigilant of declared competencies. Of course, you can gauge a candidate's competency by taking relevant tests or simply engaging in a meaningful discussion on competencies, outlook, opinions etc. It is a difficult task.

A candidate, asked for samples, need not supply copyrighted or any company confidential information. They can create a sample portfolio for themselves that can be used in such instances. However, then again, how do you verify the authenticity of the claim made by the candidate about the sample? The best option would be for the candidate to have a website, an active blog or publications on the web that a candidate can easily share.

All said, the recruiter still needs to use their skills and judgement to form an opinion on how much of the faith factor should be built into that opinion.

Hi Prosen, thanks for your observations. The certification has to be in the selection process also. Currently, the selection of tech writers is sort of biased because the existing teams and the manager plays a huge part here. Such a process is open for biased or prejudiced selection based on the whims and fancies of the existing teams, unless the client or overseas managers are also involved. The solution here is for the HR department to get involved in a much more active level instead of leaving everything to the project teams.

I even recommend technical writers moving into HR functions so that a fair assessment of the candidate's skills can be arrived at. As you said, a good and tough writing tests can truly assess the skill of a technical writer. And samples can done by someone else.

For experienced professionals, handling *work-samples* requests should not be an issue.
I have a post on the issue at my blog, at: http://blog.vhite.com/2012/02/technical-writing-interviews-handling-work-samples-requests/.

I am completely agree with the fact that now a days most of the recruiters are asking for work samples. This is very difficult. Almost all companies' documents are copyrighted and cannot be shared. The companies, which ask for such documents, also do not allow their employees to share their documents, but when it comes to employee selection, they forget their own rules.

This is very tricky. It will the breach of security to share work samples. Probably an essay or article is enough to gauge the merit of a particular candidate.
Can anybody who have given his or her work sample share his experience here. What and how he has shared.

regards,

It's unfortunate to see so many grammatical mistakes in the above mentioned comments from Technical Writers.
Examples:
- "I am completely agree with.."
- "Can anybody who have given.."

Coming the point, I agree that we cannot share copyrighted information, but we can always create our own samples with fake product names and logos.