How Not to Get Hired at DocStrats

We get several resumes each week from people wanting to become technical writers. A distressingly large percentage of these resumes hit the trash within five minutes of arrival. Why? Read on for some tips on how not to get hired at DocStrats:

1) Address your cover letter to “Whom It May Concern”. It’s much too difficult to check our website and give us a call to get the right person’s name.

2) Indicate that your most recent job ended in 2004 and don’t tell us why. After all, it’s up to us to determine if you’ve been sailing around the world, in prison, or just forgot where you work.

3) Stress lots of inappropriate experience. You’re the finest mattress salesperson in the world? Best of luck with your career.

4) Don’t proofread your resume. Don’t fix the typos or the poor grammar, and by all means continue confusing it’s with its and there with their. Catching these mistakes is up to Microsoft Word, not the author.

5) Embellish your credentials. How could we not hire a PhD and Attorney with sixty years’ experience designing nuclear missile systems while working at the State Department?

Got it?


====== Jeff Klein, COO, Documentation Strategies