Practice your Handwriting
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007Let’s consider this hypothetical scenario:
A core-IT company is recruiting highly-skilled IT professionals. Every recruiting candidate must fill a number of standard forms, for example:
- non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
- code sample agreement
- self-identification form
- employment application
- bank account information
- itemized expenses sheet
Some of these forms are accompanied by corresponding explanatory documents, which explain how and why to fill the forms, etc. (these accompaniatory documents are just for the information of the candidate, they don’t have to be filled or returned).
And now, let’s propose two realistic ways of implementation:
Scenario A
The recruiter send an email which has attached a zip file containing a mix-and-match of a dozen of Word and Excel and PDF documents. The candidate (an IT professional) tries at first to fill-in these documents electronically, on the computer (in order to print them already filled-in), but quickly realizes that they were not designed to be filled on the computer. They are made for ‘pencil & paper’ filling, and trying to fill them on the computer is a pain, not worth the effort (imagine editing text in a jpeg image, to get an idea).
So that’s what the IT professional does: prints them all, and proceeds with the totally inhabitual activity (for an expert touch-typer) of hand writing, taking care to respect the ironic indications that appear on the documets, like this:
Name of Candidate (please print): ________
To translate, in this context please print means: please use all-capitals while hand-writing — no, it doesn’t make reference to using a printer device.
Having finished the labour-intensive activity of hand-writing (potentially going through a couple of iterations), the candidate signs the documents and admires the finished work: what an interesting font I have..
Note: of course these paper documents have a penchant for redundancy: the candidate has to fill his name, address, etc, repeatedly on each document.
The candidate takes the bunch of papers with him, and presents them to the recruiter, who enters the paper-written data into the company’s recruiting information management system.
Scenario B
The recruiter provides the candidate with a ‘candidate ID’, which the candidate uses to log in on the restricted-access recruiting web site.
On the web site he finds a (single, comprehensive) web form that he fills in (in the browser, not on paper, btw). When he submits the web form, his data is registered in the recruiting information system, and a number of nice PDF documents are dynamically generated, all personalized and already filled with his data (name, address, etc).
The only thing missing on these generated PDF documents is the candidate’s hand-written signature, so he prints and signs them (talking about digital signatures in our situation would be too large a leap…)
Later the candidate presents to the recruiter the signed documents. The recruiter only has to deposit the papers in the archive, because the data was already entered in the information system (it happened when the candidate submitted the web form).
Well, that’s it. What scenario would you bet is used by our hypothetical high-IT company, for recruiting high-IT professionals?
