Has anybody here ever taken an editing test for a company?
I have…more than once. And would you believe I have never passed?
Suffice it to say that it is always disheartening when I receive an email from a company saying that they cannot hire me because my test results weren’t good enough. It saps my self-confidence and makes me feel less than good at what I do. It makes me want to crawl into a hole and stay there forever.
But thanks to the discussion forums of one of the professional organizations I am in, I’ve learned that I am not alone.
Nope.
Many other competent editors have taken such tests for companies and been turned down as well.
In case you are unfamiliar with such tests, they consist of a few pages of a document into which many errors and much awkwardness have been inserted. An editor is supposed to use Track Changes in MS Word to correct the errors and rewrite poor sentence structure.
One thing we editors have commiserated about is that the companies never give us an answer key after telling us we “weren’t good enough” or give us any kind of score indicating how well we did.
Perhaps the companies have so many applicants and so many tests to look over that they aren’t able to give us such feedback. So I suppose I should give them the benefit of the doubt.
This I do know: I and my fellow editors are not “less than” if we cannot pass these tests. We have testimonials from happy customers on our websites and LinkedIn profiles. We get compliments. And, most importantly, we like what we do.
How about you? Have you ever been required to take an editing test for anyone? What was your experience like?