Job seeker, do you know what an “appli-ject” is? You will soon.

Talk about timely!

I recently participated in a lively blog conversation about writers/speechwriters being asked to produce new material or undergo writing โ€œtestsโ€โ€”in addition to providing writing samples from their portfolios and/or websitesโ€”when being considered for work by new clients or organizations.

There was a lot of discussion about the reasons potential clients or employers might request this, werenโ€™t our existing writing samples enough, and how or even should we be compensated for producing this work.ย ย ย ย 

Then along comes a Harvard Business Review piece called, โ€œProjects Are the New Job Interviews,โ€ that may settle the question for good.

The May 10 article states, โ€œResumes are dead. Interviews are largely ineffectual. LinkedIn is good. Portfolios are useful. But projects are the future of hiring, especially knowledge-worker hiring. Serious firms will increasingly ask serious candidates to do serious work in order to get serious jobs.โ€

This new way of getting work is being called โ€œproject-licationsโ€ or โ€œappli-jects.โ€ The article goes on: โ€œForget the โ€˜Whatโ€™s your greatest weakness?โ€™ interrogatory genre; the real question will be how well candidates can rise to the โ€˜applijectโ€™ challenge and help redesign a social media campaign, document a tricky bit of software, edit a Keynote presentation, produce a webinar or peer review a CAD layout for a contract Chinese manufacturer.

โ€œExploitative?โ€ the author asks? โ€œPerhaps. But most organizations have learned the hard way that no amount of interviewing, reference checking and/or psychological testing is a substitute for actually working with a candidate on a real project.โ€

The article suggests that organizations that have job candidatesโ€™ work on a project prior to hiring are, in fact, making the hiring process โ€œmore holisticโ€ rather than โ€œover the wall,โ€ and that they consider this aspect of hiring part of the larger on-boarding process.

It also suggests that just as job candidates get better at understanding and managing the interview process, they will also learn how to excel at โ€œproject-licationsโ€ and how to sniff out which are genuine invitations to success and which ones are sleazy bids for cheap labor, as weโ€™ve discussed in our blog conversations on this topic.

Finally, the writer states, โ€œItโ€™s worth something to know what itโ€™s like to really work with oneโ€™s colleagues on a real project as opposed to the all-too-misleading charade of iterative interviews.โ€ Amen!

If the trends in this article hold true, more and more potential clients and organizations will ask us to produce new, โ€œin the momentโ€ work before they make any of us an offer.

I say, โ€œBring it on!

Cynthia Starks is a freelance speechwriter living in Central Indiana.

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