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How to Hire Technical Writers
Most of this site is about getting a job as a tech writer. But you know what?
Tech writers sometimes move up into management and need to hire other tech
writers. Often the person hiring a tech writer is not a writer, and
doesn't necessarily know a whole lot about how to hire a tech writer, or what
makes a good one. So here is a brief guide on how to hire a technical writer.
Establish the requirements
If you're a manager who doesn't know exactly what it is that tech writers do,
you need to find out before you start your search. How else will you know who
meets your requirements?
Some suggestions:
- Talk to the outgoing writer, if there is one, or other members of the
writing team, if any. Ask them what makes for a good writer in your
organization - which could be very different from the success criteria in
another. Find out what technical skills and tools the writer needs, but this
shouldn't be the focus. Any good writer who knows one tool can pick up a
similar one fast. The focus should be on how the work gets done in your
company. What knowledge, skills, or characteristics make for success in
discovering, or ferreting out, the required information in your context? Do
they need to understand fiber optics, or clinical pharmacology, or robotics in
automobile manufacturing? Do they need to be able to read and follow the flow
of programming code, even if they're not themselves programmers? This stuff is
far more important than which version of a help authoring tool the writer
knows!
- Talk to your HR department and get them to provide updated salary range
information for technical writers in your industry and geographic area.
- From a business perspective - after all, you are a manager - figure
out what you need the writer to produce, and figure out what makes those
documentation sets, or widgets, or whatever, a success for you in the context
of your business.
- Now it's time to sit down and put these all together. You might find it
helpful, especially if you're comfortable with spreadsheets, to put your
criteria into columns, and put the various candidates in rows, so you can
compare one with another across the board.
Evaluate the resumes
You might not be a technical writer yourself, but you can read! Look at the
resumes. Are they really well-written? Do they tell you this person's story? Are
they error-free? (If anyone can be rightfully expected to have a perfect resume,
it's a technical writer, who is supposed to convey accurate information simply
and effectively.) Next, do you see the progression or level of experience that
you expect? Is this person close enough to your requirements list to move on to
the next step?
Interview the writers
Interview techniques for writers are probably not much different than for
others. Basically, the interview is an opportunity for both sides to get to know
each other a bit to see if there's a possible match. Just like when interviewing
for other positions, you should ask open-ended, experiential questions about the
candidate's past work projects listed on the resume. If you ask candidates if
they get along with others, they'll all say yes. But you can get more useful
information if you ask them to explain the details of how they got and processed
the information for the XYZ project that they did last year.
Review the samples
Some hiring managers put great stock in writing samples, but others don't,
for two reasons: first, they're not hard to fake, and second, it can be hard to
evaluate quality without understanding the context in which the samples were
produced, especially if they were from an industry unfamiliar to you. If you
have a team of writers that the candidate would be joining, have them go over
the samples while you interview, and then have them join in for detailed
questions on the samples.
Give a test
Some writers object passionately to this, but it seems clear that the best
way to see whether candidates are able to perform a job is to give a test that
approximates what they would be doing on the job. Don't demean the writers with
grammar or spelling tests if these are not what your company produces. It's far
more useful to have them produce an hour's worth of work on a small piece of
what you actually do. If the job involves taking a convoluted specification and
extracting the relevant information from it in order to make a first draft of a
user manual, take an old spec and have them work on it. You can simplify or
shorten the test to keep it in a reasonable time frame for the candidate. Give
detailed instructions, and see if they follow them.
You will be amazed at how some candidates who might seem unpromising in the
interview show that they can really produce in the test. And vice versa. Of all
the criteria, the test is probably the single best predictor of success on the
job - provided that you construct a good test!
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Need tech writers? Visit Atarim, LLC, providers of outsourced technical writing
services.
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