There is really no substitute for a good hire. This is especially true when it comes to your content and documentation. It’s amazing what organizations can accomplish when they have the right technical writer (or writers!) on their team.
The skills and experience needed to excel in technical writing can be surprisingly niche. As such, the hiring process requires a thorough evaluation of resumes and writing samples, as well as carefully constructed interview questions. You want to ensure the candidate’s skills and techniques are a good fit for your brand, voice, and company culture.
ProEdit’s staffing services team specializes in sourcing and placing exceptional technical writers for our clients. Today we share two tips (plus two more to come) that we use to find the ideal people for our clients.
Tip 1: Create a Resume Review Checklist
Before reviewing resumes for a position, create a brief checklist to organize the process. This ensures you don’t overlook important details, and it keeps the evaluation process balanced. While a tall stack of resumes can make it tempting to skip the basics, it pays to be thorough at this stage of the hiring process. Your checklist should target the following areas:
- Spelling, grammar, and formatting: Treat the candidate’s resume as their first writing sample. Errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar are red flags right from the start. On the other hand, professional formatting and concise, well-written credentials speak to the candidate’s abilities and give you an early idea of the level of work you can expect.
- Relevant skill set: The better defined your position, the more confident you can be when selecting a candidate to fill it. At ProEdit, we use client-vetted job descriptions to screen resumes. Ensuring your job description thoroughly defines the skills and experience needed for the role will help you feel certain about how candidates measure up.
- Experience: A great technical writer will have experience in both the techniques and the tools of the trade. If you have a type of software or industry tool that is central to the success of your project, this can be a good criterion for ranking resumes. Experience in your industry may also be a good indication that your candidate will hit the ground running.
Tip 2: Review Work Samples (Fairly)
Getting samples of a technical writer’s prior work can provide a concrete demonstration of his or her abilities. Samples don’t have to match exactly the kinds of projects future hires will be working on. In fact, many samples won’t. Writers are often limited in what they can share from past work experience.
With work samples, you’re looking for clean, well-formatted, and effective documentation. Here are some qualifying questions to ask yourself when reviewing a technical writer’s work samples:
- Does the writing communicate clearly and effectively? The central purpose of technical communication is to get the necessary information to its audience. Do you feel confident that you understand what the candidate was trying to express? Would you feel comfortable providing documentation of this quality to your own audiences?
- Does the candidate understand the audience? Good technical writers should know who they are addressing and be able to write accordingly. Do the samples demonstrate an awareness of the audience? Examples of red flags would be extensive explanations in a document for expert professionals or overly complex technical writing for introductory material.
- Are the deliverables free of errors? As with the candidate’s resume, work samples should be free of grammatical, spelling, and usage errors. Remember that the candidate selected the samples as evidence of his or her best work. Would you be satisfied with this quality of documentation for your own projects?
Come back next week to read Tips on Evaluating and Interviewing Technical Writers – Part 2.
If you need to hire a technical writer soon, learn more about our Staffing Services team, and contact ProEdit today.