By Joshua Durkin and Shelley Fitze | STC Senior Member
Ready, Aim, … Hire?
So you’ve defined the job requirements, and you’ve filtered through a stack of résumés from the recruiter or human resources. You think you’re ready to hire your new technical writer? Think again.
If you’ve never been on the hiring end of this equation yet, let us give you a preview of coming attractions. For all you technical writers who have been part of the hiring committee, you may recall how it works:
- Solicit lots of résumés.
- Pull the promising résumés out of the stack.
- Interview candidates. Offer writing tests. Look at portfolios.
- Make an offer to the one who worries you the least.
- Hope that another company doesn’t hire them first, that you don’t make what they see as a low-ball salary offer, or that their current employer doesn’t panic and offer them the moon to stay.
If you don’t make a good hire, you get to start the whole process all over again.
Your team’s success and your overall sanity may rest on hiring a great candidate for your team. Remember, management only pays this person, but you and your team have to work with them every day. Hire in haste, repent at leisure.
You can easily find all the recruiting, interviewing, and selection aids you need, and there are many good interview methods available. However, in forty years of combined experience hiring and training writers, we offer you our six missing links to help you find your best team fit.
The First Link: Mind the Gap
You may be hiring a team writer to fill a gap that has opened because of company growth, changes in projects, team, or organization. Get your team together in a room and list the work you typically have to do. That’s the obvious part of your gap.
Next, have them list every document they hate working on, meetings they hate, last-minute deadlines that keep them working into the night, applications they detest using, and basically anything else they would rather not be doing. That’s the dark and hidden part of your gap. Somewhere out there is a technical writer who will look at your hate list as a perfect day.
The Second Link: Isn’t It Obvious?
Here is a first question for the interview: “Tell me about your perfect day at work.” Listen for what the candidate says and doesn’t say. Do they cheerfully talk about being left alone all day to do the writing? Do they imagine how every review cycle they sent out comes back with rave reviews and no edits? If not, then follow up with, “Do you enjoy writing?” Believe it or not, we actually heard a promising candidate say, “No, actually, writing is my Achilles’ heel.”
Ask the candidate, “How did you get into technical writing?” Recently we had all candidates give the same answer, “By accident.” Some candidates happily make a career of technical writing, but others would rather be doing something else. Back in Y2K we had a candidate disappear from the middle of her final interview when she got a call that her romance novel was being published. Find out what your candidate really wants and don’t assume.
The Third Link: Opener or Closer?
Openers hit the ground running early in the morning and like to initiate meetings and conversations with other people who also get in early. These people go to all the early meetings that cross international time zones. Closers, by contrast, hit their stride later in the day and have tremendous stamina to complete the projects that the Openers started, or hang in there late to finish projects by end of day.
Chances are good that your gap list includes an opener or a closer.
The Fourth Link: Author or Editor?
Technical writers have to be both authors and editors, but most prefer one or the other, either creating content and starting documents or proofing and polishing documents for publication. An energetic editor will put Mozart on the headset and stare at a monitor all day, head down, reveling in the voice and the grammar, with intense attention to details. Die-hard authors will happily take thirty SME interviews in a week to create a new set of job descriptions and, when they turn in the project on Friday night, muse on why it took them so long.
The Fifth Link: The Irritating Candidate
If a candidate answers with something odd or unexpected, do not dismiss the candidate outright. Instead, say, “Tell me more.” For instance, “I can’t work under these conditions” once actually meant, “I can work better if you let me bring in my own mechanical keyboard, speedpad, and dual monitors.” We did and he was right, he did work better.
Your instinct may be to hire someone who makes you feel good, feel comfortable. But is that a true test of a good hire? Once, after an interview, we heard a team member say, “She was really bugging me with all that talk about editorial checklists and readability studies. And she spent five whole minutes on drafting meeting agendas. I hate that stuff. Let’s hurry up and hire her and let her do all that for us.”
The Sixth Link: No Clones
Whenever someone popular and successful retires or leaves and has to be replaced—let’s say his name is Walter—people will say, “We need to hire a new Walter.” Once hired, “That guy is the new Walter.” Be careful you don’t unintentionally hire Walter’s clone. Walter was familiar, but was he really perfect? And is he what you need right now?
You’ve Only Just Begun
During the first ninety days after a hire, you may still have a decision to make—did we make the right choice and should we keep our new hire? Look for opportunities to set up some early wins, so that you, your team, and the new hire can agree on what works and what needs to change.
Most importantly, don’t ever stop looking for those missing links. There will be a next time.
JOSHUA DURKIN (jdurkin@argussoftware.com) is a technical writer with fifteen years of experience writing for software applications and multi-media platforms including film and television, and web marketing.
SHELLEY FITZE (shelleyfitze@gmail.com) is a technical writer with twenty-five years of experience in software development for financial, logistics, and commercial real estate applications. She has selected and trained over 400 end user documentation specialists for client site teams.
