Comments | cellio: tech-writing resumes

cellio

tech-writing resumes

Mar 03, 2009 21:15

Someone on a tech-writing mailing list today asked the following: "As a hiring manager, what are you looking for in a resume? Do you think hiring managers with a technical writing background look for different things than one that is just getting to employee their first technical writer?" I want to record my response here:
I am a software ( Read more... )

technical career, writing

Comments 6

dragontdc March 4 2009, 10:03:48 UTC

If you ever need a technical writer for a project that can be done remotely, please let me know.

cellio March 4 2009, 13:56:01 UTC

I sure would. Alas, all of our positions so far have been on-site ones.

(Love the icon!)

fauxklore March 4 2009, 10:14:41 UTC

I would expect resume basics to be particularly important for tech writers. Things like spell checking, having adequate white space, not using weird fonts, etc.

cellio March 4 2009, 13:56:59 UTC

Yeah, that's what I meant by judging writing skills in the negative from the resume. :-)

pedropadrao March 4 2009, 15:16:19 UTC

What if most of your work is technical-to a certain extent-but it's not your standard handbook work? For instance, most of the writing I've done at work is in the shape of a couple of dozen bibliographies & resource lists. Not that I'm currently looking, since I'm very happy where I am, but these are strange times.

cellio March 5 2009, 02:25:35 UTC

When I look at writing samples I look at a few things, starting with: can this person write coherently (grammar, spelling, an appropriate level of detail, consistent style, etc). For this, I don't much care what the material is. (Heck, for fresh grads they're unlikely to have more than a few article-length pieces; that's fine.) Next, I want to get a sense of scope, because some of our projects have large docs or doc sets with lots of moving parts. Not being able to show this doesn't rule you out; it just means we'll talk about it in the phone screen. To take your case as an example, we'd talk about how you organized all the research, how you decided what to include and exclude, how you keep it current over time, and so on. If someone has sound methodologies but just hasn't ever written a 1000-page doc set, that's not a blocker. (Plenty of people who have written 1000-page doc sets don't do it in a way that it can be maintained over time...) If your samples show that you can write decently, then most of the time we're going to ( ... )