cellio | tech-writing resumes

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 developer and manager who was formerly a full-time tech writer. (I still do some writing, but it's not the majority of my work any more.) When I was hired it was for a sole-writer position.

What I look for in a resume is: technical expertise (what domains do you already know?), types of writing, size/complexity of past projects, and classes of tools. On this last: I don't care about the long list of tools (my eyes kind of glaze over, actually), just as for programmers I don't care about the long list of languages dating back to college. I do care about whether the candidate has worked with structured editing (e.g. XML) versus just working in Word. I care about whether a candidate has built or maintained the tool chain. But I don't really care if you've used Epic or FrameMaker. Tools are tools; I assume you can learn the ones we use. We'll sanity-check that assumption in the interview.

You may have noticed an absence of actual writing skills on my list. I can't judge that from a resume (except in the negative); that's what the writing samples are for, and they're essential. I want up to a few hours with them, not just what I can see while we're talking during the interview.

I don't have a lot of data about what non-writer hiring managers look for, but I believe the factors that got me hired by my current company were: technical skill (both writing and programming), ability to work with geeks, ability to work independently (demonstrated by past positions), and asking insightful questions about their software (showing that I wasn't going to just parrot what the SMEs told me, and also that I'd done some homework). (Granted, you don't get to demonstrate some of that until you get the interview.)

(Not posted on the mailing list because it would have been topic drift: For what makes an excellent writer in my particular domain, as opposed to just what I'm looking for in candidates, I find that an entry I wrote almost seven years ago still sums it up pretty well.)

tech-writing resumes

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